Mischief must needs follow this ugly deed of the man of sin. If a
house be on fire, though it is not burnt down, the smell of the
flame may long remain there: also we count it no wonder to see some
of the effects upon rafters, beams, and some of the principal posts
thereof. The calf that was set up at Dan defiled that people until
the captivity of the land.
For by antichristian darkness, though they might call it light, the
true light was darkened, and so the eye made dim, even the eye of
the truly godly. Also the Holy Ghost did much withdraw himself from
the church; so the doctrines, traditions, and rudiments of the world
took more hold there, and spread themselves more formidably over the
face of that whole church.
And this being the effect of light against light at first, is the
cause of what to this day we see in the church among the true
brotherhood. For as a cause produceth an effect, so oftentimes an
effect sets on foot another cause. Witness the jars, the
oppositions, the contentions, emulations, strifes, debates,
whisperings, tumults, and condemnations, that like cannon-shot have
so frequently on all sides been let fly against one another.
The godly all hold the Head; for there antichrist could never divide
them. Their divisions therefore are only about smaller things.
I do not say that the antichristian darkness has done nothing in the
church as to the hurting it in the great things of God. But I say,
it has not been able to do that which could sever their Head from
them. Otherwise, there appears even too much of its doings there.
For even as to the offices of our Lord, some will have his authority
more large, some more strait; some confine his rules to themselves
and to their more outward signification, and some believe they are
extended further; some will have his power in the church purely
spiritual, others again would have it mixed; some count his word
perfect and sufficient to guide in all religious matters, others
again hold that an addition of something human is necessary.
This darkness could not sever the true church from her Head; yet it
has eclipsed the glory of things. By two lights a man cannot see
this or that thing so exactly as by one single light; no, they both
make all confused, though they make not all invisible. As for
instance, sunlight and moonlight together, firelight and sunlight
together, candlelight and moonlight together, make things more
obscure than to look on them by a single light. The word reflecting
upon the understanding without the interposing of man's traditions,
makes the mind of God to a man more clear than when attended with
the other.
Things therefore will never be well in the church of God so long as
there is thus light against light therein. When there is but one
Lord among us, and his name one; and when divisions, by the consent
of the whole, are banished--I mean, not persecuted, but abandoned in
all by a joint consent, and when every man shall submit his own
single opinion to those truths that by their being retained are for
the health of all--then look for good days, and not till then.