Dei Exod. 23. In judicio plurimorum non acquiesces Sententiae ut à vero devies and yet they are the words of Salmeron a man of great learning amongst the Iesuits and confessed of all men to be so in Ep. ad Rom. 5. dif 51. pa. 468. How would they triumph upon the modesty of one of our Clergy if when he had reckoned up the opinions of most of the Fathers upon a difficult Text of Scripture he should conclude Sed si meam quoque sententiam avet audire liberè fatebor in nulla prorsus earum meum qualecunque judicium acquiescere and yet these are the words of Maldonate in his Commentary upon the 11 verse of the 11 ch of St. Matthew Qui est minimus in regno Coelorum major est Iohanne Baptista The question is not whether these very eminent Men and great Scholars for such they were said well and reasonably but whether they who assume this liberty should reproach us who never mention the Fathers but with veneration and rarely dissent from them but when they dissent from one another for taking less liberty or whether they do ingenuously to desire the People should believe that they are so severe observers of the Doctrine of the Fathers that they never tread out of their steps Why may it not become the Church of England to use the same expressions which Cardinal Cajetan so long since did in his Preface to his Commentaries upon the Books of Moses in his excuse for having rejected many expositions of the Fathers Solis sacrae Scripturae authoribus reservata authoritas haec est ut ideo sic credamus esse quia ipsi sic scripserunt Why may it not become any particular member of that Church in a particular point it may be but in a particular expression to differ from a particular Father when Petavius who had as exactly read the Fathers and was as great a Master of universal Learning as this Age hath produced presumes to say Multa sunt à sanctissimis Patribus praesertim à Chrysostomo in homiliis aspersa quae si ad exactae veritatis normam accommodare volueris boni sensûs inania videbuntur in Epipha pa. 244. These and very many more of the like animadversions and detections by Monsieur Dallie anger vex Mr. Cressy and his new Friends much more than any disrespect he is guilty of towards the Fathers of which they cannot assign one instance all that he says besides the mentioning them always with all possible reverence is no more than what Mr. Cressy says of them and of the four first general Councils and which indeed was the cause of Monsieur Dallies writing that Book that those Holy men nor the times in which they lived knew any thing or had heard of any of the points especially in controversie between us and the Church of Rome and therefore that it was a vain affectation to appeal to them for a decision I do not much wonder at any thing Mr. Cressy says upon this argument for he owed to himself some extraordinary observation to make his tale of presenting that unlucky Book as he calls it of Mr. Dallie to My Lord Falkland and which he says perswaded Mr. Chillingworth to have a light esteem of the Fathers but I cannot but admire and grieve that he hath so much credit with any member of the Church of England how obscure soever as to perswade him to have the same opinion and thereupon to assume the Licence and the rashness to asperse as far as his talent can contribute unto it the memory of that most loved and most esteemed Lord Falkland whose name he is not worthy to pass through his mouth with the odious reproach of being a Socinian and that when no Person of the Church of Rome hath had the courage in so many years to attempt the answering that Book de usu Patrum one of the other Church should think it necessary to take the quarrel upon him and without any reason or any instance of moment reproach Mr. Dallie with his light esteem of the Holy Fathers in language not in any degree decent nor was the matter or the manner at all necessary to the other part of his Book concerning the Church of England nor can any Man who is disposed to make that enquiry meet with a greater encouragement to pursue it than by having read that Book of Mr. Dallies I am glad I am now come to Mr. Cressy's conclusion which is not long and consists in a softer and more civil kind of scolding than the other parts of his Book but with the same bitterness and hath in truth in it somewhat of ingenuity a man would not have expected for after so many reproaches almost in every page of his Book of being a Presbyterian an Independent an Hypocrite indeed all the calumnies cast upon him which a good wit and an ill nature can suggest he confesses at last that the Doctor in one of his Books and the place he cites declares That the Church of England upon the greatest enquiry he can make is the best Church of the World which is a greater and fuller vindication of him for all the contumelious aspersions cast on him and a more ample and clear testimony because it is more innocent that he is a true son of the Church of England than any Mr. Cressy can produce of his being a Roman Catholick Will any Presbyterian or Independent or Anabaptist make that Declaration he well knows they neither can nor will whilst they retain the principles of their parties and they cease to be of either party assoon as they make that declaration he confesses that the Doctor hath subscribed and submitted to and practises all that Church requires of him and hath farther unprovoked given this ample testimony to it that he was not obliged to do and which no man can give that is divided in his affections and equally inclined to another Church that differs from it and yet he is so jealous of the honour and security of the Church of England that Church that he hath Apostatized from that Church that he hath traduced and reviled with all the scurrility of Language of this Church in which he will not permit a possibility of Salvation he is so careful that he will not allow the Doctor to be a member of it but advises like a loving Father the drowzy and sleeping Prelates to be watchful over him as a spy and treacherous person who whilst he perswades them poor simple creatures that he will be a champion for their Church endeavours all he can to destroy and undermine it How will Mr. Cressy answer to his Superiors this preposterous zeal of his own behalf of a Church the most odious and the most formidable to them that when it is even almost undermined by Officers of its own who are trusted to search and survey all its Vaults and most secret Avenues so that it is upon the point of falling
think never saw that excellent Person to take upon them to asperse a Noble man of the most Prodigious learning of the most exemplar manners and singular good nature of the most unblemished integrity and the greatest Ornament of the Nation that any Age hath produced with the Character of a Socinian Mr. Cressy well knows that before that time of his Journey into Ireland in the Year One thousand six hundred thirty eight that Noble Lord had perused and read over all the Greek and Latine Fathers and was indefatigable in looking over all Books which with great expence he caused to be transmitted to him from all parts and so could not have been long without Mr. Dallies Book if Cressy's presenting it to him had not given him opportunity to have raised this scandal upon his memory nor could that Book have been so grateful to him if he had not read the Fathers For Mr. Chillingworth if Mr. Cressy had not been very wary in saying any thing that might redound to the honour of any of the present Prelates he cannot but know that the present Arch-Bishop of Canterbury had first reclaimed him from his doubtings and they were no more nor had he ever declared himself a Catholick except being at S. Omers amounts to such a Declaration before ever he was sent for by Arch-Bishop Laud and I am very much deceived which I think I am not in that particular if Chillingworth's Book against Mr. Knott was not published before the time of Cressy's Journey in thirty eight into Ireland and I know had been perused by him and therefore Mr. Dallies Book could not interrupt him in his study of the Fathers nor induce him to fix his mind upon Socinian grounds which now serves his turn to reproach all men and the Church of England it self for refusing to believe his miracles or to submit to that authority to whose blind guiding he hath lazily given up himself and all his faculties Yet he does so much honour to those grounds that he does confess that they obstructed a good while his entrance into the Catholick Church the contrary whereof I know to be true as much as negative can be true and that he never thought of entring into the Religion he now professes till long after the death of the Lord Falkland and Mr. Chillingworth nor till the same rebellious power that drove the King out of the Kingdom drove him likewise from the good preferments which he enjoyed in the Church and then the necessity and distraction of his fortune together with the melancholick and irresolution in his nature prevailed with him to bid farewell to his own reason and understanding and to resign himself to the conduct of those who had a much worse than his If the having read Socinus and the commending that in him which no body can reasonably discommende in him and the making use of that reason that God hath given a man for the examining of that which is most properly to be examined by reason and to avoid the weak arguments of some men how superciliously soever insisted upon or to discover the fallacies of others be the definition of a Socinian the party will be very strong in all Churches but if a perfect detestation of all those Opinions against the Person and Divinity of our Saviour or any other doctrine that is contrary to the Church of England and the Church of England hath more formally condemned Socinianism than any other Church hath done as appears by the Canons of One thousand six hundred and forty can free a man from that reproach as without doubt it ought to do I can very warrantably declare that that unparallel'd Lord was no Socinian nor is it possible for any man who is a true Son of the Church of England to be corrupted with any of those Opinions But in truth if Mr. Cressy hath that Prerogative in Logick as to declare men to be Socinians from some propositions which he calls Principles which in his judgment will warrant those deductions though he confesses he does not suspect the Doctor will approve such consequences yet he is confident with all his skill he cannot avoid them that is he is a Socinian before he is aware of it and in spight of his teeth this is such an excess in the faculty of arguing as must make him a dangerous Neighbour and qualifies him excellently to be a Commissioner of the Inquisition who have often need of that kind of subtilty that will make Heresies which they cannot find All this invention is to perswade his new friends of