The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed and Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered, by Roger Williams CHAP. LXXVI. Optatus examined. Peace. Dear Truth, your answers are so satisfactory to Austin’s speech, that if Austin himself were now living, methinks he should be of your mind. I pray descend to Optatus, “who,” saith the answerer, “justifies Macarius for putting some heretics to death, affirming that he had done no more herein than what Moses, Phineas, and Elias had done before him.” Persecutors leave Christ, and fly to Moses for their practice. Truth. These are shafts usually drawn from the quiver of the ceremonial and typical state of the national church of the Jews, whose shadowish and figurative state vanished at the appearing of the body and substance, the Sun of righteousness, who set up another kingdom, or church, Heb. xii. [27,] ministry and worship: in which we find no such ordinance, precept, or precedent of killing men by material swords for religion’s sake. More particularly concerning Moses, I query what commandment, or practice of Moses, either Optatus, or the answerer here intend? Probably that passage of Deut. xiii. [15,] wherein Moses appointed a slaughter, either of a person or a city, that should depart from the God of Israel, with whom that national church was in covenant. And if so, I shall particularly reply to that place in my answer to the reasons hereunder mentioned.[199] Concerning Phineas’s zealous act: Phineas’s act discussed. First, his slaying of the Israelitish man, and woman of Midian, was not for spiritual but corporal filthiness. Secondly, no man will produce his fact as precedential to any minister of the gospel so to act, in any civil state or commonwealth; although I believe in the church of God it is precedential, for either minister or people, to kill and slay with the two-edged sword of the Spirit of God, any such bold and open presumptuous sinners as these were. Lastly, concerning Elijah: there were two famous acts of Elijah of a killing nature: First, that of slaying 850 of Baal’s prophets, 1 Kings xviii. [40.][200] Secondly, of the two captains and their fifties, by fire, &c. Elijah’s slaughters examined. For the first of these, it cannot figure, or type out, any material slaughter of the many thousands of false prophets in the world by any material sword of iron or steel: for as that passage was miraculous,[201] so find we not any such commission given by the Lord Jesus to the ministers of the Lord. And lastly, such a slaughter must not only extend to all the false prophets in the world, but, according to the answerer’s grounds, to the many thousands of thousands of idolaters and false worshippers in the kingdoms and nations of the world. Elijah’s consuming the two captains and their companions by fire, discussed. For the second act of Elijah, as it was also of a miraculous nature, so, secondly, when the followers of the Lord Jesus, Luke ix. [54,] proposed such a practice to the Lord Jesus, for injury offered to his own person, he disclaimed it with a mild check to their angry spirits, telling them plainly they knew not what spirits they were of: and addeth that gentle and merciful conclusion, that he came not to destroy the bodies of men, as contrarily anti-christ doth—alleging these instances from the Old Testament, as also Peter’s killing Ananias, Acts v. 5, and Peter’s vision and voice, Arise, Peter, kill and eat, Acts x. 13.