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I do not question but many Balaamites will appear before the judgment-seat to condemnation; men that have had visions of God, and that knew the knowledge of the Most High; men that have had the Spirit of God come upon them, and that have by that been made other men; yet these shall go to the generations of their fathers, they shall never see light.
It would appear that the doctrine of Balaam and the doctrine of the Nicolaitans were classed as two different heresies; but the corrupt tenets of the latter were identical with those of the former, and the probable meaning is, "As the Hebrews had Balaamites among them; so, likewise, you have among you the Nicolaitans teaching the same pernicious doctrines."
This shameful name must he bear, because he has brought so many people into sin, insomuch that they are destroyed and overcome. Such Balaamites are our bishops and ecclesiastics, who are the throat of the devil, by which he draws so many souls to himself, and swallows them down.
It did not belong to the angel to cast out the Balaamites out of Pergamos, but he might, and ought to have cast them out of the church in Pergamos. Let us take a taste. Is deposition from the ministry? This kings have done,” &c., Male Dicis, p. 7. Now similia labra lactucis. But for all that, the taste is vitiated, and doth not put a difference between things that are different.
Doth he imagine that those who are so much commended by Christ himself for their holding fast of his name, and of the true faith, did not so much as doctrinally or ministerially oppose the foul errors of the Balaamites and of Jezebel?
"The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church," said William's chaplain, a pupil and friend of Lanfranc; "and if these men of Belial drowned every man of God in Normandy, ten would spring up in their places to convert this benighted and besotted land of Simonites and Balaamites, whose priests, like the brutes which perish, scruple not to defile themselves and the service of the altar with things which they impudently call their wives."
Two of the king's officers tried to silence him, but failing, ordered him to leave England by a certain Dutch boat then waiting in the harbor with its pennant up. He protested and struggled, but at last was forced aboard, raving against those godless Balaamites, the clergy of the Established Church, who, with the devil, he declared, were behind his persecution.
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