that which they call the old Religion that his old Friend's Religion is new that they have no reverence for antiquity no regard for the Authority of the Fathers and only make use of their natural reason to find out a new Religion for themselves whereas in truth whoever will impartially and dispassionately make the enquiry shall find that there is no one substantial controversie between the Roman and the Church of England but what is matter of Novelty and hath no foundation in Antiquity and that the Fathers are more diligently read and studied in our Church than they are in theirs and more reverence is paid to them by us than by them though neither they nor we nor any other Christian Church in the World do submit or concur in all that the Fathers have taught who were never all of one mind and therefore may very lawfully have their reasons examined by the reasons of other men This that I say concerning the reading and the reverence paid to the Fathers ought to be believed till they can produce one Prelate or Member of the Church of England who hath ever used such contemptuous words of the Fathers Ego ut ingenuè fatear plus uno summo Pontifici crederem in his quae fidei mysteria tangunt quà m mille Augustinis Ieronymis Gregoriis c. Credo enim scio quòd summus Pontifex in his quae fidei sunt non posse errare quoniam authoritas determinandi quae ad fidem spectant in Pontifice residet which are the words of Cornelius Mussus an Italian Bishop and much celebrated amongst them for his extraordinary learning in Epis. ad Rom. cap. 14. pa. 606. Michael Medina a man as eminent in the Council of Trent as any who sate there in the debate whether a Bishop was Superiour to a Presbyter jure Ecclesiastico or jure Divino when they who sustained the former alledged Saint Ierome and S. Augustine to support their opinion Medina said aloud Non mirum esse si isti nonnulli alii Patres re nondum eo tempore illustratâ in eam haeresim incidissent How would Mr. Cressy and his Friends insult if a Doctor of the Church of England should publish in Print by the authority of the Church Illud asserimus quo juntores eo perspicaciores esse Doctores contra hanc quam objectant multitudinem Respondemus inquit ex verbo
his Second Iourney afterwards to Ierusalem in which he takes care that they might not think that he had any Superiour there To whom we gave place by subjection no not for an hour He proceeds then in the same jealousie to make a comparison with St. Peter He that wrought effectually in Peter to the Apostleship of the Circumcision the same was mighty in me towards the Gentiles effectually in Peter mighty in Paul a word of an equal energy and lest all this might be looked upon as speaking behind his back after he had mentioned the respect he had received from the other Apostles from Iames and Cephas and Iohn he tells them that when Peter came to him he withstood him to the face because he was to be blamed and the manner of his expostulation with him seems very rough as with a man that stood upon the same level with him not as with the sole Vicar of Christ If thou being a Iew livest after the manner of the Gentiles and not as do the Iews why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Iews Whosoever seriously reflects upon the tampering that had been with the Galathians to lessen their confidence in Paul and the gradations by which he endeavoured to reconfirm them in the same faith he had formerly taught them cannot but believe that the Apostle had therein a purpose to root out any such Opinion of priority out of their hearts especially when in no other place after this there appears the least mention of or appeal to St. Peter in the many errours and mis-interpretations of the words and actions of our Saviour and of them in the Life of the Apostles from whence many troubles and great disorders sprung and grew up amongst Christians of that Age. He shall do well to consider whether it be probable that St. Peter himself or any of his Successors did pretend a Precedency or Superiority over Saint Iohn the Evangelist who lived Twenty Years after Saint Peter and to let us know when the first Pope discovered his Supremacy over other Bishops and then we know well enough how it was introduced in Temporalities If Mr. Cressy and the rest of the enemies of the Church of England who will not allow any members of the same to have any hope without deserting their Mother of a place in Heaven and hardly admit them to be in their wits upon Earth would enter upon the disquisition of these particulars which are warily declined in all their Writings or very perfunctorily handled the foundation doctrine and discipline of that Church would be in a short time utterly overthrown and demolished or worthily vindicated and supported in the judgment of most learned and discerning men and there can be but two reasons why they should decline this method which they should the rather imbrace because all other have proved ineffectual and in near two hundred years the appeal to Fathers and Councils or Scripture it self hath not reconciled many persons in any one controverted particular but those two reasons so unwarrantable that they will never be owned will never suffer them to admit the method and pursue it closely The first is that if they should proceed in this ingenuous and substantial way they would be cut off from those common places in which they are only versed and by which they are supplied to urge all things which have been thought heretofore material to that matter and to reply to what is said of course but especially they will find themselves restrained from that multitude of ill words in which they so much delight of calling those they do not love and whose arguments they cannot answer Hereticks who are condemned already to Hell-fire and from asking the old stale question that hath been as often answered as asked Where was your Church before Luther and from their so often vain excursions upon the voluptuousness of Henry the Eighth whom they would fain perswade the world to be the Founder of the Church of England and all the reformation to have been devised by him Whereas if they would seriously study these material points the first whereof would go very far towards the facilitating the resolution upon the rest they might easily discern that no member of the Church of England by their own rules can be comprehended within any of their decrees for an Heretick which serves their turn only as an angry word to throw at any mans head whom they desire to make odious to all Roman Catholicks and they would be as easily convinced that we never had any thing to do with Luther that in all those quarrels and wars which were either occasioned by him or accompanied his doctrine there was not a man of the English Nation that was ever engaged and that it was long after his time not at all by his model that the Church of England without one sword drawn and in as peaceable and grave a manner as ever that Nation hath concurred in the making of any of those excellent Laws which distinguishes them from all the subjects of the world in the happiness they enjoy did reject those superstitions and inconveniences which they could not sooner free themselves from with those circumstances of justice and peace and the retaining whereof would have been more for the benefit and advantage of the Court of Rome than for the Church of England or the good of that Kingdom and as such alterations cannot be supposed to be made with so universal a consent but that many of all conditions adhered still to the exercise of their Religion with all the circumstances which they had been before accustomed unto and for which no body suffered in many years nor till by their treasonable acts and conspiracies they appeared dangerous to the State For King Henry the Eighth he had some personal contests with Clement the Seventh who was then Pope from whom he received such personal indignities as in the opinion of most of the Princes of that Age who had all out-grown the wardship of the Pope he could not but resent and vindicate himself from nor did he do it any other way than his most glorious Catholick Predecessors had always done upon far less injuries or provocations as Edward the First and Edward the Third and others whose Religion was never suspected often restrained him from exercising any authority or jurisdiction in England to which they well knew he had no other authority or right but what the Crown had granted him and forbid any of their Subjects to repair to Rome or to receive any Orders from thence which was upon the matter all that Henry the Eighth did and was no more than Lewis the Twelfth of France had done very few years before but was so far from being inclined or favouring to any reformation or alteration in Religion that he proceeded as long as he lived with the utmost severity against all who were but suspected to be averse from the Catholick Religion and caused many of them
IMPRIMATUR THO. TOMKYNS Ex Aed Lambethanis Nov. 29. 1673. ANIMADVERSIONS Upon a Book Intituled FANATICISM FANATICALLY Imputed to the Catholick Church By Dr. STILLINGFLEET And the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S. C. By a Person of Honour LONDON Printed for R. Royston Bookseller to His most Sacred Majesty 1673. TO Dr. Stillingfleet SIR HAving lately it may be later than most men in England who are inquisitive after Books had a view of a little Book in answer to a Book of Yours which I had not then seen Intituled Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed by him Dr. Stillingfleet to the Catholick Church I had read very few leaves in it when I was able warrantably to say that Mr. Cressy was the Author of this Book a person whom I had long known and familiarly conversed with before he was perverted in his Religion aud had often seen since and upon the whole I must confess if there had not been some particulars in it which could not suffer me to be deceived I could hardly have believed that so much pride and bitterness and virulence could upon so little provocation and with so little excuse have dropped from his pen. The confidence of it amazed me as much as the rudeness and though I could not expect that a man who had treated his own Mother with so little respect could have much reverence for your Person who have so vigorously defended her and fully vindicated her from all the reproaches that Classis of men have been able to cast upon her and exposed their malice and their ignorance more nakedly to the view of the world than I think hath been ever done before for which all her true children are and always must be indebted to you and to your memory I thought the little angry Book fit to receive some answer and the Author of it worthy of reprehension and admonition which he might receive with less disturbance from an old Friend and I thought it likewise