By John Flavel.
Mental Errors.
The Occasions, Causes, Nature, Rise, Growth, and Remedies of Mental Errors
By John Flavel 1628-1691
About the Author:
John Flavel was an English Presbyterian minister and author who was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in or around 1627. He was the eldest son of the Rev. Richard Flavel, who was a minister at Bromsgrove, Hasler, and Willersey.
John Flavel received his early education at local schools before attending University College, Oxford. He began his ministry in 1650 as the assistant to the infirm minister at Diptford, a parish on the Avon, five miles from Totnes. He later moved to Dartmouth where he was ejected from his position due to the Act of Uniformity in 1662.
However, he continued to preach in private until he was forced to move five miles away from Dartmouth by the Five Mile Act. He returned to Dartmouth in 1671 and continued to officiate there, even after the liberty to do so was withdrawn. He eventually moved to London and narrowly escaped shipwreck in a storm during his journey.
He returned to Dartmouth and met with his people in his own house until a meeting-house was built for him in 1687. He died suddenly of paralysis at Exeter on 26 June 1691 and was buried in Dartmouth churchyard.
Taken from the Introduction of the book:
An error is any departure or deviation in our opinions or judgments from the perfect rule of the Divine law; and to this, all men, by nature, are not only liable, but inclinable. Indeed man, by nature, can do nothing else but err; Psalm57:3.
He goes astray as soon as born; makes not one true step until renewed by grace, and many false ones after his renovation. The life of the holiest man is a book with many errata’s; but the whole edition of a wicked man’s life, is but one continued error; he who thinks he cannot err, manifestly errs in so thinking.
The Pope’s supposed and pretended infallibility has made him the great deceiver of the world. A good man may err, but is willing to know his error; and will not obstinately maintain it, when he once plainly discerns it. Error and heresy, among other things differ in this: heresy is accompanied with pertinacy, and therefore the heretic is self-condemned; his own conscience
condemns him, while men labor in vain to convince him. He does not formally, and in terms, condemn himself; but he does so equivalently, while he continues to own and maintain doctrines and opinions which he finds himself unable to defend against the evidence of truth.
Human frailty may lead a man into the first, but devilish pride fixes him in the last. The word of God, which is our rule, must therefore be the only test and touchstone to try and discover errors. It is not enough to convince a man of error, that his judgment differs from other men’s; you must bring it to the word, and try how it agrees or disagrees therewith; else he that charges another with error, may be found in as great or greater an error himself.
None are more disposed easily to receive, and tenaciously to defend errors, than those who are the Antesignani, heads or leaders of erroneous sects; especially after they have fought in the defense of bad causes, and deeply engaged their reputation. The following discourse justly entitles itself, A BLOW AT THE ROOT. And though you will here find the roots of many errors laid bare and open, which, comparatively, are of far different degrees of danger and malignity; which I here mention together, many of them springing from the same root:
YetI am far from censuring them alike; nor would I have any that are concerned in lesser errors to be exasperated, because their lesser mistakes are mentioned with greater and more pernicious ones; this candor I not only entreat, but justly challenge from my reader.
And because there are many general and very useful observations about errors, which will not so conveniently come under the laws of that method which governs the main part of this discourse, namely, CAUSES and CURES of error: I have there fore sorted them by themselves, and premised them to the following part in twenty observations next ensuing.
Twenty general OBSERVATIONS about the Rise and Increase of the ERRORS of the Times