A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST THE PUBLICATIONS DISPERSED BY MODERN SOCINIANS. In which the Impiety and Absurdity of their ADDRESSED BY A COUNTRY CLERGYMAN TO HIS PARISHIONERS. Satan hath desired to have you. Luke xxii. 31. A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST SOCINIANIS M. MY DEAR BRETHREN, YOU live in an age and in a country, in which most men think they have a right to do and say just what they please. Thus far, indeed, we are still under the protection of the law, that one man cannot shoot another through the head without being hanged for it; unless he does it upon a principle of honour. But he may asperse characters, accuse the innocent, put darkness for light and light for darkness, blaspheme God, dishonour the king, and expose the nakedness of his country, without being called to any account. Before the flood of Noah, the earth was filled with violence, God was despised, all goodness was trampled under foot, and they were too far gone to take any warning. The Gospel tells us it shall be so again : and all good people, whose brains are not turned with empty sounds, can plainly see, that the glorious liberty of these latter days will be the grand instrument in bringing the new world up to that degree of corruption which destroyed the old. That the influence of Christianity, which is now so much decayed, may be less and less every day, books and pamphlets are industriously handed about among the common people, to turn away their hearts from Christian Truth to the fables of infidelity. I do not mean that these publications abound with oaths, curses, and obscenity, though the press is daily delivered of them also; but that they give God the lie in all the doctrines by which our Holy Religion is distinguished; and if they should be attended to and received, must provoke Him to transplant the Christian Faith to some other quarter of the earth, which has not so much neglected his goodness. Some may promise themselves, that when this happens a state of perfect freedom will take place; but let them know, that how freely soever men may offend against one another, God is not to be intimidated by the claims of licentiousness. The God of Christians is and will be the Ruler of the World, whether libertines consent to his dominion or not; and they may assure themselves, that the departure of the Christian religion will be no peaceable event. When the Founder of our Faith expired, the heavens were darkened, the earth shook, and the minds of men were troubled and confounded. When God departed from the Jewish nation, discord, pestilence, and famine, all the horrors of war, and all the miseries of sedition and slavery succeeded. The destruction of the world by the flood, the burning of Sodom, the captivity of Jerusalem, and other like visitations, are to be understood as so many warnings of that fate which all apostates will meet with in another world, and as examples of what will most probably befall them in this world. |