Artificial Defensative and Out-work which is prescribed by great Moralists as necessary to weak Minds to secure their Virtue especially when Virtue it self is out of Repute and disgraced You have persisted constantly in one even Tenor of Life have been Uniform Regular and Consistent with your self There may have been some complyance in appearance to your Lordship but you never yet departed from your self nay you have not so much as incur'd the suspicion of so doing No man makes any Question about your Lordship or what it is you design it is no mans Enquiry no mans doubt You have been always the same and are as every man concludes immutably so You are not unhappy to pass under Conjectures and various Opinions there is no need of a Cryptique man to unriddle any intricacies in the course of your Life Votivâ pateat veluti descripta Tabellâ Vita senis No false insinuations can hurt your Name No Service but what is just will ever be imposed upon you no Mysteries of Iniquity will be committed to your Breast no man will be offended at you but he that hath reason to be displeased with himself and takes himself in a sort reproved by every honest man as every man doth that condemns himself You cannot be disgraced by any Faction but a real dishonour will return upon those that attempt it Every honest man will be sensible if you being reckoned and esteemed a publick good are lessened And you cannot fail of Honour from the worst of men when in Honouring you they Honour themselves and honestate their designs My Lord You represent to us the Condition of the Nation not desperate and incurable whilst you preside in His Majesties Councils for no man can believe you would be an unconcerned Spectator of our Ruine or the Preparations to it or that you would contribute any thing thereto by giving us a vain confidence of a secure condition and suffer your fam'd Integrity to be Suborned to so mischievous a Deceit My Lord Your Lordship hath afforded a mighty recommendation of sincerity and simplicity to the practice if the world you have Honoured thereby the Age wherein you live acquired true Honours to your self and are thereby become a publick Blessing I hope I shall have your Lordships Pardon in making a further advantage of your Lorships Noble Integrity and Wisdom by presuming to offer these Sheets to your Lordships favourable Judgment That I adventure to appear to so great a Judgment is the best Argument I can use to the World for my integrity and honest designment therein and besides the good Opinion of so great a man as your self would give great assurance to my own Conscience If your Lordship doth think any thing therein useful to the World I am sure it will have your Lordships Countenance which will make them more useful since as my Lord Bacon observes The Cause of Laws and Defence of the ancient State hath ever found this Priviledge That such as for their own Interest disturb the same Excuse if they Honour not their Defenders My Lord I shall ever pray for increase of Honour to your Lordship and that full of years you may change this Life for a better to which I am bound for that I esteem you a Publick Good if I had no particular Obligations as I have to your Lordship and for the greatest Reason I take my self Obliged to be in true Honour of your Lordship My Lord Your Lordships Most Obedient Servant THO HUNT THE PREFACE I Cannot but take notice That my honest Design in my Argument and Postscript to serve the Church of England and therein the Nation hath been by many perverted and how it hath been endeavoured to make them loose that effect to which they were sincerely directed I have therein asserted the rightful Authority the Bishops have in the Government represented the just Expectations the Nation hath of their due Exercise of that Authority for the publick good and have endeavoured to remove the great prejudice against their Order especially those that are occasioned by the Mistakes of the Inferiour Clergy for such we have taken notice of as those which do most hurt then esteem and affect them with the greatest dishonour and danger I have therein faithfully defended the Authority and Power of the Bishops in the Government But these I take to be but other Names for the Duty they owe to the Common-wealth Civil Honours and Dignities declare respectively the trusts that the Government hath plac'd in the persons under such Characters and admeasure the Duties and Offices that are expected from them The present state of the Kingdom doth most importunately urge and require that they should perform their duty in its fullest and utmost extent and thereby vindicate the honour of their Order It cannot fail being venerable in the same degrees we find it beneficial All positive Duties indeed have an indefinite latitude and we have a great liberty in the performing of them They are not peccant against the rule of Virtue who do not always exhibit to us the most Excellent Actions It is not expected from the Duty that every man owes to his King and Countrey that he should serve them always to his utmost Capacity and with an Heroical Bravery But he that doth not lend all the assistance to their service which his place requires and his power can perform in the greatest Exigency in the Extreamest need is a wretched Traytor and Betrayer of his Countrey In the Postscript I have by no means lessened the Authority of the Church or narrowed their Capacity of serving the Publick weal. But with great satisfaction considered their Authority and how much they may contribute to the uniting our Distracted Nation almost ruined by our Divisions which are occasioned and promoted by the Enemies of our Church and principally designed for her Destruction If we loose our Government for the sake of her ruine and in order to that we loose it and which is worse if we lose it it must be by the instrumentality of her Clergy if the Government be not preserved the Church must perish Therefore I did not confine my thoughts to a Defence of the Church her Rights but employ'd them for the Preservation of the Church her self and did endeavour to remove some great Prejudices and Mistakes that assist the designs of her Enemies upon her Mistakes to which our Enemies owe all the power they have to hurt us in virtue of these Mistakes their malice is onely considerable it could never have affected us nor we brought within any danger or fear of them if these vain Opinions had not been entertained by some of our Church-men And yet two Discourses so agreeable in all the parts thereof one to another united in Design and that could not possibly but concur to the thoughts of any man that truly and heartily design'd to serve to the prosperity of the Church and State are endeavoured to be set at variance with
that to make Experiments and try Conclusions upon There is little reason to charge the Guilt of the unexpiable Murder of our late Excellent King for which at this day we are doing most severe penances upon Presbytery which was not thought of here in England till the War was begun The heats that produced that unhappy War were from other Causes and Reasons as every body may know But when that War was once begun as no War can be managed by fore-established Rules and Measures it did not stand within the reasons and first designs thereof but was prosecuted and managed by such means and measures as were necessary and possible This will always happen more especially in a Civil War wherein though both parties share in the Causes yet the Guilt to be sure belongs to the Rebels side The Parliament in the Course of the War in their distress prayed Aid of the Scotch Nation who was shortly before entered into the Covenant They refused them any Assistance except they would enter into that Covenant which they had passed upon their own people By this accident that part of the Nation that was engaged in that unnatural War of the Parliaments side were imposed upon by the Scotch Presbytery But after the Covenant was thus imposed they still retained the English Loyalty filled the Town with Protestations and Remonstrances against the Kings feared Murther declared out of their Pulpits against the Actors of that detestable Tragedy were continually contriving to restore our present King to the Government of his Kingdoms and of their instrumentality in his Restoration the King himself is very sensible I wish the Church too were made sensible of the extinction of that prejudice the Scotch Covenant created against her for though God be thanked she hath survived almost all of those deluded Covenanters yet the apprehension of the danger or the remembrance of the evil at least will return with the mention of that name and render it very displeasing I wish I say that prejudice was removed by their frank Declaration of their good liking of her Order in general and by their humble desires to be spared in the matters whereof they yet remain in doubt by the indulgence of the Church That we may not incur the danger of loosing our Religion and Government by the scandal that is given to the Church-men at the old remembrance of what hath been done here by some that were of the Presbyterian Name For this matter of Offence they of the Popish Faction do with mighty advantage to their Villainous design cultivate and improve They stigmatize all that oppose the Popish Plot with the Name of Presbyterians and thereby would denote them Enemies of our Church-Order By this means they have brought many too many Eminent men of our Church to at least a dead Neutrality as if things were come to this pass that they must perish either by that or the Popish Faction and had nothing left them to do but to chuse which way our Church shall be destroyed A cold comfort this would be that whatever way they should take they must assist to the destruction of their Order Upon this rock we are like to be split this makes our deliverance to stick in the birth and upon this hinge the fate of our Religion and Nation will turn Lord what a prodigious thing is this that is come to pass in our age Religion it self must be the devoted thing to the rage and folly of the Priests of that Religion Let them in the Name of God consider what iniquity it is to declame against the faults of others and not endure to hear of their own Crimes To hate one-another for those very proceedings that their own faults occasion where the fault is in both sides the fault is in neither so as they may justly accuse one another and yet they will both fall under a most severe Condemnation to be sure in the next world if they do not both miss their aims and be confounded with guilt and disappointment in this I wish it were considered that scarce any Nation ever yet perished that was so blinded in her own concerns that she had not discerning men enough to have preserved her from the destroying Evil if many good and wise men did not perswade themselves it was better to suffer it than to endeavour to prevent it and from the fears of one Party and the dislike they have conceived against the other determine with themselves to stand Neuters whilst they want Resolution to oppose the dangers that one side threatens and think the disorders of the discontents incorrigible It was a wise Law of Solon That if the Common-wealth at any time should be divided into Factions that the Neuters should be noted with infamy by which every man was obliged to take a side or Party and all the virtuous peaceable and modest were engaged to appear openly in the concernments of the Government he concluded assuredly that by this means Peace would be more easily restored and terms of an accommodation more readily invented and entertained the Factious Knaves of both sides turned out of Office their Evil Designs disappointed and the ruine of the Nation by the Extremities of wicked men prevented For the worst men are most forward in Factions and the greatest beautefeus most honoured by their respective contending Parties before the wise and good interpose 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The Causes of the Differences would be better understood be rendred clear and conspicuous when the honest men such as can have no interest but the publick good whose Authority is more prevalent with the people than the clearest Reason do declare them and those that are mis-led and abused into Extreams would then unite and conspire against those who gave the first occasion to the Divisions and promote them As did the Factions of the Colonnois and the Vrsins who having discovered that Pope Alexander the Sixth set them still at discord and variance amongst themselves so by their Calamities and Falls to encrease the strength and power of his Son Borgia they fell to agreement among themselves and made head against him their common Enemy If all that are true Protestants and true lovers of our Government would declare themselves on the behalf of our Religion and Government in such terms as befit honest men and as the Exigency of our present state shall require we shall find the numbers of Addressers reduced to the Dukes Pensioners Creatures The number of Phanaticks made so few that the Papists would again become the Fautors and Defenders of Fanaticism as they were about ten years since lest the numbers of Fanaticks should not be big enough to make a Scare-crow for the Church of England or the Schism not considerable enough to disgrace her All discerning men see that the late Addresses have been obtain'd by application That the design therein was to make Voices for the discontinuance of Parliaments and for a Popish Succession If the people
are pleased with these things there is no wrong done them and if we affect a change of our Religion and Government it may be easily obtain'd The King hath no reason to consent to disinherit his Brother if the People rejoyce in the hopes of such a Successor or at least will acquiesce under that fate but if we would avoid it we must deprecate it in such applications to his Majesty as consists with true Loyalty and with such earnestness as the matter requires and at the same time represent the smalness of the numbers of Addressers and the inconsiderableness of their quality Thus his Majesty would understand better the Sense of his People especially when most of the Addressers themselves shall by joyning in such Applications shew what they meant by Lawful Successors in their Addresses And that when in the same Addresses they did engage to serve the King with their Lives and Fortunes they did not intend to subject themselves and all that they have to his Majesties absolute pleasure In that they thank his Majesty for his Promise of frequent Parliaments they desire them and when they thanked him for his promise to maintain the Protestant Religion they desired the continuance of it and such a Law as is absolutely necessary for its preservation Then it may appear that the Abhorrers themselves did not understand that the name of the Earl of Shaftsbury in the business of Abhorrence is but like the name of John a Styles and John an Oaks of Titius and Sempronius in putting a fictitious Case And that the onely Question askt was Who are the most damnable Plotters at this time the Protestants or Papists And that this was the Question intended to be put to the People in the Sollicitation of Addresses of Abhorrence is evident If we did dutifully represent to his Majesty these Proceedings as the Arts of our Enemies for dividing us and the Methods of our designed Ruine we should not be undone and there is nothing more than this necessary for the preventing of our Ruine since we have so gracious a King Our King is duly stiled Pater Patriae he will not suffer his People to be calamitous as no good Prince can suffer his to be from any cause whatsoever that is to be removed no not from their own Fears and Jealousies if they are innocent reasonable and probable The Affections of a Prince to his People supersede his Affection towards any private Relation So strong is the Tye of Duty upon him from his Office to prevent publick Calamities as no respect whatsoever no not of the Right Line can discharge nor will he himself ever think if duly addressed that it can By the Kingly Office he is taken up from amongst men and is made a God to us he is not to suffer the passions of a private man so as to be swayed by them In this high capacity In the matters