unreasonable that you whose studies are so wholly engrossed by and dedicated to the publick should be put to the trouble to free your self from these feeble calumnies which every man who hath read your Works is able to do and every man who loves the Church is bound in justice to do Besides I was willing to invite other Lay-men to shew with more efficacy their concernment for the Church and the Protestant Religion so variously and maliciously assaulted on all hands though God be thanked impotently enough that the defence of it may not be looked upon as the sole duty of the Clergy These were the motives that invited me to undertake this little task which I was not long performing and yet even when I had finished it if so imperfect a draught can be called finishing I chanced to have the pleasant sight of your Answer to several late Treatises c. and I can with a very good conscience assure you that mine was dispatched before I did see it and therefore especially since you have only taken a slight notice in the Preface of Mr. Cressy's waspish invectives I am willing if you please that my short Animadversions may be likewise presented to his view which is intirely left to be communicated or suppressed or corrected according to your judgment by SIR Your most affectionate unknown Servant ANIMADUERSIONS Upon a Book Intituled FANATICISM FANATICALLY Imputed to the Catholick Church By Dr. STILLINGFLEET And the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S. C. IT was the wish not the hope of the most excellent Lord Bacon in his never enough admired Advancement of Learning that good Books had the quality or faculty of Moses's Rod that being become a Serpent eat up and devoured the other Serpents which were produced by the Rods of the Sorcerers or Magicians The number was so great in his time of idle and impertinent and Seditious Books and the number of the Readers who were delighted with them was likewise so great that Books of Learning weight and importance found little countenance and few Men at leisure to peruse them and he saw no remedy but by such a miracle What would that great and discerning Person think if he had lived in these days when the licence of writing and publishing light and scandalous Books of all Arguments without any rules or limits of modesty is grown the Epidemical disease of the Nation and a reproach to the Government in the violation of the Laws the contempt of the Magistrate and the general contagion that is spread abroad and threatens the very peace of the Kingdom at least disturbs the sober conversation of it The spirit of Martin Marprelate which hath for so many years been expired or extinguished is revived with greater insolence and improved and heightned as well against the State as the Church in a petulancy of language in a style so new and unbecoming Men of honest education that the gravest arguments in Divinity it self and Texts of the Sacred Scripture are handled in a manner and fashion and with such vain and Comical expressions as have not used to be admitted in the lightest arguments or in sober and chast mirth The important and vital parts of Government the dignity of the Laws established and even the Person of the King himself and the greatest Magistrates are arraigned censured and inveighed against in such a bitterness of words with terms so reproachful as have not been ever used in good company and as if the English tongue were too narrow to comprehend all the Ribaldry and filthiness of their thoughts and inventions they coin new words of contempt and indignation and make use of a Dialect never heard of but in the company of Ruffians and the lowest and most debauch'd of the People which for wit sake they apply to their vile purposes so that this extravagance if not timely suppressed doth really seem to threaten not only a general corruption of manners but of the purity and integrity of the Language and of the good humor and good nature and modest conversation of the Nation and upon this occasion I cannot but lament the want of that caution and prudence which was heretofore observed when this unruly Spirit first broke out in the time of Martin Marprelate who had a contribution of Jests and Scoffs and Comical inventions brought to him by all the party who desired to expose the Church and the Government of it to the contempt and scorn of the loose and rude People It was not thought worthy of any serious Man to enter into the lists with such adversaries or to take notice of their Pamphlets but Men of the same Classis of the same rankness of Wit and fancy and of honester principles were the Champions in that quarrel Thom. Nash was as well known an Author in those days as Martin who with Pamphlets of the same kind and size with the same pert Buffoonry and with more salt and cleanliness rendred that libellous and seditious crew so contemptible ridiculous and odious that in
a short time they vanished and were no more heard of What was urged or insinuated by any Men of discretion and understanding that might make any impression upon sober unwary and misinformed Men was carefully and learnedly answered by Persons assigned to that purpose that the Church or the State might not undergoe any prejudice by want of seasonable advice without mingling any of the others froth or dregs in their compositions which they left to the chastisement of those who could as dexterously manage the same weapons and were fitter for their company And methinks grave and serious men or they who ought to be grave and serious should be afraid of imitating such adversaries in their licence and excesses lest they should get into a scoffing vein which they should not easily shake off or lose their credit with worthy Men for dishonouring the cause they maintain ironically A man will hardly be thought provident enough or solicitous for his own peace and credit who having discovered this unruly frantick disease will expose himself to the malignity thereof by approaching so near the company of those angry Wasps and Hornets who are like to be willing to take any opportunity to be revenged upon a Person who hath presumed to be offended with their manner of writing and in the same instant submitted his own to their censure which is like to be liable to as many exceptions of weakness and impertinence To which I shall only say that whatever other faults they shall discover in this short writing of mine they shall not find the same of which I complain I shall give no body ill words nor provoke them by contemning their Persons and I chuse rather to be at their mercy than not to endeavour the best way I can to divert men from that indecent way of reviling each other and instead of answering Arguments to traduce the Persons who urge them Truth is of so tender and delicate a constitution that it is defiled by rude handling and hath advantage enough to encounter and conquer its adversaries by the vigour of its own beauty without aspersing the deformity of the other farther than unavoidable reason makes it manifest I shall not interpose in those Arguments which are now most agitated in that scurrilous style that I complain of but chuse to take upon me to make Animadversions upon a Book lately published at least lately come to my sight Intituled Fanaticism Fanatically imputed to the Church of England by Doctor Stillingfleet and the imputation Refuted and Retorted by S. C. The Author whereof professes himself an avowed Enemy to the Church of England and would be thought as much an enemy to the foul custom introduced into the Controversies concerning it and the liberty men assume to deride Religion instead of vindicating it to wound the profession by a petulant and scornful mention of the Professors and by expressions full of pride and vanity and destructive to peace and government and yet how contrary soever this way of writing is to his practice and inclination he hath some jealousie of himself that upon the insupportable provocation he hath received some phrases of bitterness may have scaped his Pen which he doth believe he hath very good authority not to make any excuse for and there being such plenty of that noisom Gall scattered throughout his whole discourse it will be but just to take a view of his provocation and whether his revenge be no more than proportionable to the occasion and then whether the imputation be not rather confidently retorted than reasonably refuted and whether in the endeavoring the one or the other the bounds and limits of all modesty and civility are not so far transgressed that the Author is liable to just censure I do the rather enter into the List upon this occasion because I may infallibly presume that I know the Author of that Discourse for I no sooner read it which was long after it was published but that it was manifest to me by many particulars contained in it in which I cannot be deceived that it is written by Mr. Cressy with whom I have been acquainted very near fifty years and have very long esteemed him for his parts and learning and for his good nature and his good manners all of which were in as great perfection then as they have been ever since or are at present and therefore as I shall treat him with that candor that becomes an old Friend so I do not suspect his reception and interpretation of it will be such as is worthy of that temper of spirit which he professes to be of nor do I despair of presenting some considerations and reflections to him which may so work upon it as to induce him to believe that both in regard of the matter it self and the manner of treating Dr. Stillingfleet he hath swarved very much from those Rules which he prescribes to others and pretends to observe himself and then the tenderness of his own Conscience will instruct him what reparation he ought to make But before I enter into the debate I must first declare that the Religion I profess and defend is the Religion of the Church of England and not the particular opinions much less the expressions of any member of it how worthy soever and Mr. Cressy who professes to be an adversary to it ought to insist only upon what is owned and avowed by her and not hope to wound her through the sides or by the weakness or passions of those who have deserted her or still adhere to her And in the second place that I do not take upon me to write against the Catholick Church of which the Church of England is a vital part or against the Religion professed in any Catholick Country but against the Roman Catholick Subjects of his Majesties Dominions whose Religion I take to be different from that which is professed and established in any Catholick Country in Europe and disavowed by all the Catholick Countries out of Europe And one of the principal reasons that engages me in this Discourse is to endeavour to draw the dispute that is between the Church and the Laws of England and his Majesties Subjects of his own Dominions who profess to be of the Roman Faith into a narrower room and within that compass that properly contains it And I have always thought that they have had too much countenance and too great a latitude allowed them in reducing the contest to what concerns all the members of the Roman Church equally with themselves as if the Roman Catholicks of England withdraw their obedience from the Kings authority and oppose the Laws of the Land so much to the damage of their Estates and the danger of their lives if the Laws were prosecuted against them only for the support and in the defence of the cause common to all other Catholicks Whereas I say the difference between us depends wholly upon the personal authority of the Pope within the Kings
