65. These differences of mind and practice, will engage both parties in some kind of opposition to each other. The worldly clergy, or hypocrites, will have heart-risings against the ministers and people that think meanly of them, and will take it for their interest to bring them down: for enmity is hardly restrained from exercise. And Cain will be wroth that Abel's sacrifice is better accepted than his own.
66. The better ministers will be apt, through passion, to speak too dishonourably of the other; and the rash and younger sort, and the heretical hypocrites that fall in with them, will take it for part of a godly zeal to speak against them to the people, in such words as Christ used of the scribes and Pharisees.
67. Hereupon the exasperations of each party will be increased more and more; and the powerful, worldly clergy will think it their interest to devise some new impositions, which they know the other cannot yield to, to work them out.
68. Whether they be _oaths_, _subscriptions_, _words_, or _actions_, which they believe to be against God's word, the spiritual and upright part of the clergy and people will not perform them; resolving to obey God rather than man.
69. Hereupon the worldly part will take the advantage, and call them disobedient, stubborn, proud, schismatical, self-opinionated, disturbers of the public peace and order, "pestilent fellows, and movers of sedition among the people," that will let nothing be quiet, but "turn the world upside down," Acts xxiv. 5, 6; and will endeavour to bring them to such sufferings, as men really guilty of such crimes deserve.
70. And because the suffering and dissenting party of ministers, when silenced, will leave many vacancies in the churches, they will be fain to fill them with men, how empty and unworthy soever, that are of their own spirit, and will be true to their interests.
71. The exasperation of their sufferings will make many, otherwise sober ministers, too impatient, and to give their tongues leave to take down the honour of the clergy whom they suffer by, more than beseemeth men of humility, charity, and patience.
72. When the people, that most esteem their faithful ministers, are deprived of their labours, by the prohibitions of the rest, and themselves also afflicted with them; it will stir up in them an inordinate, unwarrantable, passionate zeal; which will corrupt their very prayers, and make them speak unseemly things, and pray for the downfal of that clergy, which they take to be the enemies of God, and godliness. And they will think that to speak easily or charitably of such men, as dare forbid Christ's ministers to preach his gospel, and by notorious sacrilege alienate the persons and gifts that were consecrated solemnly to God, is but to be lukewarm, and indifferent between God and the devil.
73. And when they take them as enemies to religion, and to themselves, the younger and rasher sort of ministers, but much more the people, will grow into a suspicion of all that they see their afflicters stand for: they will dislike not only their faults, but many harmless things, yea, many laudable customs, which they use; and will grow into some superstition in opposition to them, making new sins in the manner of worship, which God never forbad or made to be sins; and taking up new duties, which God never made duties; yea, ready to forsake some old and wholesome doctrines, because their afflicters own them; and to take up some new, unsound doctrines, and expositions of God's word, because they are inclined by opinion and passion conjoined, to go as far as may be from such men, whom they think so bad of.
74. And the vulgar people that have but little sense of religion, (that are not by the aforesaid interest united to the afflicting clergy,) having a reverence to the worth of those that are afflicted, and an experience of the rawness and differing lives of many that possess their rooms, will grow to compassionate the afflicted, and to think that they are injured themselves, and so to think hardly of the causers of all this.
75. Hereupon the powerful clergy will increase their accusations against the party that is against them, and declare to the world in print and from the pulpits, their ignorance, unpeaceableness, unruliness, giddiness, false opinions and conceits about the manner of worship, and how unsufferable a sort of men they are.
76. By this time the devil will have done the radical part of his work; which is to destroy much of christian love to one another, and make them take each other for unlovely, odious persons: the one part, for persecuting enemies of godliness, and hypocrites, and Pharisees; the other for peevish, seditious, turbulent, unruly sectaries. And on these suppositions, all their after characters, affections, and practices towards each other will proceed.