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That he might not irritate the religious prejudices of his countrymen, he sought to mask his real object, the restoration of the monarch, under the pretence of suppressing heresy and schism; he professed the deepest veneration for the covenant, and the most implicit deference to the authority of the kirk; he listened with apparent respect to the remonstrances of the clerical commission, and openly solicited its members to aid the parliament with their wisdom, and to state their desires.
When sergeant-major in Flanders, he had himself volunteered so ran the chronicle to do execution on a poor wretch found guilty of professing the faith of Calvin; and, with his own hands, had prepared a fire of straw, tied his victim to the stake, and burned him to cinders. Another Netherlander for the name crime of heresy had been condemned to be torn to death by horses.
There had been no official movement towards a new doctrinal standpoint. On the contrary, the suppression of heresy had been not less active after Cranmer's accession to the primacy than before.
If it were deemed important that one hand should guide the pen of controversy, to establish the truth, it was considered no less important that the other should wield the sword to extirpate heresy. Military heroism was thought as essential as scholarship for the defense of the faith.
Plato, seeing things from a very general point of view, thinks it expedient, upon the whole, to prohibit the cultivation of the higher branches of physics. Euripides tries to free himself from the imputation of heresy as best he may.
He is always, and has ever been, sacrificing himself to and for his creatures. It lies in the very essence of his creation of them. The worst heresy, next to that of dividing religion and righteousness, is to divide the Father from the Son in thought or feeling or action or intent; to represent the Son as doing that which the Father does not himself do.
Yet, I still held rigidly to the doctrine that immersion alone was baptism, and that with all its defects, the Baptist Church was the most scriptural and orthodox in its doctrines and practices of any church in existence. The upshot of this whole matter was, that I was soon cited before my "church conference" to answer a charge of heresy, in holding to the doctrine of "open communion."
Here he paused and bowed his head upon his hands and thus remained a while; when at last he spoke, it was with face still hid and slowly, as if unwilling to give the words utterance: "Yet, first thou art decreed a space for contemplation of thy heresy vile and abominable, having fellowship with one who, blasphemous as thyself and of a pride stubborn and hateful, long persisted in his sinfulness, yet at the last, by oft suffering, hath lately abjured his damnable heresy and is become of humble and contrite heart, and thus, being soon to die, shall, by pain of flesh and sorrow of mind, save his soul alive in Paradise everlasting.
A few years before the States-General had agreed to a National Synod, but with a condition that there should be revision of the Netherland Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. Against this the orthodox infallibilists had protested and thundered, because it was an admission that the vile Arminian heresy might perhaps be declared correct.
In my native town, Socinianism flourished to a fearful extent; it has long been a very hotbed of that fatal heresy, the holders of which are found among many leading characters of wealth, influence, and high attainments. I knew no more of it than that it was one of the many forms of dissent with which I had nothing to do.
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