of making known God's counsel, darken counsel by words without
knowledge? The apostle speaks of some that did more than darken
counsel; for they wrested the counsel of God; 2 Pet. iii. 16. In
Paul's epistles, saith he, "are some things hard to be understood,
which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also
the other scriptures, to their own destruction." Some things in the
Scriptures are hard to be known, and they are made harder by such
unlearned teachers as utter their own notions by words without
knowledge.

None are more bold and adventurous to take upon them to expound the
dark mysteries and sayings of the prophets and Revelations, and the
9th of the Romans, which I believe contains some of those many
things which, in Paul's epistles, Peter saith, were "hard to be
understood;" I say none are more forward to dig in these mines than
those that can hardly give a sound reason for the first principles
of religion; and such as are ignorant of many more weighty things
that are easily to be seen in the face and superficies of the
Scripture; nothing will serve these but swimming in the deeps, when
they have not yet learned to wade through the shallows of the
Scriptures: like the Gnosticks of old, who thought they knew all
things, though they knew nothing as they ought to know. And as
those Gnosticks did of old, so do such teachers of late break the
unity and peace of churches.

How needful then is it, that if we desire the peace of churches,
that we choose out men of knowledge, who may be able to keep them
from being shattered and scattered with every wind of doctrine: and
who may be able to convince and stop the mouths of gainsayers.