that loveth God with all his heart, and his neighbour as himself, hath all the obedience necessary to his reception into the kingdom of God. For if God should require perfect innocence, there could no flesh be saved.
But what commandments are those that God hath given us? Are all those laws which were given to the Jews by the hand of Moses the commandments of God? If they be, why are not Christians taught to obey them? If they be not, what others are so, besides the law of Nature? For our Saviour Christ hath not given us new laws, but counsel to observe those we are subject to; that is to say, the laws of Nature and the laws of our several sovereigns: nor did He make any new law to the Jews in His sermon on the Mount, but only expounded the law of Moses, to which they were subject before. The laws of God therefore are none but the laws of Nature, whereof the principal is, that we should not violate our faith, that is, a commandment to obey our civil sovereigns, which we constituted over us by mutual pact one with another. And this law of God, that commandeth obedience to the law civil, commandeth by consequence obedience to all the precepts of the Bible; which, as I have proved in the precedent chapter, is there only law, where the civil sovereign hath made it so; and in other places, but counsel; which a man at his own peril may without injustice refuse to obey.
Knowing now what is the obedience necessary to salvation, and to whom it is due; we are to consider next concerning faith, whom, and why we believe; and what are the articles or points necessary to be believed by them that shall be saved. And first, for the person whom we believe, because it is impossible to believe any person before we know what he saith, it is necessary he be one that we have heard speak. The person, therefore, whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets, believed, was God himself that spake unto them supernaturally: and the person whom the apostles and disciples that conversed with Christ believed, was our Saviour himself. But of them, to whom neither God the Father, nor our Saviour, ever spake, it cannot be said that the person