To
oversee, exhort, reprove, and, after long suffering and waiting upon the
disobedient and refractory, to disown them, as any longer of their
communion, or that they will stand charged with the behaviour of such
transgressors, or their conversation, until they repent. The subject
matter about which this authority, in any of the foregoing branches of
it, is exercised, is, first, in relation to common and general practice.
And, secondly, about those things that more strictly refer to their own
character and profession, and which distinguish them from all other
professors of Christianity; avoiding two extremes upon which many split,
viz. persecution and libertinism, that is, a coercive power to whip
people into the temple; that such as will not conform, though against
faith and conscience, shall be punished in their persons or estates; or
leaving all loose and at large, as to practice; and so unaccountable to
all but God and the magistrate. To which hurtful extreme, nothing has
more contributed than the abuse of church power, by such as suffer their
passion and private interests to prevail with them, to carry it to
outward force and corporal punishment: a practice they have been taught
to dislike, by their extreme sufferings, as well as their known principle
for a universal liberty of conscience.
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