Dominions which is an argument never used for the support of the Catholick Religion if it were all Catholicks must be of the same opinion It was that and that only that first made the Schism and still continues it and is the ground of all the animosity of the English Catholicks against the Church of England and produced their separation from it and if they will renounce all that personal authority in the Pope and any obedience to it within his Majesties obedience which I say again is not admitted in any other Catholick Kingdom they will purge themselves of all such jealousie or suspicion of their fidelity as may prove dangerous to the Kingdom and against which the Laws are provided their opinions of Purgatory or Transubstantiation would never cause their Allegiance to be suspected more than any other error in Sence Grammar or Philosophy if those opinions were not instances of their dependance upon another Jurisdiction foreign and inconsistent with their duty to the King and destructive to the peace of the Kingdom and in that sence and relation the Politick Government of the Kingdom takes notice of those opinions which yet are not enquired into or punished for themselves let them disclaim that and they will find themselves at great ease This is the only Argument I wish should be insisted on between us and our fellow-subjects of the Roman profession not that I think that the other Doctrinal points between the two Churches are not worthy the insisting upon but that as much hath been said already upon them on both sides and as convincingly as is necessary Nothing new can be added at least no man will be convinced with what shall be added who is not moved with what is already said nor doth the meer difference upon any of those points naturally produce that uncharitableness those animosities of which we complain towards each other No man was ever truly and really angry otherwise than the warmth and multiplication of words in the dispute produced it with a man who believed Transubstantiation more than he would be with another who should come into a room where he was reading by a Candle and swear that the room was so dark that he could not see his hand but when he will for the support of this Paradox introduce an authority for the imperious determination thereof that the Word of God hath not commanded men to submit to and the word of Man the Law of the Land hath positively forbidden them to submit to it is no wonder if passion breaks in at this door and kindles a Fire strong enough to consume the House This is the Hinge upon which all the other controversies between us and the English Catholicks do so intirely hang and depend that if that only were taken off all the rest would quickly fall to the ground and therefore it concerns Mr. Cressy and the rest of his friends to fasten and make that Hinge strong that it may support the rest from falling And I cannot but observe how unwillingly they are brought to touch this point or if they do it is so lightly as if it were too hot for their fingers and upon the necessity of a through examination of this material Argument I shall be obliged to inlarge in the Conclusion of this Discourse There is another reason that hath principally invited me to this unequal undertaking that is my Zeal to the Church of England and a compassion of the very ill condition it is reduced to by an unworthy conspiracy that was never before entred into against it or any other established Church in undervaluing whatsoever is written by any Clergy-man how learned and vertuous soever in defence of it as if he were a party and spoke only in his own interest so that they who would undermine it by all the foul and dishonest arts imaginable have the advantage to be considered as Persons engaged in that accompt meerly and purely by the impulsion of their Consciences and for the discovery of such dangerous errors as are dangerous to the Souls of men whilst they who are most obliged and are best able to refute those vain and malicious pretences and to detect the fraud and the ignorance of those Seditious undertakers are looked upon as men not to be believed at least partial and that all they say is said on their own behalf This is a sad truth and a new Engine to make a Battery at which Atheism may enter without opposition with all its instruments and attendants that would make Christianity it self ridiculous that it may be contemptible God forbid that this Scarcrow should impose silence upon or seal up the mouths of any Learned and worthy Clergy-man who should open them the wider for this combination and contribute the more to the assistance and vindication of the best constituted Church in the world because it is in a distress by mockers and scoffers and neutral or unconcerned persons who make the approaches and sap the ground to open the way and make the access the more easie for more declared Enemies to oppress and destroy it This hath been a motive to me who have neither dependance upon or relation to any Clergy-man nor any temptation to imbark my self in this quarrel but my love of truth and the most abstracted duty to my Country and likewise because I think though the Clergy is best able to judge of any difficulties in matters of Religion the Laity is equally engaged in the consequences which will inevitably attend any prejudices it shall undergo or be exposed to and therefore ought in time to contribute their talent towards the securing it and not stand idle spectators of those stratagems which are no less designed against the State than the Church In the last place the particular esteem I have of the profound Learning and integrity of Dr. Stillingfleet to whom I am very little known and his great merit towards the Church of England whose worthy Champion he will not be thought the less for the untrue aspersions Mr. Cressy hath presumed to cast upon him and which will easily be wiped off hath disposed me to interpose in his Vindication which is so much due to him from other Men that I wish he may not trouble himself with it And having now observed Mr. Cressy's own method in giving first account of the reasons and motives which have prevailed with me for this engagement for which I cannot alledge another that was most powerful with him obedience to certain friends whose commands he ought in no wise to resist since I may honestly declare that no Friend I have is privy to my purpose or knows what I am doing I make hast to wait upon him by his own stages and shall make no excuse for not affixing my name to what I write which I do purposely decline not by the example of S. C. but by the assurance I have that the publishing my name would be so far from bringing any advantage to the cause
for which I am solicitous that it would rather increase and propagate the prejudice that is against it I do therefore provide a more natural countenance to support it and which legally will supply the defect of the name by having it Licensed by lawful Authority without which it shall never be published IF Dr. Stillingfleet hath in truth cast any contemptuous aspersions upon Mr. Cressy or if he hath suffered any scorn or calumny only for recommending to devout Christians instructions for the practice of Christian vertues and piety in the greatest perfection that this life is capable of If he hath selected the most Sacred things and Persons in the Catholick Church on purpose to be contaminated with his Ink full of Gall and Poyson thereby administring new Arms to Atheists If he hath endeavoured to shew that all the Religion professed in the World and that thing that bears the name of a Catholick Church for so many Ages before the time of Luther and Calvin was nothing for their Worship but Idolatry for their Devotions but Fanaticism and for their doctrine and discipline nothing but faction ambition and avarice And if the Doctor hath imployed his talent of reasoning upon these subjects to discharge his excess of spleen and choler and to give free scope to all unchristian and even inhumane passions with all which the three first Pages do confidently and directly charge him I must confess that Mr. Cressy will not only be excusable for any Zeal and confidence he shall express against such an adversary but that the Doctor hath neither direction or authority from the Church of England in either of the particulars nor would I undertake to vindicate him from that great guilt But if nothing of all this be true and if the Doctor hath neither said or done any thing of this with which he is charged Mr. Cressy shall but comply with his obligations in seriously considering whether he hath observed St. Paul's injunction Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice And of the greater importance any controversie is especially if it hath any relation to Religion the swarving from that rule can never be dispensed with and therefore it will be proper in the first place to examine the evidence that is to prove this charge or charges against the Doctor before we consider the three Imputations by which it is said he would fright men from the Communion of the Catholick Church or the other three Retorsions by which Mr. Cressy is confident to wound the Protestant Churches upon both which reflexions will be made in the proper season Though I am no stranger to the writings of Dr. Stillingfleet but have read I think all that he hath published at least all that I have seen of his and as I always admired the strength and vigour of his ratiocination and the clearness of his style and expressions a faculty not natural to all very Learned and pious men by which he renders the most difficult points and which are usually by others wrapt up in obscure terms plain and intelligible to vulgar understandings So I have been exceedingly delighted with the softness gentleness and civility of his language which can never flow from an insolent or proud spirit in which he represents things which in themselves are light and as such might be neglected in a pleasant not reproachful manner a dialect his adversaries are not acquainted with And when he is compelled to answer Arguments or rather Allegations full of bitterness and reproachful words which would tempt another to take the advantage they are liable to with some sharpness he passes by the provocation and collects what can possibly be found like reason out of what is alledged and refutes it with very much less severity than the matter would justifie and seems sometimes to require Yet knowing Mr. Cressy well too and that he is not of a quarrelsome disposition or apt to give ill words in his discourse and to have a full understanding of what he reads that cannot be imposed upon I had some fear that the Doctor had upon some great provocation exceeded his former limits he had prescribed to himself and retorted the language of his adversaries with a bitterness natural enough for them though not to him And that temper I wished might never depart from him and therefore I was in some pain till I could procure the Doctor 's Book that had raised so much passion in Mr. Cressy and which I had not seen before But when I had carefully read those places to which the exceptions were made and examined as well as I could the signification or implication of every word I begun to suspect that I was mistaken in my former conjecture and that Mr. Cressy was not the Author of that Imputation Refuted but when I again reflected upon the reasons which had first produced that judgment of mine I found they had still the same strength and had then nothing to hope but that his obedience to those Friends whose commands he ought in no wise to resist for the writing and publishing his discourse had prevailed likewise with him to publish it in their and not his own words and I shall hereafter give Mr. Cressy a warrantable reason why I am still of the same opinion The first thing Mr. Cressy lays to his charge is That he accuses the Catholick Church of Fanaticism which he says no man ever presumed to do before and that he hath written an invective against the life and prayer of Contemplation commended and practised only in the Catholick Church it being a state which from the infancy of the Church he says hath been esteemed the nearest approaching to that of glorified Saints and the evidence that he produces to make this charge good is That the Doctor that he might make an entrance into the invective with a better grace hath produced on his Stage antiquely dressed the famous Teachers and erecters of Schools for Contemplation S. Bennet S. Romaulde S. Bruno S. Francis S. Dominique and S. Ignatius exposing them to the derision of prophane persons for which he threatens him shrewdly upon an Epigram in the Margent out of Martial Before he proceeds farther in his evidence lest the Doctor may be too much exalted with the novelty of his invention of his prophanely imployed Wit he doth assure him that he hath heard that kind of Wit before when he was a young Student in Oxford in a repetition Sermon to the University which he says if fancy be alone considered far better deserved applause wherein the Preacher descanting upon the whole life of our Saviour rendred him and his attendants men and women objects of the utmost scorn and aversion as if they all of them had been only a pack of dissolute vagabonds and cheats But presently the Preacher changing his stile as became a Disciple of Christ with such admirable dexterity and force of reason
answered all the Cavillations and invectives made before that the loudly repeated applause of his hearers hindered him a good space from proceeding Notwithstanding which the grave Doctors and Governours of the University though much satisfied with his abilities yet wisely considering that a petulant Histrionical stile even in objections did not fit so sacred a subject and that it was not lawful too naturally to personate a deriding Jew obliged the Preacher to a publick recantation-Sermon in the same Pulpit the Sunday following To which pretty tale I should make no reply since in the judgment of no dispassioned man it cannot be thought to be parallel to any thing the Doctor hath said or done Yet I shall endeavour to convince Mr. Cressy that his memory hath not been faithful to him in preserving the merit of that case and sentence and shall give him cause to believe that I was likewise present at that Sermon by putting him in mind that it was preached by one Mr. Lushington a man eminent for his parts upon those words in the Evangelist And his Disciples came and stole him away whilst we slept Which gave him occasion to help the Souldiers in their defence in which he gave them leave to use some light expressions against the witnesses for the Resurrection which were not decent upon that subject but that part was quickly ended when he put into the mouths of the Disciples to whom he likewise assigned a part words very worthy of them and fit to be uttered in that place and with which the gravest Auditors were abundantly satisfied though they were displeased with some light and scandalous expressions in some other parts of the Sermon Which he begun with qu' elle Novelle as if he came thither to ask and hear News but under favour of Mr. Cressy's memory nothing of this was the ground of the sentence or his Recantation but a Parliament being then sitting the Preacher had unwarily and very unnecessarily let fall some words which reflected upon their proceedings particularly that now every Pesant in Parliament by the priviledge of his Vote there cared not how he behaved himself towards the King or the Church or to that effect which made those who loved him best willing to censure him there that he might escape a harder judgment in another place Whereupon the Vice Chancellor who was Dr. Pierce afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells commanded a copy of the Sermon which being delivered and perused by him and a Delegacy of the Doctors Mr. Lushington was reprehended for the light and scandalous expressions he had used upon a subject too much above those excesses and was ordered to make a recantation Sermon for what he had said of the Parliament and had a Text likewise given him to that purpose the words concerning the Apostles in that of the Acts And they assembled together with one accord in one place Which Recantation he performed with great ingenuity and much applause If these particular recollections do not induce Mr. Cressy to concur in the truth of the relation I doubt we shall find few equal Arbiters to determine the difference between us for this Sermon if I am not very much deceived was preached in April 1624. or 25. of which I believe that there be not many surviving Auditors besides Mr. Cressy and my self In the next place let us examine how the Doctor came to provoke Mr. Cressy by laying this grievous charge of Fanaticism upon many members of the Catholick Church and to charge the Church it self to be guilty of giving too much countenance to it Mr. Cressy confesses that the first occasion was given him by charging the Church of England with Fanaticism which is sure as new a charge upon that Church as it can be upon the other which he is so far yet from retracting that he still justifies it by there being so many Fanaticks in the Church of England whereas he knows there is no Fanatick in England or in any other Country who doth not avow a particular malice and displeasure against the Church of England and if he doth not he is no Fanatick There can be nothing more contrary to Fanaticism than the order and discipline and steddiness of the Church of England And it is not ingenuously nor generously done of Mr. Cressy to charge that Church with inclining to and favouring an enemy that he knows hath rebelliously invaded her and would destroy her He would not think it just nor indeed would it be honest to charge the Church of Rome of inclining to or favouring of Iudaism because many Iews live there And yet the publick liberty and protection they have in their allowed Synagogues where they must both renounce and contemn and blaspheme the Person of our Saviour is a greater argument of inclination and of favour than can be charged upon the Church of England towards any Fanaticks all whom it doth heartily desire to convert or to remove out of its limits This unseasonable and untrue reproach made it necessary for the Doctor to answer and refell that calumny and as reasonable to instruct Mr. Cressy that his own Church is much more liable to that accusation than the other And why this provocation should be so innocent an assault for the one and the defence by the other should prove so heinous an offence will require an impartial Judge to determine who will likewise discover which of them doth most discover his excess of spleen and choler or gives most scope to all unchristian and even inhumane passions And he cannot but observe the Doctor 's commendable modesty that he would not give himself leave to retort the monstrous aspersion upon his own Mother without very exactly setting down the particular instances of the ground of that his Retorsion without any other sharp language than is unavoidable in the mention of the matters of fact a method Mr. Cressy doth warily decline in his bitterness towards his native Church nor do I blame him for being so much displeased with the length of the Doctors discourse of that subject nor for his so slightly answering those particulars of which he takes notice and undervaluing the rest rather than go about to answer them of which it will not be possible to avoid speaking more particularly anon and in the mean time I believe more of his Catholick than of his Protestant Friends do heartily wish that the task had been imposed upon him to answer the points in controversie between the Catholick Church and the Protestants and that the Doctor 's pleasant fourth Chapter had been left untouched to those who will needs be reading his Books than that Mr. Cressy's extraordinary zeal on the behalf of so prodigious a number of Saints and Miracles which are very rarely particularly urged by the learned Catholick writers in defence of their doctrine should invite men farther to examine those records which the Church it self hath given so many orders to reform Mr. Cressy finds himself most concerned to
