4. Take heed of giving the magistrate's power to the clergy, and setting up secular, coercive power under the name of the power of the keys: and it had been happy for the church if God had persuaded magistrates in all ages to have kept the sword in their own hands, and not have put it into the clergy's hands, to fulfil their wills by:[110] for, 1. By this means the clergy had escaped the odium of usurpation and domineering, by which atheistical politicians would make religion odious to magistrates for their sakes. 2. And by this means greater unity had been preserved in the church, while one faction is not armed with the sword to tread down the rest: for if divines contend only by dint of argument, when they have talked themselves and others aweary they will have done; but when they go to it with dint of sword, it so ill becometh them, that it seldom doth good, but the party often that trusteth least to their reason, must destroy the other, and make their cause good by iron arguments. 3. And then the Romish clergy had not been armed against princes to the terrible concussions of the christian world, which histories at large relate, if princes had not first lent them the sword which they turned against them. 4. And then church discipline would have been better understood, and have been more effectual; which is corrupted and turned to another thing, and so cast out, when the sword is used instead of the keys, under pretence of making it effectual: none but consenters are capable of church communion: no man can be a christian, or godly, or saved against his will; and therefore consenters and volunteers only are capable of church discipline: as a sword will not make a sermon effectual, no more will it make discipline effectual: which is but the management of God's word to work upon the conscience. So far as men are to be driven by the sword to the use of means, or restrained from offering injury to religion, the magistrate himself is fittest to do it. It is noted by historians as the dishonour of Cyril of Alexandria, (though a famous bishop,) that he was the first bishop that like a magistrate used the sword there, and used violence against heretics and dissenters. 5. Above all, abuse not the name of religion for the resistance of your lawful governors: religion must be defended and propagated by no irreligious means. It is easy before you are aware, to catch the fever of such a passionate zeal as James and John had, when they would have had fire from heaven to consume the refusers and resisters of the gospel: and then you will think that any thing almost is lawful, which doth but seem necessary to the prosperity of religion. But no means but those of God's allowance do use to prosper, or bring home that which men expect: they may seem to do wonders for awhile, but they come to nothing in the latter end, and spoil the work, and leave all worse than it was before.