The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, D.D. Vol. III

But he hath finished his course, and is gone before us, and hath left here a dark, self-distracting world, and a church of such as Christ will perfect; but, alas! yet lamentably imperfect, as their errors, divisions, contentions, and scandals have these thirteen hundred years too publicly declared. Children of the light we are, while the world is in darkness; but, alas! yet how dim and clouded! With thousands it does not so much as convince them of their ignorance, nor maketh them humbly suspicious of an erring judgment; so that through the copulation of pride and ignorance, few cry out so loud of error as the erroneous, or of heresy as the heretical, or of schism as the schismatical; and false conceptions are so common among men, that I think with almost all mankind the number of false apprehensions in. comparison of the true ones is far greater than unhumbled understandings will easily believe; and yet, while mankind doth swarm