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ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A56382	The case of the Church of England, briefly and truly stated in the three first and fundamental principles of a Christian Church : I. The obligation of Christianity by divine right, II. The jurisdiction of the Church by divine right, III. The institution of episcopal superiority by divine right / by S.P.	Parker, Samuel, 1640-1688.	1681 (1681)	Wing P455; ESTC R12890	104,979	280

And therefore in answer to it I will at present only return these few brief Considerations each whereof will be enough to satisfie men if they will be reasonable and altogether more than enough to silence them if they will not The first ill consequence then of this Opinion is only this that it charges our Saviour and his Apostles of not making sufficient provision for the lasting peace and settlement of the Church so that had not After-ages supplied their defects in such things as were absolutely necessary to the Government of it there had been no remedy for curing or avoiding eternal schisms and divisions for according to this account of the Original of the Episcopal superiority all the world were by sad experience convinced of its great necessity for the prevention of factions and confusions Now what a dishonourable reflection is this upon the Wisdom of our Saviour and his Apostles to institute a Society of men in the World without providing a competent Government to secure its continuance in peace and unity But then secondly whilst this Conceit explodes the claim founded upon Divine Right it is forced to grant a necessity founded upon natural Reason so that acccording to it Episcopal Government is made necessary by vertue of all those Laws of God and of Nature that provide for the Churches peace and the preservation of Society For if this were the ground of that universal agreement in the Institution of Bishops that St. Jerom speaks of in his toto Orbe decretum est viz. ut schismatum semina tollerentur and if there were no remedy for the prevention of this evil whilst the Government of the Church was administred by the whole Body of the Presbyters the consequence is unavoidable that though our Saviour or at least his Apostles had no more discretion that to leave all Church-Officers in an equality of Power yet the light of Nature and the Laws of Society made it necessary to establish a superiority of one Order above another Ecclesiae salus in summi sacerdotis dignitate pendet cui si non exors quaedam ab omnibus eminens detur potestas tot in Ecclesiis efficientur schismata quot sacerdotes The security of the Churches peace depends upon the preheminence of the Bishops power which were it not supreme and paramount in reference to the other Clergy we should quickly have as many Schisms as Priests says St. Jerom Setting aside the Authority of the man the reason and experience of the Argument it self is unanswerable For in such a vast body of men as the Clergy it is obvious to every mans understanding that considering the passions of mankind there could be no possible agreement and by consequence no Government without a superiority of power in some above others Now this is another pretty handsome reflection upon the wisdom of our Saviour and his Apostles that they were so shamefully defective in their first settlement of the Church as shewed them to be so far from being directed by any divine and infallible Spirit that they fell short of the principles of common discretion For though any man of an ordinary understanding might easily discern how impossible it was to avoid Schisms while the Power of the Church resided in the whole Body of the Clergy partly by the bandying of the Presbyters one against another partly by the siding of the People with some against the rest partly by the too common use of the Power of Ordination in Presbyters by which they were more able to increase their own Party by ordaining those who would joyn with them and by this means perpetuate Schisms in the Church when I say these inconveniences were so obvious what a prodigious neglect or weakness must it be to leave the Church through all Ages in such a shattered and tottering condition insomuch that it must unavoidably have perished had not some that came after them invented better means to prevent or redress mischiefs than they had left them For upon this it was that the graver and wiser sort considering the abuses following the promiscuous use of this power of Ordination and withal having in their minds the excellent frame of the government of the Church under the Apostles and their Deputies for preventing future Schisms and Divisions among themselves unanimously agreed to chuse one out of their number who was best qualified for so great a trust and to devolve the exercise of the power of Ordination and Jurisdiction to him so that it seems we are more obliged to those wiser and graver sort than to the Apostles for their care in preventing Schisms and Divisions through all Ages of the Church But thirdly this conceit bottoms upon no better foundation than a bold and presumptuous conjecture And there is no dealing with such men as are able to blast the credit of all the most undoubted Records of ancient times with an imaginary and sinister suspicion for when we have pursued the Succession of Bishops through all Ages of the Church up to the very times next to the Apostles it requires somewhat a bold face to tell us that though this perhaps may be sufficiently evident from the practice of the Primitive Church and of the Apostles and their Deputies yet there was a dark interval between the death of the Apostles and the time of the most ancient Fathers in which it was abolished and a new Form of Government set up but that being found inconvenient it was thought good and agreed upon in all Churches to lay that aside and restore the old Apostolical superiority These are very hard conceits especially when they cannot so much as pretend to give us any the least probable account where and when and by whom this was done And this is pretty modest to bear up so confidently against all the current of Antiquity without so much as any pretences of ground or evidence to rely upon But so it hapned once upon a time in which toto Orbe decretum est though when that time was we have no more certain knowledg than we have in what degree of Latitude this totus Orbis lies Perhaps it was as Blondel will have it about the thirty fifth year after the death of St. John and what if he had been pleased to have said the fifteenth or sixty fifth year the guess had been altogether both as learned and as well grounded However is it not a pleasant thing to tell us boldly and at all adventure in toto Orbe decretum est without so much as telling us when or where or attempting to prove the matter of Fact especially when it is plainly impossible that so universal and remarkable a change should be so unanimously agreed upon and effected and that upon such great and urgent reasons without ever being so much as taken notice of Why may we not as well discredit any Record chuse what you please by pretending there once was or perhaps might have been an unknown time in which all mankind conspired

practice of this thing as far as I can find in those times to expel them out of their Society without variety of lesser or greater degrees but whoever were excommunicate were to all intents and purposes degraded from being Jews But herein perhaps I am mistaken and whether I am or am not I am as little concern'd as my cause to which I now return And here all that our Author has to the purpose is that Excommunication among the Jews was only an abatement of their Civil not their Sacred priviledges which if true would do very little service to his Conclusion that therefore it must be so in the Christian Church where there are no priviledges but what are Sacred but the principle it self is altogether ungrounded without Authority and without reason and that too though we understand it of his Talmudical Excommunication for as he justifies the Truth of it by no Authority so the reason he gives is as good as none viz. That those under Nidui were admitted into the Synagogue And so they were as they were admitted to civil Conversation keeping their distance of four paces and from thence alone it is reasonable to conclude that as the sentence proceeded higher so it was raised in both kinds of punishments However there is one Argument to prove the Jewish Excommunication to be a sacred as well as civil Interdiction and that so very obvious that it is impossible that our learned Author could have overlooked it had not his eyes been so wholly fixt upon his own Hypothesis And that is this that they looked upon all excommunicate Persons as no Jews or as we cited before out of the third Book of the Maccabees as enemies to the Jewish Nation and then it is sufficiently known to all men That no such were admitted to the publick service And so we come to the Period of the Christian Church which is divided into three Ages the first during the time of our Saviour and his Apostles The second from their death or the end of the first Century to the Reign of Constantine The third from the Reign of Constantine down to our own times And that Excommunication in the first age of the Church was of the same nature with that of the Jews our learned Author demonstrates because our Saviour and his Apostles practised it in imitation of their Discipline Though for my part I cannot understand how any thing can follow more plainly than that Excommunication if it were a civil punishment among the Jews must be meerly Sacred among the Christians For if the Jews took it up as our Author will have it only to supply their want of civil Government it must therefore as he rightly infers be used by them as a civil Penalty Then when our blessed Saviour instituted the same in his Church it must not be a civil but a sacred Penalty because his Church is no civil but a sacred Society If indeed Christians as Christians confederated together to maintain their secular Interests that would make temporal punishments necessary to the preservation of their Confederacy But when they enter into a Society purely to enjoy some spiritual Rights and Priviledges then all separation from the Society by way of Punishment can be nothing else than debarring them from those Rights and Priviledges So that if Excommunication among the Jews was as our Author contends the same with Out-lawry as to their civil Rights what can be more evident than that it can be no such thing among Christians because as such they have no civil Rights to lose And for this reason whereas he concludes that because Excommunication was taken up into the Christian Church in imitation of the Jewish Discipline that therefore it was the same if he had consider'd things instead of words he would have been so far from making his own Conclusion that he would have concluded that if one were civil the other was not So that when our Saviour established the Customs of his Country in his Church it is manifest from the nature of his Church which was a spiritual Kingdom that he never intended it should be exercised in any other matters than what were peculiar to his Religion or if he did that he lost his Intention And therefore it seems no better than meer obstinacy in our Author to insist upon it so importunately that Excommunication in the Christian Church must be the same with the Jewish because borrowed from it when for that reason alone it must be different because so were the Societies to which they related And he might as well have argued that the Christian Baptism was the same with that of the Jews because it is the form of Proselytism in both whereas by one men become Jews by the other Christians And of the same nature is Excommunication for as by that we are admitted into the Church so by this are we cast out of it And whereas our Author will have it to have been the same thing both among Jews and Christians because it is expressed by the same Phrases it is as absurd as if he should go about to prove that no man can be banisht out of England because he may be banisht out of France for though banishment out of both Kingdoms be the same punishment yet were their banishments out of different Kingdoms so by Excommunication among the Jews passing Mr. Seldens account of it were men cast out of the Common-wealth and all the Rights of it and among the Christians out of the Church and all the benefits belonging to it And therefore unless he could prove that there is no difference between the Christian Church and Jewish Common wealth it is in vain for him to insist thus weakly upon the fignification of words for that is determined by the nature of things and therefore where they are different there is no avoiding it but that the words by which they are expressed must signifie different things But this being premised our Author divides his Discourse into two parts First to enquire what was the use of Excommunication in the Apostolical Age Secondly upon what right it was founded as for the first he alledges several Texts of Scripture as Gal. 1. 8. Though we or an Angel from Heaven preach any other Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you let him be Anathema 1 Cor. 16. 22. If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ let him be Anathema Maran Atha But to what purpose this is past my Comprehension For the only design of the Argument is to prove that the Apostolical Excommunication was meerly Jewish as he had before proved that the Jewish was meerly civil Now can any man imagine that such dreadful Curses as these should signifie no more than a separation from Neighbours Commerce especially when it is evident that St. Paul strain'd for the highest expressions of misery and therefore to heighten his sense he supposes an impossible thing that an Angel from Heaven should teach a