Corruption of the church by antichrist.

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.