God worketh by instruments: when he will convert a Cornelius, a Peter must be sent for, and willingly heard. When he will recall and save a sinner, he hath usually some public minister or private friend, that shall be a messenger of that searching and convincing truth, which is fit to awaken them, enlighten them, and recover them. If God furnish these his instruments with compassion to your souls, and willingness to instruct you, and you will take them for your enemies, and peevishly quarrel with them, and contradict them, and perhaps reproach them, and do them a mischief for their good will, what an inhuman, barbarous course of ingratitude is this! Will you be angry with men for endeavouring to save you from the fire of hell? Do they endeavour to make any gain or advantage by you? or only to help your souls to heaven? Indeed, if their endeavours did serve any ambitious design of their own, to bring the world (as the pope and his clergy would do) under their own jurisdiction, you had reason then to suspect their fraud. But the truth is, Christ hath purposely appointed his greatest church-officers to be but ministers, even the servants of all, to rule and save men as volunteers, without any coercive power, by the management of his powerful word upon their consciences; and to beseech and entreat the poorest of the flock, as those that are not lords over God's heritage, nor masters of their faith, but their servants in Christ, and helpers of their joy; that so whenever we deliver our message to them, they may see that we exercise not dominion over them, and aim at no worldly honours, or gain, or advantage to ourselves, but at the mere conversion and saving of their souls. Whereas, if he had allowed us to exercise authority as the kings of the gentiles, and to be called gracious lords, and to encumber ourselves with the affairs of this life, our doctrine would have been rejected by the generality of the world, and we should always have come to them on this great disadvantage, that they would have thought we sought not them, but theirs; and that we preached not for them, but for ourselves, to make a prize of them.[25] as the Jesuits, when they attempt the conversion of the Indians, do still find this their great impediment, the princes and people suppose them to pretend the gospel, but as a means to subjugate them and their dominions to the pope; because they tell them that they must be all subject to the pope, if they will be saved. Now when Christ hath appointed a poor, self-denying, entreating ministry, against whom you can have none of these pretences, to stoop to your feet, with the most submissive entreaties, that you would but turn to God and live, you have no excuse for your own barbarous ingratitude, if you will fly in their faces, and use them as your enemies, and be offended with them for endeavouring to save you. You know they can hold their tithes and livings by smoothing,