Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
The new system was, in principle, scarcely less Erastian than that which it displaced. The Houses, guided chiefly by the counsels of the accomplished Selden, had determined to keep the spiritual power strictly subordinate to the temporal power.
M'Nab, the minister who in his white manse dwelt by the white kirk on the top of the windy hill. This was, by every earthly canon, a good man, but a stern and unsupple. He had not been long in this parish, and he was sweeping with a strong, new besom. The old minister, to his mind, had been Erastian and lax, weak in doctrine and in discipline of the fold. Mr. M'Nab meant not to be weak.
The lawful and just freedom which the church now claimed and stood upon, so highly incensed the court, because their Erastian encroachments were not yielded to, that all warlike preparations were speedily made for having them again reduced, by force of arms, to their former slavery.
It was before the church had shaken off the intolerable yokes of Erastian supremacy and patronages; before she had ecclesiastically asserted, and practically maintained, her spiritual and scriptural claim of right, namely, the divine right of presbytery, and intrinsic power of the church, the two special gems of Christ's crown, as King on his holy hill of Zion; before the explanation of the national covenant, as condemning episcopacy, the five articles of Perth, the civil power of churchmen; before the Solemn League and Covenant was entered into; before the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Catechisms, larger and shorter, the Directory for worship, Form of Presbyterian church government and ordination of ministers, were composed; and before the acts of church and state, for purging judicatories, ecclesiastical and civil, and armies from persons disaffected to the cause and work of God, were made; and all these valuable pieces of reformation ratified with the full and ample sanction of the supreme civil authority, by the king's majesty and honorable estates of parliament, as parts of the covenanted uniformity in religion, betwixt the churches of Christ in Scotland, England and Ireland.
An immense population gathered round the sacred citadel and gradually spread on all sides of it for miles. But the parish church for a long time remained the only one at Mowbray when the population of the town exceeded that of some European capitals. And even in the parish church the frigid spell of Erastian self-complacency fatally prevailed.
If it was hard to have James II. a fugitive in foreign lands and Dutch William in Whitehall, it was perhaps even harder to see Sancroft expelled from Lambeth, and the Erastian and latitudinarian Tillotson, who was prepared to sacrifice even episcopacy for peace, usurping the title of Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, no man, not even a Churchman, can serve two masters.
A fourth calumny is this: He had first blamed two parties that they came biassed to the Assembly; I answered, How then shall he make himself blameless who came biassed a third way; which was the Erastian way; and that, for our part, we came no more biassed to this Assembly than the foreign divines came to the Synod of Dort, Alexander to the Council of Nice, Cyril to that of Ephesus, and Paul to the synod at Jerusalem.
In like manner we reject Prelacy, whether Erastian or Diocesan, as abjured in the National Covenant and more explicitly in the Solemn League; while in pity for the persons involved in these despotic systems, we will pray and labor for the extirpation of these poisonous plants, and the emancipation of their deluded admirers.
Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my grandmother's purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment. But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so misled by the outward graces of the body.
Both were extremely dissatisfied with the later portions of Sir Wilfrid's speech, which had seemed to them tainted in several passages with Erastian complacency toward the State. Parliament especially, and a possible intervention of Parliament, ought never to have been so much as mentioned even for denunciation in an ecclesiastical court.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking