ingular number, and rulers in the plural.
Thus analogically there should be ecclesiastical rulers and governors in
every single congregation, for the well guiding thereof. But if this
satisfy not, add hereunto the material passages in our Saviour's speech.

2. Now touching the matter of our Saviour's discourse, it makes this
very clear to us; for by a gradation he leadeth us from admonition
private and personal, to admonition before two or three witnesses, and
from admonition before two or three witnesses, to the representative
body of one church, (as the phrase _tell the church_ must here
necessarily be interpreted,) if there the difference can be composed,
the offence removed, or the cause ended; rather than unnecessarily
render the offence, and so our brother's shame, more public and
notorious. And that the presbytery or eldership of a particular
congregation, vested with power to hear and determine such cases as
shall be brought before them, is partly, though not only here intended,
seems evident in the words following, which are added for the
strengthening and confirming of what went before in ver. 17: "Verily, I
say unto you, whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in
heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in
heaven. Again, I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth
as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of
my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them," Matt. xviii.
18-20. In which passages these things are to be noted: 1. That this
church to which the complaint is to be made, is invested with power of
_binding_ and _loosing_, and that so authoritatively that what by this
church shall be bound or loosed on earth shall also be bound or loosed
in heaven, according to Christ's promise. 2. That these acts of
_binding_ or _loosing_, may be the acts but of two or three, and
therefore consequently of the eldership of a particular congregation;
for where such a juridical act was dispatched by a classical presbytery,
it is said to be done of _many_, 2 Cor. ii. 6, because that in such
greater presbyteries there are always more than _two or three_. And
though some do pretend, that the faults here spoken of by our Saviour in
this place, were injuries, not scandals; and that the church here
mentioned was not any ecclesiastical consistory, or court, but the civil
Sanhedrin, a cour