offence in Dr. Stillingfleet to express no more reverence towards them Concerning the person of S. Benedict I do not find that the Doctor in any place calls him an Hypocrite or a counter feit Enthusiast he may have been deluded by the effects of a distempered faney as many well-meaning men have been and in truth I think Mr. Cressy is less tender of his honour than he ought to be by challenging all men to discover any thing in or of S. Benedict that may abate that reverence to his memory that he is bound to pay him and none disturb him in it except they be haled by him to rake into his ashes which whosoever shall do cannot but find enough that will lessen the esteem men would be willing to have of him If Saint Bennet's rules contain nothing but a collection skilfully made of all Evangelical precepts and Councils of perfection If there the Ecclesiastical office is so wisely ordered that the whole Church judged it fit to be her pattern of which I never heard before If S. Bennet teaches his Disciples to begin all their actions with an eye to God begging his assistance and referring them intirely to God's glory If there be nothing in his Rules but what is mentioned by Mr. Cressy though there doth not appear all things necessary in it for a great and a wise King to make choice of for his rule in managing his Kingdom nor doth he tell us who that wise King was S. Bennet may have been and Mr. Cressy might have continued a Protestant all those ends if there be no other in S. Bennet's Rules being as much commended and enjoyned by the Church of England as they are by any thing prescribed in the other Injunctions and if humility and peaceful obedience are indeed so copiously and vehemently inforced as if in them the spirit of his rule did principally consist he must not take it ill if he be thought not to have studied or conformed himself to that Rule when he presumes to call a great King a Tyrant a King that was Soveraign over all his Ancestors and lived and died as much a Catholick and as much an enemy to all Protestants as Mr. Cressy himself is at present and how he comes to have authority from the practice of his humility and peaceful obedience to stile such a Prince a Tyrant because he would not permit another Prince to be a Tyrant in his Dominions and over his subjects cannot be easily understood except it be to insinuate to all other Princes what he thinks of them and what he thinks he speaks when they shall deny obedience to the Pope which the most Catholick Kings frequently have done upon several occasions in the most Catholick times In the mean time if he well consider it he must believe that that single appellation of Tyrant setting aside the distance of the Persons is an expression more indecent more rude and in all respects more reproachful and scandalous than all the terms put together in Dr. Stillingfleet's Book can amount unto and to which he takes so great exception But I cannot enough wonder after all this at the meekness of Mr. Cressy's spirit in which he is willing even to appeal to the Doctors own judgment if he will but vouchsafe to read and examine the rules of S. Benedict which it is not possible for him to do without reading the second Chapter in which he describes the duty of an Abbot who he says ought to be the more careful of his behaviour Christi enim agere vices in Monasterio creditur quando ipsius vocatur praenomine for he proves that our Saviour was an Abbot upon Earth by that of S. Paul Accepistis spiritum adoptionis filiorum in quo clamamus Abba Pater We have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear but we have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba Father by which Text S. Bennet thought it was sufficiently proved that Christ was an Abbot Is the reading of this Rule now like to advance the honour of S. Benedict Or is it possible for any man who doth read it to believe the poor man how good soever his meaning might be qualified to give rules which can improve knowledge or devotion And in truth I think every man who reads the Orders which were at first instituted by S. Benedict and the other religious men named as every man may read them who desires it will find himself more in danger to be stirred to another passion than choler which is too predominant in the Doctor if he be provoked to it upon such an occasion at least that he will not find himself obliged to be of Bellarmine's opinion that those Orders were instituted by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and a man may honestly believe that there are not two men of that Society to which Bellarmine was a great honour who do concur with him in that opinion further than in what relates to S. Ignatius For my own part I have always had more kindness and esteem for the Monks of that Order I mean for those of the English Congregation and have had more conversation with them than with any other Religious of our Nation They are very few excepted all Gentlemen and of very good Families as Mr. Cressy is and of very civil and quiet natures not petulant and troublesome to those who do not think as they do and they were very kind to all their banished Country-men in France and Flanders for I have not known them in any other Provintes in the times of the late persecution I have been assured that they expressed more affection and duty to the King and were more useful to him even in assisting him with money in his greatest distresses and performing other offices for him than all the other Religious Communities put together And they had the good fortune to have opportunity to be instrumental towards his Majestie 's happy deliverance after the Battle at Worcester the consideration of all which hath prevailed with the King to give them more countenance and protection than he hath done to any other Ecclesiastical order and which on their part they have so well merited that I have not heard of one Benedictine Monk Mr. Cressy only excepted who hath imbarked himself in controversies in the present conjuncture to the disqueting of himself and others and in throwing reproaches upon the Church of England which may make men think that they do not live all by the same rule at least that they do not interpret it by the same spirit and yet after all this Testimony which is due to them from me I can by no means acknowledge or imagine why Mr. Cressy avows it That we owe to the followers and Disciples of S. Benedict the preservation of almost all the Literature which remains in the World which he says pag. 26. and which all the other Orders me-thinks which for the most part have been much more industrious in
that contribution should not take well Besides that as in the time of S. Bennet which may be reckoned to be about the year Five Hundred and Fifty Learning did in no degree flourish so it grew less and less for Seven Hundred years after his time or near so much even to the Age in which Erasmus lived who knew the talent of the Monks and Friers very well And truly I think Mr. Cressy's Superiors may believe that he hath taken too much pains in collecting a bundle of reproaches of a false pretender to Visions Miracles and Inspirations and an ignorant fool to be cast upon their Founder not one of which is laid to his charge by the Doctor and must therefore be imputed to another Author and he hath less reason to imagine that those reproaches must fall upon S. Gregory because he confirmed the Rules and writ the life of S. Bennet both which he might do without being guilty of either of those imputations He never knew S. Bennet and confirmed his Rules long after his death which makes some Catholick Writers believe that the Rules were in truth not made by S. Benedict and a known Catholick Antiquary Mr. Broughton takes upon him to pronounce that S. Gregory himself was never a Monk of that Order which is a greater affront to it than any that the Doctor hath put upon it I do not know but that the Church of England hath a just reverence and esteem of the learning and of the piety of S. Gregory and a greater than Mr. Cressy hath as will appear anon however as the most learned men who write many Books seldom write all with the same perfection and accurateness of judgment and their Readers do not look upon all with the same estimation so many do not believe and I doubt not many Catholicks that S. Gregorie's Dialogue of the Life of S. Bennet is for the learning or judgment of it equal to the rest of his Works But Mr. Cressy is very hard to be pleased who hath been so very angry with the Doctor for the rudeness and incivility of his language and is now no less displeased with him for his excess of civility in calling S. Benedict Saint which he says pag. 31. If he was guilty of what the Doctor charges him with savours something of blasphemy Truly though many men cannot comprehend how S. Benedict attained that degree yet no body is sure that he hath it not and his title doth not seem the worse because he doth not appear qualified by any particular Canonization at Rome there being I think no Record of any such but by a general consent amongst many devout persons which is the title of all those Primitive Saints to whose memories our Church pays as much reverence as the other doth before those very costly commencements were established at Rome which have lately conferred all those degrees and the preliminaries to it But I think it is now the civility of most of the Provinces of Europe to treat all men with the same stile that they assume to themselves or their Friends attribute to them and so we use to call those Saints who are commonly called so though we are not sure they are in Heaven and he would believe that he were very unkindly dealt with if he should be charged with want of integrity for calling the Reverend Prelates of our Church Bishops when if he did believe them really to be so he would not when he left the Church have been re-ordained and if he does not believe them to be such his insincerity is more to be reproved than our blasphemy in calling those Saints of whose station we are not so well assured But Mr. Cressy hath a greater insight into History and a more discerning spirit than any man of whom I have ever heard if he hath discovered That the greatest Iudgment and Plague that God ever no doubt in his just anger brought upon the Christian world or any Christian part of it in that general deluge of the Goths Vandals Huns Saxons Danes and other Pagan Nations proved a most unvaluable blessing as he says pag. 32. because God of those stones raised up children unto Abraham that is after these inhumane miscreants had for many hundred years massacred many millions of Christians demolished so many Churches and Religious houses and introduced a brutish savageness into the very nature of the Inhabitants within the Provinces of which they were possessed some of their posterity became Christians and yet for almost an Age after their conversion their manners remained still almost as much Pagan as they were before And for their building of Churches and Schools of piety hear what Monsieur Mezeray who is much more conversant with the transactions of those times than Mr. Cressy is says I know no time in which there were more Churches and Abbies built than in this speaking of the Tenth Century which was near the time when the most general conversion of these Barbarians happened The most wicked persons affected says he very much the title of Founders whist they ruined Churches on one side they built others on the contrary and made sacrilegious Offerings to God of those things