The opening of Author’S Preface
As Satan’s malice, and man’s wickedness, cease not to molest the thrice happy estate of the church of Christ, so hath the eternal council of the only wise God predetermined the coming of offences, persecutions, heresies, schisms and divisions, that professors may be proved before they be as approved and made manifest, 1 Cor. xi. 19. And hence “It must needs be that offences come,” Matt. xviii. 17; neither hath the church ever enjoyed both purity and peace any long time together. But whiles the church of God, thus disquieted, at well with dangerous alterations, as with doleful altercations, is presented in the theatre of this world, and crieth out to beholders, “Have ye no regard, all ye that pass by!” Lam. i. 12. A pity it is to see the crooked and sinistrous courses of the greatest part, every man moving his period within the enormous confines of his own exorbitant desires; the atheistical nullisidian, nothing regardeth the assoiling of ecclesiastical controversies,—he is of Gallio’s humour, Acts xviii.