the Novatians unreasonable who preached Penance and denied the Fruit of it lib. 1. de Poenit. c. 16. Frustra dicitis vos praedicare Poenitentiam qui tollitis c. And lib. 2. cap. 3. Merendi gratia Sacramenti ad precandum impellimur hoc auferre vultis propter quod agitur Poenitentia Tolle gubernatori perveniendi spem in mediis fluctibus incertus errabit Tolle luctatori coronam lentus jacebit in stadio Tolle piscatori capiendi efficaciam desinet jactare retia In hopes of arriving at his Haven the Pilot steers his Ship The Wrestler strives in hope to throw his Adversary The Fisher casts his Nets in hope of catching some Fish All these would relent were they persuaded the thing they aimed at were impossible How then do you expect that Men should practise good Works when you teach them to hope for no good from them It were indeed to be wished that Men would serve God for God without regarding any Reward But that is a Perfection all do not arrive to and even the best are fain to use some other Motives A Fifth Your Clergy is utterly unfit to Direct and Instruct such Houses our Works have a greater influence on our Neighbors than our Words S. Jerom thought it incongruous that a Man with a full Belly should Preach Fasting And how can a Man Preach Chastity to others who comes himself from the Embraces of his Wife if he hath one or hath his Head full of Amourettes and Designs to get one if he be a Batchelor It is in vain therefore that you seek the advantage of those withdrawing Places from the noise and trouble of the World to those devout Solitudes your Lives are not fit for them your Doctrin is inconsistent with them and your past Actions have shut that Door of Mercy unto you As for Books of Devotion the Author of the Fiat Lux says you have Printed several such composed by ours under your own Names So you hang us and cherish our Writings as the Jews stoned the Prophets and canonized their Books You own we have many excellent Books all the World sees you have scarce any nor can rationally hope for any For he who writes a Spiritual Book ought to aim at two things The First to instruct the Understanding with Divine and Eternal Truths The Second to move the Will to a Hatred of Sin a Contempt of the World and to the Love of God above all things The first may be an Effect of Study but the second cannot be attained unto unless the Author be such himself He must as S. John be A burning and shining Light Joh. 5.35 Burn to God by a true and unfeigned Love of him Shine to Men by the clear Truths which he delivers He must feel within himself those Motions which he endeavors to communicate to his Reader Si vīs me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi A Soul possessed with Hope with Fear with Joy with Grief with Love with Hatred in fine with any Passion doth express not only the Thoughts but the Passion it self with Tropes proper by which means it not only informs the Understanding but also stirs the Will of the Hearer or Reader to like Inclinations Read Seneca's Epistles or other Moral Works or Cicero's you shall find a great many excellent Truths yet I never knew any Man the better in his Morality for them As they themselves notwithstanding those Lights were far from being Good Men as you may see in Lactantius lib. 3. Divin Instit from Chap. 13. On the contrary the reading of Saints Works hath a great force to move us to Good. S. Austin l. 8. Confess c. 6. says some were Converted by reading the Life of S. Antony Several have taken serious Resolutions of leading a Christian Life by reading those Confessions And I have known several moved to love Mental Prayer by reading S. Teresa's Works and to the Love of God by using those of S. Francis de Sales This is a great defect in all our Protestant Writers I will instance in two who seem each in his kind to overtop his Confreres quantum lenta solent inter viburna Cupressi The one Bishop Andrews who by Divisions and Subdivisions instructs well only sometimes verborum minutiis rerum pondera frangit The other is the Author of The whole Duty of Man who hath many excellent Truths and very practical as well as the first yet seem not to move the Will because of their cold way of treating their Doctrins They shine but they do not Burn. This Heat is not to be attained unto but by Prayer Which enflames our Heart with the Love of God In meditatione meâ exardescet ignis Psal 38.4 It is this Love which unites us to God and this Union makes us capable of doing great things For an Instrument must be in the Hand of the Workman to do compleatly what is intended if it be distant from him and not held but by a small Thred the Work will be difficult and imperfect if there can be any We are all the Instruments of God in order to all good Works especially in writing Spiritual Books in which if there be any thing good it must come from God the Fountain of all Good. The Apostles after the Ascension expecting the coming of the Holy Ghost Act. 1.14 continued with one accord in Prayer S. John Baptist althô sanctified in his Mothers Womb and designed for the Office of Praecursor and by consequence fitted from above for that Office yet he was in the Desert till the days of his shewing unto Israel Luc. 1.80 sequestring himself from the company of Men and conversing only with God and his Angels the far greatest part of his Life And the Word Incarnate not for any need of his own but to give us Example passed Forty days in Fasting and Prayer in a Desert before he began to Preach Mat. 4.2 And when he had begun he passed the Days with Men and the Nights in Prayer with his Heavenly Father Luc. 6.12 Erat pernoctans in oratione Dei. Species tibi datur forma tibi praescribitur quam debeas amulari says S. Ambr. l. 6. in Luc. This was the Practice of S. Greg. Naz. S. Basil S. Chrysostom And in later Times Ignatius de Loyola before he began the Society past a Retreat in a Cave at Manresa God alone is in peculiar manner the Father of Lights all is darkness but what is received from him The greatest Spiritualists that ever held a Pen even the Writers of Scripture at the same time they taught us received their Lesson from the Holy Ghost And first the Ears of their Heart were open to hear what God spoke to them Psal 84.9 Then they opened their Mouth to speak out of the abundance of their Heart to us Mat. 12.34 Now what Years what Months what Weeks or at least Days do you of the Ministry pass in Solitude in Prayer I find little footsteps of it in any
quicquid daemonum colitis victi dolore quod sunt eloquuntur Nec utique in turpitudinem sui nonnullis praesertim vestrum assistentibus mentiuntur Ipsis testibus esse eos daemones de se verum confitentibus credite adjurati enim per Deum verum solum inviti miseri c. Most Men and even many of your own know they are no better then Divels whom you adore Your Gods Saturn and Serapis and Jupiter have been adjur'd by the name of the true and only God and have been forced out of the bodies they possest and confessed themselves to be foul and seducing Devils And their Confession was to be supposed true in point of Reason For they that were adored as Gods would never belie themselves into Devils to their own reproach especially in presence of them that worshipped them were they not forced Thus is that place Englished by W. L. Julius Firmicus pag. 20. Ecce daemon est quem colis cùm Dei Christi ejus nomen audierit contremiscit It is the Devil whom you adore he trembles when he hears the Name of God and of his Christ In my next Section I will cite Prudentius who says the same in his Apotheosi You may find in S. Austin and other Fathers several Reasons proving those Gods to be Divels chiefly for their promoting Vice by encouraging Poets Fables concerning those filthy Acts related to have been committed by them My Fifth Pooof is taken from the Testimony of Protestants themselves The Author of the Whole Duty of Man pag. 138. I need speak little of the Second Commandment as it is a forbidding of that grosser sort of Heathenish Idolatry the worshipping of Idols which though it were once common in the World yet it is now so rare that it is not likely any that shall read this shall be concerned in it Could he have said this had he not known the Practice of Papists to be far different from those of Heathen Idolaters Vossius l. 1. de Idol cap. 18. pag. 139. Omnes Gentium Dii fuerunt homines All the Gods of the Pagans were Men. Godwin l. 4. Antiquit. c. 1. well deserving Men were reputed Gods. Mr. Thomas Prat in his Epistile Dedicatory of the History of the Royal Society having said that Generals of Armies and great Conquerors were by the Pagans esteemed Heroes he adds The Gods Antiquity worship'd with Temples and Altars were those who instructed the World to plow to sow to plant to spin to build houses and to find out new Countrys M. G. B. in this very Book p. 17. The herd the comonalty of the Idolaters did formally worship the Image And p. 23. The Souls of deceased men were honored with divine honor I hope E. S. will not refuse the Testimony of his great Patriarch W. L. who in his Relation p. 77. cites with great esteem of them the words of Minutius Felix and very judiciously observes that it is not credible the true God should be forced out of his Possession much less that he be constrained to utter a lie and own himself to be a foul and seducing Devil Can any man think that God can denie himself to such a degree Credat Judaeus Appella non ego I scarce wonder at the extravagant Opinions of the Pagans seeing E. S. and G. B. can believe that Were there not some other more powerful tye then only imaginary or pretended Incredibility I should hope to see both believe Transubstantiation seeing they can believe that God can deny himself tell a lie and profess himself a Divel