Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/14

 strangers and wolves that would ask no better plea then this to doe in the Church of Christ, what ever humour, faction, policy, or licentious will would prompt them to. Againe, if Christ be the Churches husband expecting her to be presented before him a pure unspotted virgin; in what could he shew his tender love to her more, then in prescribing his owne wayes which he best knew would be to the improvement of her health and beauty with much greater care doubtlesse then the Persian King could appoint for his Queene Esther those maiden dietings & set prescriptions of baths, & odors, which may her at last the more amiable to his eye. For of any age or sex, most unfitly may a virgin be left to an uncertaine and arbitrary education. Yea though she be well instructed, yet is she still under a more strait tuition, especially if betroth'd. In like manner the Church bearing the same resemblance, it were not reason to think she should be left destitute of that care which is as necessary, and proper to her, as instruction. For publick preaching indeed is the gift of the Spirit working as best seemes to his secret will, but discipline is the practick work of preaching directed and apply'd as is most requisite to particular duty; without which it were all one to the benefit of souls, as it would be to the cure of bodies, if all the Physitians in London should get into the severall Pulpits of the City, and assembling all the diseased in every parish should begin a learned Lecture of Pleurisies, Palsies, Lethargies, to which perhaps none there present were inclin'd, and so without so much as feeling one puls, or giving the least order to any skilfull Apothecary, should dismisse 'em from time to time, some groaning, some languishing, some expiring, with this only charge to look well to themselves, and do as they heare. Of what excellence and necessity then Church-discipline is, how beyond the faculty of man to frame, and how dangerous to be left to mans invention who would be every foot turning it to sinister ends, how properly also it is the worke of God as father, and of Christ as Husband of the Church; we have by thus much heard.

 

S therefore it is unsound to say that God hath not appointed any set government in his Church, so is it untrue. Of the time  of Errata