as church discipline and government, the privileges of parliaments, and liberties of subjects, and condign punishment of malignants, things hard enough for the wisest and most learned to draw the just lines of, and to give plain definitions and decisions of them, and therefore certainly, as far off from the reach of poor country people's understanding, as from the true interest of their souls, and yet to tie them by a religious oath, either to know all, or to contend for them blindfold, without knowing of them. Where will there be instanced a greater oppression and tyranny over consciences than this? Certainly, they that now govern in this church cannot be charged with any thing near, or like unto it; for whatsoever they require of entrants to the ministry, they require neither subscriptions nor oaths of ministers already entered, and far less of the whole body of the people. And it were ingeniously done to take some notice of any point of moderation, or whatsoever else is really commendable, even in those we account our greatest enemies, and not to take any party in the world, for the absolute standard and unfailing rule of truth and righteousness in all things. U 4 MEDITATIONS CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL, ON PSALMS IV. XXXII. AND CXXX. Now first translated from the Latin. MEDITATIONS CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL, ON PSALM IV. Title, To the chief Musician on Neginoth, a Psalm of David. MANY of the calamities of good men look like miseries, which yet on the whole appear to have conduced greatly to their happiness; witness the many prayers which they poured out in those calamities; the many seasonable and shining deliverances which succeeded them, and the many hymns of praise they sung to God their deliverer: So that they seem to have been cast into the fire on purpose that the odour of their graces might diffuse itself all abroad. The seventy Greek interpreters seem to have read the word which we render to the chief Musician, something different from the reading of our present Hebrew copy, i. e. Lemenetz, instead of Lemenetzoth; and therefore they render it, as réλos, as the Latin does in finem, to the end. From whence the Greek and Latin fathers imagined that all the psalms which bear this inscription, refer to the Messiah, the great End and the accomplish |