of the Government nothing ought to determine him but the Common weal to which purpose all Governments are instituted Besides the excellent humanity of our King which hath made his Reign so clement doth dispose him to a tender Affection towards his People committed to his care and must powerfully incline and perswade him to do any thing that is necessary for preventing such Evils which as they are greater than can be supported by his People so if they come upon us we shall never be able to emerge or recover from under their pressures There wants nothing but a universal desire of being happy to make us so and nothing but a declaring our steady abhorrence of the Evils we cannot sustain is further necessary for preventing them Our Enemies will be destroyed meerly by our uniting they have no direct Strengths of their own all their hopes and confidence is in our Divisions We may evacuate their designe by making it impossible without a Conflict with any of the Evils fear'd We shall have no Enemies from that time we are at peace with our selves if we have courage enough to say we are not content to perish we are immediately safe Our Traytors would disappear if we had no Neuters and we cannot lose either our Religion or Government if we have a just concern for them If the Protestants would in time understand that the single Art and Stratagem they have to undo us is by dividing us we should not assist it by receiving false and hated Characters of the several Sects that are amongst us from the Popish Writers and represent them to our selves as more detestable than the Popish Traytors and alike Enemies to the Government It is no more agreeable to a scrupulous man about a Ceremony of the Church to depose and murder his lawful Prince than to a man of a nice Conscience to be impiously wicked Too true it is all Nations and Religions have been sometime or other stain'd with the horrid guilts of Deposing and Murdering Kings under a pretence of destroying Tyrants and vindicating their Country from Oppression The Bishops concur'd with the Temporal Lords in deposing the second Richard In an Address to that King they justifi'd themselves therein Ex Antiquo Statuto from the Constitutions of the Kingdom and Ex facto nuperrimè dolendo by which they meant the deposing of Edward the Second Knighton one of the Decem Scriptores published by Mr. Selden gives us the Address in terminis Until the Collectors of Dissenters Sayings can justifie the Bishops in this matter let them not trouble the world any more with the farrago of some of their wicked Sayings thereof to make a Character of a Dissenter for it belongs no more to him as such to be a Traytor or Rebel than it doth to the Character of the English Bishops to depose their King and cause his most Sacred Bloud to be shed and profan'd as a common thing But for removing the fears that our cautious Church-men have of Dissenters which hath cast them into a cold indifferency and inert neutrality at this time when if ever the Applications of an active Prudence are required from all honest men and lovers of their King Country and Religion I wish they would weigh and consider the mischiefs on either hand What the Popish Party designes and what the Dissenters would have What powers the Popish Party have what endeavours they use to force their Superstitions upon us and to change our Government That the Dissenters have neither Power nor Will to destroy our Religion or Government They are already of our Church and it is expected that they should be Petitioners to the Bishops for their intercession towards obtaining some Indulgence in some little matters that may bring them into an entire Communion with us It may easily be known who are for the preservation of our Government or dissolution of it by their Desires or Abhorrences of Parliaments and who desires Parliaments more than Dissenters which would preserve our ancient Government in Church and State and the true Religion establish'd among
Act of Parliament in Scotland for the Recognition of the unalterableness of the Descent of the Crown and his Book accounted unanswerable and the whole Cause by the Asserters of this Doctrine put upon the force and consequence of his Reasonings And indeed I have seen nothing so considerable made publick and offered to the World for the defence of the unalterable Right of the Descent of the Crown as are the reasons of these two Books which we have considered in these following Discourses To the end that the reasons against the Bill of Exclusion as well as the reasons for it being duly examined together no honest man may from a doubtful Conscience be any longer under a necessity of suffering the Mischiefs of a Popish Successour which will be more intolerable when they come to be felt than any imagination can suggest or any words can express True it is the Most cannot consider duly of a Matter and determine upon it by their own proper Reasonings and Discoursings and yet they have so much reason as to think That where Doctors differ they have respectively their reasons for their different opinions though they themselves do not apprehend them and consequently at least doubt and of what they doubt they conclude unlawful Yet even the Most may judge what weight and moment the reasons and arguments upon which each party ground their Conclusions are of if they are truly clearly and nakedly propounded reflected upon and made fit for their Judgment and Capacity and