O Blasphemy But altho in a bad humor E. S. should refuse to subscribe to his quondam Primate yet I can have recourse to a person very near unto him even his own dear self for he Origines Sacrae l. 1. c. 2. p. 32. speaking of Sanconiathon says That which of all seems clearest in this Theology is the open owning the Original of Idolatry to have been from the Consecration of some eminent Persons after their Death who had found out some useful things for the world whilst they were living which the subtiller Greeks would not admit of viz. That the Persons they worshipped were once men which made them turn all into Allegories and mystical Senses to blind that Idolatry they were guilty of the better amongst the Ignorant And l. 3. c. 5. he says that Saturn Jupiter Mercury Neptune Vulcan Juno Minerva Ceres Bacchus and others had been Men and Women He could not have given a clearer and fuller testimony of the Truth of what we say and the Falshood of what he delivers than is contained in those two places To what can we attribute this Change in E. S. that what was before the certain Position of Idolatry should now be false but to a desire to charge that hainous sin upon the Roman Catholic Church which of it self falls to the ground if Pagan Idolatry be rightly represented Tantae molis erat to make Rome seem Idolater in the eyes of his ignorant Admirers Philo Biblius had reason to blame those Allegories to which the subtiller Greeks had recourse which made a clear new Religion by changing the Object adored as God from some man eminent for Power or Vertue to Elements much inferior to the least of men or any living Creatures for this yielded the cause and condemned the whole Idolatrous World. So Minutius Felix in Octavio pag. 16. Zenon interpretando Junonem Aëra Jovem Coelum Neptunum mare ignem esse Vulcanum caeteros similiter vulgi Deos Elementa esse monstrando publicum arguit graviter revincit errorem SECTION IV. That the Jupiter O. M. of the Greeks and Romans was not the True God. MY first and chief Proof is taken from what is already said out of Holy Scripture Fathers Protestants and Pagans For those universal Propositions contain all and every God of Paganism V. C. What are the Propositions of Scripture All the Gods of the Gentiles are Divels And The Pagans sacrificed to Divels not to God. What are the Propositions of E. S. One God of the Pagans was the true God and no Devil Item The sacrifices of the Pagans were offered to the true God and not to the Divel If the Logic of E. S. can reconcile with Truth two Contradictions it is a rare one Till he teach us how they can stand together we will stick to the common received Axiom of Sophists that both cannot be true So one of those Propositions must be false either that of Scripture or that of E. S. now I desire him to declare whether he takes to be true and whether the lyar God or himself Again Gal. 4.8 the Galatians knowing not God served those who by nature were not Gods. Which are the words of the Apostle and E. S. says The Galatians knew Jupiter and served him who was the true God Wherein he directly contradicts the Scripture The like Arguments might be brought from the Authority cited out of Fathers Protestants and
Catholics when they commend the Gospel but you do not well in believing them when they blame Manioheus do you think me such a Fool as without any reason I should believe what pleases you and not believe what you dislike Certainly it is much more reasonable seeing I must believe the Catholics that I abandon your Communion unless you can give me an evident Demonstration for the contrary Wherefore if you will alledge Reason lay by the Gospel If you retain the Gospel I will stick to those upon whose word I have admitted the Gospel and their Authority forces me to renounce you Now if perchance you can shew out of the Gospel any evident proof of Manichaeus his Apostleship you will indeed weaken in me the Authority of Catholics who forbid me to believe you But that Authority being weakned I shall no more be able to believe the Gospel which I received by it and so whatsoever you prove thence will fall to the ground Therefore if no clear proof of Manichaeus his Mission is extant in the Gospel I will rather believe the Catholics than you If a clear proof be found there I will neither believe the Catholics nor you Not them because they were false in the Opinion they delivered of you Not you because you rely on that Scripture which I received on the testimony of those who have deceived me Yet God forbid I should reject the Gospel and believing it I see no possibility of believing you Thus the great Saint which I have cited at large because the whole Discourse holds against all Heresies changing only the Name of Manichaeus or Manichean into that which signifies the Heresie as for Example into that of Protestant or Luther Morcover it contains a clear