St. Paul hath made it the
privilege of the full-grown Christian, 'to search out the deep things of
God himself'.

Chap. IV. p. 111.

'The delivering over unto Satan' seems to have been a form of
excommunication, declaring the person reduced to the state of a
heathen; and in the Apostolical age it was accompanied with
supernatural or miraculous effects upon the bodies of the persons so
delivered.

Unless the passage, ('Acts' v. 1-11.) be an authority, I must doubt the
truth of this assertion, as tending to destroy the essential
spirituality of Christian motives, and, in my judgment, as
irreconcilable with our Lord's declaration, that his kingdom was 'not of
this world'. Let me be once convinced that St. Paul, with the elders of
an Apostolic Church, knowingly and intentionally appended a palsy or a
consumption to the sentence of excommunication, and I shall be obliged
to reconsider my old opinion as to the anti-Christian principle of the
Romish Inquisition.

Ib. p. 114.

'A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition,
reject; knowing that he that is such, is subverted, and sinneth, being
condemned of himself'.--Tit. iii. 10, 11.

This text would be among my minor arguments for doubting the Paulinity
of the Epistle to Titus. It seems to me to breathe the spirit of a later
age, and a more established Church power.

Ib.

Not every one that mistakes in judgment, though in matters of great
importance, in points fundamental, but he that openly espouses such
fundamental error. * * Dr. Whitby adds to the definition, the
espousing it out of disgust, pride, envy, or some worldly principle,
and against his conscience.

Whitby went too far; Waterland not far enough. Every schismatic is not
necessarily a heretic; but every heretic is virtually a schismatic. As
to the meaning of [Greek: autokatakritos], Waterland surely makes too
much of a very plain matter. What was the sentence passed on a heretic?
A public declaration that he was no longer a member of--that is, of one
faith with--the Church. This the man himself, after two public notices,
admits and involves in the very act of persisting. However confident as
to the truth of the doctrine he has set up, he cannot, after two public
admonitions, be ignorant that it is a doctrine contrary to the articles
of his communion with the Church that has admitted him; and in regard of
his alienation from that communion, he is necessar