which they had ravished from the poor and therefore those structures are not always the best Records of the piety of the Age in which they are erected and very few of the Monasteries into which Kings and Queens and Princes used to retire for attending their Heavenly meditation were erected after the incursion of those barbarous Pagans and before which that numerous Army of Martyrs was likewise expired since that time must be reckoned under the Ten Persecutions So that the unvaluable blessing that Christian Religion received from that impious inundation is not yet discovered or understood and less that the persons who by Gods blessed directions instilled into the hearts of men such an heroical Faith and Divine love were principally the Disciples of S. Benedict I must tell him again that Christianity was well cultivated before S. Bennet's Rules were published or confirmed which was not till after the year Six Hundred and from that time it received greater improvement from the piety and learning of many devout Prelates and from the learning and good lives of the Clergy and of other Religious men than it hath ever done by the disciples of S. Bennet except all the Monasteries that have been ever founded and all the professed Monks shall be looked upon as founded by him upon which computation I doubt many of Mr. Cressy's mistakes are to be imputed nor is he probably well informed of the numbers which have been converted to Christianity by the Protestant Churches though he takes upon him to know that there is not one Village which he would hardly undertake since he cannot but know that the Protestants have many large Plantations in Provinces inhabited by Pagans whereof many have been converted if he did not think that a conversion from Paganism is to little purpose
inform his indifferent Reader of the sence of those hard places do but make the understanding thereof the more intricate and that the Commentary is not less obscure than the Text and nothing is more wonderful than that the illustration he makes to facilitate the understanding of what is conceived obscure by the Prayer in our Churches Liturgy which he says was borrowed from the Roman and I say was translated out of our own Lord from whom all good things come grant us thy humble servants that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good and by thy merciful guiding we may perform the same I say it is strange that he does not so far discern that this Prayer is so easie that no one pretends not to understand the perfect meaning and extent thereof whereas he cannot but know that some men of more than common understanding profess not to comprehend the other and therefore it is too magisterial a determination that whosoever hath not a capacity to understand Sancta Sophia is an enemy to mental Prayer which no body can be who understands it or in the least degree hath endeavoured to practise it Since it is the best if not the only way to keep the mind fixed upon the subject it is solicitous for and the object to whom the Prayers are directed which in the loud pronunciation of many words is it may be to many men the most difficult thing in the sacrifice of Prayer especially if there be any affectation of words which insensibly carries the mind away from what it should be intent upon and the least moment of diversion puts a period to mental prayer which without any sensible motion hath a vehemence that cannot bear interruption and as little any prescription of method from another man To the personal reflexions and invectives against the Doctor fuller of causeless passions and of bitterness and virulence than I have ever observed in so little room in any book I shall answer in a more proper place anon After Mr. Cressy hath spent many pages in commending to his friends the having a good opinion of Visions and Revelations and Miracles and very pathetically advises them to read the Histories of the lives of Saints which the more they have done they may probably be the less inclined to conform to his opinions he professes that the only ground of the Catholicks faith is divine Revelation made to the Church by Christ and his Apostles and conveyed to posterity in Scripture and Tradition and we say that the ground of the Faith of the Church of England is the same leaving out the two last words and tradition not that the Church of England is an enemy to or disclaims the use of tradition but is not guided and governed by it by reason of the incertainty of it Where the tradition is universal and uncontradicted we have as much resignation to it as they have and therefore we do acknowledge the reception of the Scripture to be by unquestionable and never doubted tradition and that having thereby received it it hath in it self enough to convince the Reader that it could not be formed and invented by the wit of man nor that it hath not been disguised or corrupted by the malice of man and so we are possessed of the Scriptures by the same tradition that they are and whatever they believe by as confessed a tradition we believe likewise as well as they But when they urge many things as necessary to be believed by the authority of tradition we do not reject the authority but deny the tradition and say there is no tradition that will warrant it and how fallible that pretence is needs no other manifestation than that controversie of the observation of Easter which continued half a hundred years only upon the point of tradition with so much bitterness and animosity the Greek Church alledging that tradition was for them and the Roman Church the contrary and if tradition was so doubtful a guide in those Primitive times when so few years had run out what must it be now when five times as many are since expired They therefore do not deal ingenously who amuse their auditors with telling them that we reject all tradition consider not antiquity submit to no authority but every man chuses a Religion according to his own spirit Whereas they well know that the Church of England doth as much respect tradition when it is agreed upon as all evidence must be that is submitted to and requires as much subjection to authority and leaves as little to the private fancy and imagination of men and pays as much reverence to the primitive Fathers where they concur together in opinion as the Church of Rome doth but denies any subjection to that Church and believes that her own children with others she meddles not should have the same reverence for her determinations as those others have for the Roman since her determinations are made with as much regularity as lawful authority and with the unanimous advice of as learned men as by the others of which we shall say more in the conclusion of this discourse If Mr. Cressy was not very confident that all for whom he writes will confidently believe all he says and had not a marvellous contempt of all other persons he would not so positively say That when examination is made of miracles in order to the Canonization of any Saint the testimony of women will not be received pag. 68. and gives the reason for it because naturally imagination is stronger in them than judgment and whatsoever is esteemed by them to be pious is easily concluded by them to be true which may likewise be the reason that his beloved Sancta Sophia is so much valued by women and his Miracles so much believed by them only and neither the one or the other in any degree regarded by any learned men of the Roman Church But his averment that the testimony of women is rejected in those cases is without any ground Was not the single testimony of the Nurse the only evidence of the first miracle that was wrought by his adored S. Benedict in the mending the Sieve or putting together the broken pieces of the Earthen pot If he were much conversant in the acts of Canonization as he ought to be before he publishes the Rules observed there he would have found that the seventh miracle wrought by Philip Nereus the Founder of the order of the Oratorians for which he was Canonized was that he cured diseases oftentimes by his word as particularly in the case of Maria Felici à Castro in Monasterio Turris speculorum Moniali quae continua febri correpta Philippo jubente statim convaluit And his eighth was that he cured many sick people meerly by his apparition Ac Drusilla Fantina quae praecipiti casuprostrata ac horribili capitis oculorum totius corporis collisione semiviva jacens tribus Philippi apparitionibus mirabiliter
liberatur And he would likewise have found in the Canonization of Ignotius Loyala his thirty third miracle is that of Isabella Monialis ord S. Clarae who being threescore and seven years old being in a very high place about business by mischance had a terrible fall to the ground with which she broke her thigh and for above forty days adhibitis per Medicum Chirurgum eventu planè irrito medicamentis and all hope of life being in the judgment of all hopeless and desperate petita tamen pia cum religione impetrata reliquia B. Ignatii super coxendicem applicata statim sana est reddita coxendicem tibiam prius tumentem atque immobilem expedite sine dolore movere coepit die proxima surrexit ac libere perfecte ambulavit Many more of the like instances he will find in the fourth Tome of the great Bullarium and without the evidence of these three women these miracles had been lost which could not but contribute very much to their Canonization Nor was the Testimony of women ever rejected in those cases it is probable for that very reason for which Mr. Cressy seems to think their evidence ought not to be received because imagination is stronger in them than judgment and that whatsoever is esteemed by them to be pious is easily by them concluded to be true and such a Confessor as Mr. Cressy will easily perswade them to believe that many things are pious which he knows not to be true And in truth he hath not answered the weight of the Doctors instance of the visions of S. Bridget and S. Katherine of Syena with all the help that S. Anthony and Cardinal Baronius can give him the last of which apparently believed neither of them and his own addition is much less satisfactory to any discerning person that no Oecumenical Council hath made a Canon with an Anathema against all those who will not acknowledge all the Revelations of S. Bridget to have been divine and the belief of them necessary to salvation and that all that was done by the Council was upon occasion of invectives made against those Revelations by many Catholicks to require Joannes à Turrecremata to peruse and give his judgment of them which being favourable the Council approved them says the Doctor that is says Mr. Cressy freely permitted them to be read as containing nothing contrary to faith and good manners The Councils approbation was much more than that but if it were no more it doth not become the Catholick