Selected quad for the lemma: religion_n
Text snippets containing the quad
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A66606
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A sermon preached before the mayor, aldermen, and Common-Council of Nottingham in St. Peter's Church, on the 14th of Febr. 1688/9 being the thanksgiving day for our deliverance from popery and arbitrary power / by W. Wilson.
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Wilson, William.
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1689
(1689)
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Wing W2956; ESTC R39123
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18,013
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45
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he should be willing to admit of a Foreign jurisdiction into his Kingdom which by those that maintain it would have been declared to be superiour to his own and to be so vigorously set upon this glorious project as to frown upon those that were disirous to preserve all the Jewels of his Crown and to maintain his Authority entire Will it gain credit that the great and sworn Enemies of the Kingdom should be the directours if not the disposers of the publick Authority and they who had plotted the destruction of his Grandfather and the whole Royal Family in the most barbarous manner should be cherished as the best and most Loyal Subjects These are things so incredible that Posterity will read them with as much amazement as we have beheld them But that it may appear how much reason we have to say we have seen strange things to day give me leave to rimind you 1. Of the Evils that threatned us 2. Of our Deliverance from them 1. Of the Evils that threatned us Which are of that dreadfull Nature that we may well say of our selves that in our own eyes we were but as dead Men since Death would have been much more welcome than the one and the most savage Inhumanites must have been suffered if we could not have embraced the other For we were not onely proudly threatned that we should eat our own Dung and drink our own Piss but which is most amazing this was to have been the reward of our constancy to our God our fidility to our Prince in his greatest extremities and our zeal for the true interests of our Country Vertues of that Noble strain and generous magnitude as would have been caress'd and encouraged by any Prince whose Principles are not debauched and whose Generosity over ruled by a Bigottry to a Religion that knows neither Conscience nor Honour But when a violent zeal to convent was adjudged the Character of a much greater Soul and a more heroick Spirit than to conquer Kingdoms it became our crime that we could not obey God less than Man a crime so heinous in the opinion of that Church that is much more zealous for her own than God's Laws that nothing but the Death of such Obstinate Hereticks could expiate And since we could not suffer our selves to be cajol'd and complemented out of our Religion nor would be so mannerly as to quit it as a Testimony of our Loyalty we were God knows reduced almost to so deplorable a condition as would have made it impossible to have preserved our lives and our intregrity too For to speak at once the mischief that for these late years we have trembled to think of and almost felt Popery was to supplant Protestantism and since at no cheaper rate we could be made Papists Slavery was to humble us and a rampant Army to eat up our English Liberties Evils that threatened us both as Men and Christians 1. We were threatened by Popery A Religion that lays the most base and servile yoke upon the Souls and Consciences of Men and that for the making Proselytes has shed more bloud and practised more dreadfull Inhumanities than ever Heathenism did A Religion that would first have unmann'd you by depriving you of the use of your Reasons and then have taught you the generous thing of believing Contradictions that would have instructed you how to honour God by breaking his Commandments and have made you excellent Catholicks by teaching you to be Idolaters A Religion so destructive of the very foundations of Faith so wicked in its Principles and so barbarous and bloudy in its Practices that I cannot but think it would be every whit as pleasing to God and as becoming our own Nature to be of no Religion at all as that which makes men ten times more the slaves of the Devil than they were by Nature I would not be thought to be so uncharitable as to think it impossible that any that profess it should be saved or that they are in a worse condition than if they had been of none for we do hope that there may be some in that Communion whose Devotion and Piety may be so sincere that God may in Mercy overlook their errours but if any of that Church be saved we do not believe it is for the goodness of their Religion but because their ignorance of the illness of it may be excusable in the sight of God. But it is sure no very great commendation of a Religion that a man may be saved that professes it if he have but the good fortune to believe doe he knows not what but that he must certainly be in a very ill case if he understand it and yet continues to profess it and yet this is the Religion that threatned you a Religion that no man can any longer profess with safety than he is totally ignorant of it or knows not that God has provided better for his Soul. 'T is true we had the word of a King to assure us that no such evil was intended us but that our Religion should be upheld and maintained And is it not pitty but a person of his sacred Character had been of a Religion that would have suffered him to have been as good as his word For at the same time that a Prince promises safely to his Haretical Subjects he runs the hazard of being excommunicated and deposed and as he desires to be reputed a Good Catholick he is bound by the Decree of the 4th Lateran's Council to doe his utmost to purge his Countrey of Heresy and to extirpate those that obstinately adhere to and maintain it So that suppose a Prince be never so sincere in making such Promises and according to the most generous Principles of Humanity does incline to protect those whom his Church condemns and obliges him to extirpate the forfeiting the Reputation of being a Good Catholick and his Crown to boot are two things so dreadfull as will lay a strong Biass upon the most Noble temper But besides it is but two well known that this has been one of the Arts whereby poor Protestants in our Neighbouring Countrey have been reduced to the utmost extremity of Misery that at the very time they were persecuting them they gave assurances that the King had no design against their Liberties and in almost all the Edicts that Prince set forth he inserted some Article to lull them asleep and when the Electour of Brandenburgh did intercede for them that King assured his Highness that so long as he lived no wrong should be done to his Subjects of the Reformed Religion that he acknowledg'd them for good ones and would maintain them in all their Privileges But yet in the very self same instant that he gave this publick assurance he caused many of their Temples to be demolished and others to be shut up put the Ministers into Prison and made Children to be taken from their Parents and to be shut up into Convents with a