Prefatio Crimina III §.VIII opening: The Sandomierz cruelty charge and the Synod's clash with a single contradictor

§. VIII.

But we hasten on to the THIRD and greatest of all the CRIMINATIONS — belonging almost solely to my first and most vehement Accuser — who, alas!, indulges too much his envy and his unjust and tumultuous zeal, by which he is rather often carried off into various things less becoming a Christian man, especially a theologian, so that not seldom he appears to have laid down his shield even in the most manifest distortions. He takes it ill that I set forth and recommended the Sandomierz Consensus as an Example of the Ecclesiastical Union of Evangelicals — than which none more excellent is given, and by which the Polish Evangelicals once coalesced so closely that they all but held every sacred thing in common, and neither Reformed living among Lutherans nor Lutherans living among Reformed feared, when occasion was given, to use and enjoy one another's sacred Sermons and Administrations of the Sacraments, while for the rest they proposed to one another, where need was, the most modest discriminations of beyond-fundamental Doctrines, without any party detractions, through charitable informations and conferences — persisting most amicably in such Consociation for more than half a century (as we proved by a just computation of the time from when the Consensus began to when it was afterward disrupted by certain well-known Firebrands, in the Preface vindicating the Consensus and prefixed to its repeated Edition).

Accordingly, that he might hurt me, the Adversary arraigns both the Sandomierz Consensus and me its Herald as guilty of utterly monstrous Cruelty and Tyranny, on this sole ground: that when a certain Contradictor interposed against this Consensus — and after the Synod had dealt with him both publicly and privately, as one reclaiming against the Consensus and unwilling to foster Concord with the other Churches — a certain tumult arose (as Hartknoch reports), and he experienced the threats of a certain Polish Politician, made with the scimitar after the manner of the Nation.

Yet even without my reminding him, anyone sufficiently understands that nothing can fall away from or be detracted from the Consensus of so many Evangelical Churches, unanimously entered, and from its just praises, merely because one sole Pastor reclaimed against it; nor can the whole Synod, otherwise peaceably agreeing, justly be charged with cruelty because, when a large enough handle had been given by the obstinate contradiction of one man shouting against all, some one of the Nobles — especially of the Poles, among whom liberty sometimes degenerates into Polish license — threatened him with the scimitar beyond the mind and will of the Synod.