_Direct._ XXV. Take heed that you interest not religion or the church in civil differences.[172] This error hath divided and ruined many famous churches, and most injuriously made the holy truth and worship of God to be a reproach and infamy among selfish, partial, carnal men. When princes and states fall out among themselves, they will needs draw the ministers to their sides, and then one side will certainly condemn them, and call them all that self-interest and malice can invent; and commonly when the controversy is only in point of law or politics, it is religion that bears the blame of all: and the differences of lawyers and statesmen must be charged upon divines, that the devil may be able to make them useless, as to the good of all that party that is against them, and may make religion itself be called rebellion. And oh that God would maintain the peace of kingdoms; and kings and subjects were all lovers of peace, the rather because the differences in states do cause so commonly divisions in the church. It would make a man wonder (and a lover of history to lament) to observe in the differences between the pope and Henry the fourth, and other emperors, how the historians are divided, one half commending him that the other half condemneth; and how the bishops and churches were one half for the pope, and the other for the emperor; and one half still accounted rebels or schismatics by the other, though they were all of one religion. It is more to ruin the church, than kingdoms, that Satan laboureth so much to kindle wars, and breed civil differences in the world; and therefore let him that loveth the church's peace, be an obedient subject, and an enemy of sedition, and a lover and defender of the civil peace and government in the place that God hath set him in: for this is pleasing unto God.
I know there are some, that with too bloody and calamitous success, have in most ages given other kind of directions for the extirpation of error, heresy, and schism, than I have here given:[173] but God hath still caused the most wise, and holy, and charitable, and experienced christians to bear their testimony against them. And he hath ever caused their way of cruelty to turn to their own shame: and though (like treasons and robberies) it seem for the time present to serve their turn, it is bitterness in the end, and leaveth a stinking memorial of their names and actions to posterity. And the treatises of reconcilers, (such as our Halls, Ushers, Bergius, Burroughs, and many other,) by the delectable savour of unity and charity, are sweet and acceptable to prudent and peaceable persons, though usually unsuccessful with the violent that needed them.
Besides the forecited witness of Sir Francis Bacon, &c. I will here add one of the most ancient, and one or two of this age, whom the contrary-minded do mention with the greatest honour. Justin Martyr, Dial. cum Tryph. doth at large give his judgment, that a judaizing christian, who thinketh it best to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, be suffered in his opinion and practice, and admitted to the communion and privileges of the church, and loved as one that may be saved in that way, so be it he do not make it his business to persuade others to his way, and teach it as necessary to salvation or communion; for such he doth condemn.
King James by the pen of Is. Casaubon telleth Cardinal du Perron, that "His Majesty thinketh, that for concord there is no nearer way, than diligently to separate things necessary from the unnecessary, and to bestow all our labour that we may agree in the things necessary, and that in things unnecessary there may be place given for christian liberty. The king calleth these things simply necessary, which either the word of God expressly commandeth to be believed or done, or which the ancient church did gather from the word of God by necessary consequence.----"