Confutation of what hath hitherto by the Learnedst of our Adversaries been said in Answer to it The first Interpretation of this Place is delivered by W. L. in his Relation of a Conference pag. 81. Some of your own says he will not endure it should be understood save of the Church in the time of the Apostles only and then cites Ockam Dial. p. 1. l. 1. c. 4. Where he hath not one word of that But says Mr. Still in his Rational Account p. 198. the words are in Durandus l. 3. Insent d. 24. q. 1. n. 9. where he says Intelligitur solùm de Ecclesiâ quae fuit tempore Apostolorum It is understood only of the Church which was in the time of the Apostles The same Author borrows another Explication of Biel Lect. 2. in Can. Missae That the words are to be understood of the Church in general as it contains the first and later Ages A tempore Christi Apostolorum c. And to this he sticks for he adds And so doth S. Augustin take Eccles contra Fund And Dr. Still p. 198 199 approves the same and confirms it out of Gerson and Driedo Neither of these two Explications can stand with the Text as appears out of those words Quibus obtemperavi dicentibus Credite Evangelio cur eis non obtemperem dicentibus mihi noli credere Manichaeo Whom I obeyed in saying Believe the Gospel should I not obey in saying Do not believe Manichaeus Hence I frame this Argument St. Augustin professeth he received the Gospel upon the credit of that Church which condemned Manichaeus But that Church which condemned Manichaeus was that of his time and not that of the Apostles who never mentioned Manichaeus Ergo the Church on whose word he received the Gospel was that of his time and not that of the Apostles When therefore E. S. p. 220. says It is plain St. Austin means not the Judgment of the present Church but of the Catholic Church as taking in all Ages and Places he evidently contradicts the very Text of St. Austin whence I conclude that either he speaks against his Conscience which I am unwilling to believe or else which is more excusable that he had not read the Text which he undertakes to Explicate A Third and yet more improbable Explication is delivered by W. L. p. 82. He speaks it either of Novices or Doubters in the Faith or else of such as were in part Infidels Mr. Fisher the Jesuit at the Conference would needs have it that St. Austin spake it even of the Faithful which I cannot yet think for he speaks to the Manichees and they had a great part of the Infidel in them And the words immediately before these are If thou shouldst find one qui Evangelio non credit which did not believe the Gospel what wouldst thou do to make him believe Thus W. L. This is likewise plainly false for S. Austin was neither a Novice nor a Doubter in the Faith nor in part an Infidel when he writ that Book for he writ it after he was made Bishop as you may see Lib. 2. Retract c. 2. But he speaks of himself and describes the ground of his own Faith Ergo he doth not speak of Novices Doubters or half Infidels nor describes the ground of their Faith but of those who are firm Believers I prove that S. Austin speaks of his own Faith and shews the ground on which it relied For first he says I would not believe the Gospels without the Authority of Catholics commending them Secondly he says If you weaken the Authority of Catholics I will reject the Gospel This I believe Mr. Stillingst saw and therefore said pag. 20. If you extend this beyond Novices and Weaklings I shall not oppose you in it And I cannot think that W. L. had read that place at least with attention when he writ He could not think S. Austin spoke of the Faithful Stilling pag. 220. Neither you nor any Catholic Author is able to prove that S. Austin by these words ever dreamt of any infallible Authority in the present Church Ans Seeing S. Austin expresly says He would renounce the Gospel if the Authority of Catholics were weakned in him by discovering they had delivered any one Lye he must either think them exempt from all possibility of Lying or else he adhered very loosly to the Gospel I hope E. S. will not assert the later part wherefore he must grant that S. Austin thought the Church free from all possibility of Error Let us return to Mr. G. B. G. B. pag. 43. Christ's Prophetic Office is invaded by the pretence of the Churches Infallibility in Expounding Scriptures And why good Sir should the Infallibility in Expounding Scriptures be an Invasion of the Prophetic Office of Christ seeing Infallibility in writing them was no such thing Certainly it is more to compose a Writing than to understand it as many can understand Cicero's Speech pro Milone who cannot compose such an one And your old Women pretend to understand several parts of Scripture which yet I think will scarce undertake to Pen the like By this say you the whole Authority is devolved on the Church No more than it was on S. John when he writ his Gospel