1. When it is certain that you have but a dark, uncertain apprehension of any point, to think it is clear and certain, is but to deceive yourselves by pride. And, to cry out against all uncertainty, as scepticism, which yet you cannot lay aside, is but to revile your own infirmity, and the common infirmity of mankind, and foolishly to suppose that every man can be as wise and certain, when he list, as he should be. Now reason and experience will tell you, that a young, unfurnished understanding, is not like to see the evidence of difficult points, as, by nearer approach and better advantage, it may do.
2. If your conclusions be peremptory, upon mere self-conceitedness, you may be in an error for aught you know; and so you are but confident in an error. And then how far may you go in seducing others, and censuring dissenters, and come back when you have done, and confess that you were all this while mistaken yourselves!
3. For a man to be confident that he knoweth what he knoweth not, is but the way to keep him ignorant, and shut the door against all means of further information. When the opinion is fixed by prejudice and conceit, there is no ready entrance for the light.
4. And, to be ungroundedly confident, so young, is not only to take up with your teacher's word, instead of a faith and knowledge of your own, but also to forestall all diligence to know more: and so you may lay by all your studies, save only to know what those men hold, whose judgments are your religion: too popish and easy a way to be safe.
5. If you must never change your first opinions or apprehensions, how will you grow in understanding? Will you be no wiser at age, than you were in childhood, and after long study and experience, than before? Nature and grace do tend to increase.
Indeed, if you should be never so peremptory in your opinions, you cannot resolve to hold them to the end: for light is powerful, and may change you whether you will or no: you cannot tell what that light will do, which you never saw. But prejudice will make you resist the light, and make it harder for you to understand.
I speak this upon much experience and observation. Our first unripe apprehensions of things will certainly be greatly changed, if we are studious and of improved understandings. Study the controversies about grace and free-will, or about other such points of difficulty, when you are young, and it is two to one that ripeness will afterward make them quite another thing to you. For my own part, my judgment is altered from many of my youthful, confident apprehensions: and where it holdeth the same conclusion, it rejecteth abundance of the arguments, as vain, which once it rested in. And where I keep to the same conclusions and arguments, my apprehension of them is not the same, but I see more satisfying light in many things, which I took but upon trust before. And if I had resolved to hold to all my first opinions, I must have forborne most of my studies, and lost much truth, which I have discovered, and not made that my own, which I did hold; and I must have resolved to live and die a child.
The sum is, Hold fast the substance of religion, and every clear and certain truth, which you see in its own evidence: and also reverence your teachers; especially the universal church, or the generality of wise and godly men; and be not hasty to take up any private opinion; and especially to contradict the opinion of your governors and teachers, in small and controverted things. But yet, in such matters, receive their opinions but with a human faith, till indeed you have more, and therefore, with a supposition, that time and study is very like to alter your apprehensions; and with a reserve, impartially to study and entertain the truth, and not to sit still just where you were born.
[Sidenote: What to do when controversies do divide the church.]
_Direct._ XII. If controversies occasion any divisions where you live, be sure to look first to the interest of common truth and good, and to the exercise of charity. And become not passionate contenders for any party in the division, or censurers of the peaceable, or of your teachers, that will not overrun their own understandings, to obtain with you the esteem of being orthodox or zealous men; but suspect your own unripe understandings, and silence your opinions till you are clear and certain; and join rather with the moderate and the peacemakers, than with the contenders and dividers.