they may thereby be brought to discharge their doubt and determine with clear satisfaction in any matter so discussed if they will honestly and duly consider I perswade my self I have by the reflections I have made upon the Discourses of these two renowned Authors prepared their Reasonings for the judgment of the ordinary sort of men if honest To such their Arguments must appear so frivolous as they will conclude these Authors downright Advocates for the Popish Superstition and Cruelty under the thin pretences of defending That a Successour to the Crown by an ordinary and common right cannot be Excluded by an Act of State Such a Successour who if he be not a Papist yet hath openly departed from our Church in which he was born and for which his Father suffered Martyrdome and for the preserving the Peace of Three Kingdoms disdains to tell us he is a Protestant and neglects the direful Imprecations of his Grand-Father though no Curses are so operative as those of Parents upon their Children upon weighty causes solemnly pronounced These can kill at the Root the most flourishing and prolifical Families make their Root rottenness and their Blossom to go up as dust Omnem vastant stirpemque domumque 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 And therefore I have caused these reflections to be Reprinted if happily they may conduce any thing towards a full information of my doubting honest Countrymen in a matter so weighty and consequently towards the prevention of the effusions of English Blood in Wars Massacres and Martyrdomes and of the lawless violent and bloody attempts to be made for the Extirpation of the Reformed Religion Establisht amongst us by Law by the Romanists And lastly towards the re-establishment of our Government and Nation in Peace and Tranquillity again which are now most miserably distracted by the fears of a Popish Successour and by the Doubts about Excluding him If we did not doubt without reason of the lawfulness of Excluding a Popish Successour we should have no reason to fear him The Great and Weighty CONSIDERATIONS c. CONSIDERED WHatever is the subject matter upon which we exercise our thoughts or whereupon we make our Enquities doth not make the Considerations of slight and vain Men GREAT and WEIGHTY A man of slender Endowments doth not commence to be Wise as soon as matters of great Moment take up his Thoughts But if he be of such a make as renders him capable of being in any degree wise he is affected with an ingenuous Shame finding the matters too hard for his Capacity and above his reach He is displeased and dissatisfied with his own dark indistinct and confused Conceptions in which he himself can receive no satisfaction he suspends and determines nothing but that he doth not understand the matter and resorts with deference to those who are wiser than himself But there is a sort of Arrogant Fools who trouble the World make it difficult to understand plain Truth confound the Notions of things blend things of remote distances in their nature together or put one thing for another that have no affinity to each other puzzle and perplex the minds of the Weak These deserve the Indignation of the better sort of Judgments who cannot but be empassioned while they see a great part of mankind abused to their hurt By the villanous practices of some designed to the endurance of the greatest mischiefs and by a sort of silly Knaves attempted upon for deceiving them into a permission of all the pretended evils to come upon them who presumptuously use their little Wit to ensnare the Consciences to perplex the Minds of the Multitude by Objections puzzling to the weak by such Reasonings as none but fools could think of and none but bold Knaves would offer to the World Such I take to be every immodest man who will adventure not from his Understanding and therefore from his Will and consequently his Interest to speak things that have no consequence and are not induc'd by the Laws of Reasoning and Discourse that have a tendency to dispose men to scruple of Conscience and make them doubtful and unactive against the evils of the greatest size that are design'd against them and to neglect or resist the Counsels of God against themselves and fatally fall under the designed evils notwithstanding they are provided of a just and allowable Remedy against them There are and ever was and ever will be to the trouble of Mankind a sort of literate Fools who will always obtain some reputation with the stupid admiring Vulgar made by Nature to little Understanding and who have lost that little for want of using it who by Books good of bad it matters not much become greater Fools than they could have been if left to simple Nature who by imperfect remembrances and undue joyning of things more imperfectly understood make most perverse Judgments in all things they are conversant about And if it happen that by their Complexion they prove forward and are opinionated of their false Learning they obtrude upon the World their unnatural monstrous and incoherent Conceptions And if they chance to mix their Discourses with passages of Holy Scriptures and thereby entitled Religion to their Absurdities they more powerfully amuse distract and abuse the Consciences of the common People and perplex them with Scruples and Prejudices and that sometimes against the only means of their preservation And this calls upon and urgeth the Charity of such to whom God hath given a better