Church or any National Church to give that countenance to any new opinion that may encourage such a liberty as he says is taken by many writers to decry both the one and the other and introduces animosity and uncharitableness between Christians which hath been notorious enough in this particular And since he confesses that many illusions and fancies have been brought into the Church by pretence of such Revelations by the several Sects and Persons named by the Doctor as the Sects of Mendicants the Authors of the Evangelium aeternum and the rest all or most of which did find countenance and exceedingly disturb the peace of the Church and who Mr. Cressy confesses were Monsters raised up by the Devil in a cursed imitation of the graces and gifts communicated by God to his devout and faithful servants There cannot be too much vigilance in shutting all doors at which such illusions may enter and no body is to be blamed who is most jealous of their integrity We come in the next place to his fifth Chapter of resisting authority falsly imputed he says to Catholick Religion in which he says the Doctor doth very ingeniously absolve the Catholick Church her self and lays the fault only on the principles and practices of the Iesuitical party Indeed the Doctor cannot but absolve the Catholick Church from that reproach except he thought all Christian Churches liable to it but he is far from absolving all Catholicks of the Roman Church from rebellion excepting only the Iesuits though he instances most in them because the books which most defend it have been written by those of that Society but nothing can be stranger than that Mr. Cressy should so magnifie the general obedience of all Roman Catholicks that none of them were ever in rebellion against the King or his Father when he knows very well and hath some marks of it that the whole Irish Nation very few persons of honour excepted joyned in rebellion against the King and but for that rebellion neither Presbyterian Independant or Anabaptist had been able to have done any harm in England For the Scots rebellion was totally suppressed and their Army disbanded before the Irish rebellion begun It was that which produced all the mischief that succeeded in England and gave those Sects in Religion opportunity to bring in their confusion to the destruction of the Church and State with such barbarous circumstances as are too horrible to repeat though they can never be forgotten Was not that Rebellion begun and carried on intirely by the Kings Roman Catholick subjects Was there one man but Catholicks who concurred in it and did they pretend any other cause for it but Religion at least when they had the satisfaction they desired in whatsoever else they pretended did they not continue it still under pretence of Religion Was not the secular and regular Clergy equally engaged to support it And did not the Pope himself contribute to it if not contrive it And was not himself in the person of his Nuntio Rinnuccini General of the Rebels both by Sea and Land And can there be a greater manifestation that the Catholick Roman Religion it self favoured rebellion than when their head of their Church and all Ecclesiastical Orders joyned and concurred in it And it it cannot but be observed that though the Irish for ought appears only carried on or were active in that Rebellion there was not any English Catholick that made any publick profession against it nor did one English Priest Secular or Regular manifest his detestation or dislike of it by any publick writing And how much they favoured it in private discourse there wants not abundant evidence All which should be forgotten as it is forgiven before there be such loud Encomiums published of the never-failing obedience of the Romish Catholicks and the Records of later rebellions in France as well as those of the League should be razed out It is to be wished rather than hoped that the profession of Christian Religion in any Church had that impulsion in it as it ought to have that it preserved the professors of it from entring into rebellion and the practice of any other iniquity Yet it may be truly said that there were very few who did so much as pretend to have a reverence for the Church of England that were ever active in the late rebellion How far the fear and consternation men were in forced them to submit to
that torrent which over-bore them ought not to be imputed since it over whelmed multitudes of all professions who heartily abhorred those that they were compelled to obey It is a great instance of Mr. Cressy's good temper if it be of his sincerity that he is so solicitous to purge the Iesuits from the imputations which are more particularly cast on them I believe they did not expect it from him who is not thought to agree with them in all which they account fundamental Yet truly the excuse he makes for them is such as if he invited men to keep up their prejudice against them That for asmuch as concerns the unsafe Antimonarchical doctrine contained in those books cited by the Doctor it is almost a whole Age since that they have been by their General forbidden under pain of Excommunication and other most grievous censures to justifie them either in writing preaching or disputing c. Mr. Cressy speaks much of retractation and says well That they who by writing or otherwise have published scandalous doctrine which hath corrupted other men do not do their duty in being silent and giving over to do that which will be no longer safe for them to do but that recantation and retractation is necessary that they may be known to be no longer of the samc mind Is there any man of the society that hath written against that Anti-monarchical doctrine who hath endeavoured to confute Cardinal Bellarmine or Mariana or Emanuel Sa or any of the rest Is not Bellarmine's book of the power of the Pope over Kings are not all the other books to be bought at every Stationers shop Who knows any thing of the Generals warrants but themselves It was known to and permitted by the Pope that is the Pope was willing when their books were out that they should be quiet and write no more which would excuse them for not answering those books which Catholicks as well as Protestants should write against them and that they might not enter into dispute with the Colledge of Sorbon which detested their Principles He says It is well known that in this point Princes and States are generally become more clear-sighted and more wise than formerly they have been and by consequence the Court of Rome also It is indeed well known that the Court of Rome adheres still to its own principles though they do not think fit to put Princes in mind what they are well knowing that all their Bulls and Interdictions and Absolutions how long soever since published are still in the same force and vigour as they were the first hour of their publication and it is very few years since that upon an occasion of some consultation between the secular and regular Clergy of Ireland to present an address to the King in testimony of their obedience in which they disclaimed any temporal authority to be in the Pope the Court of Rome was so alarm'd by it that Cardinal Barberine writ to them to desist from any such Declaration and put them in mind that the Kingdom of England was still under Excommunication and since that time the Pope hath made many Bishops in Ireland which his predecessors had forborn to do from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the year One thousand Six hundred and Forty and this is the clear-sightedness and wisdom that the Court of Rome is lately improved in But he doth assure you that if an oath were framed free from ambiguity and without odious phrases inserted in it wholly unnecessary to the substance of it the Iesuits would not make any scruple of joyning with their Catholick brethren in it Alas what authority hath he to assure us this He knows very well that the Society will not trust him to frame such Oath and that they and he differ very much in their judgments in that point and of all men Mr. Cressy is the most unfit for such an undertaking He cannot forget that shortly after he deserted the Church of England and published his Exomologesis which in comparison of all that he hath writ since may be looked upon as a modest Book he did in that Book publish a protestation or subscription which all the Roman Catholicks in England would be willing to take and in truth it did not differ much in substance or sence from the Oaths which are enjoyned by the Law and no doubt he would have taken it himself and did then believe that all other Catholicks might have taken it likewise But within a short time all that impression of that Book was bought up or otherwise procured and a second Edition of it published wherein there were very many substantial alterations and additions from what was in the former the protestation of duty and obedience which was in the first was totally left out in the second impression it being not thought a fit obligation for the Catholicks to enter into The discourse he had made of Purgatory was likewise left out for he had mistaken the tenent of his new Church in that particular Many other alterations were made as must be confessed by any man who will take the pains to examine both Editions There were also many additions especially of reproaches against the Church of England and many bitter and virulent expressions against the Clergy of that Church And I know a person who meeting with Mr. Cressy expostulated with him upon all those particulars and asked him how it came to pass that those were left out when his Book had been first licensed by Dr. Holden and another Doctor of the Sorbon and why the other calumnies were added which so much reflected upon the Clergy contrary to what in his own Conscience he knew was true to all which he answered with passionate protestations that he never knew of one or the other till he saw the second impression that his Superiours were offended with the first in which there were some mistakes and that he had intirely left it to their discretions to do what they should think fit upon it whereupon they had caused it to be reprinted as it now stood without at all communicating with him which it seems being a custom amongst them gives me yet some hope that the very unusual passion and incivility that runs through this discourse may be added by the appointment and direction of some Superiour Since he is not so much altered in his face or habit from what he was when he was thirty years of Age as he is from that modesty and gentleness of nature and smoothness and civility of stile if all the expressions in his Book are his own from the time I knew him and had conversation with him But he finds it much easier to revile than answer any Books the Doctor hath writ in any time Nor can his opinion be doubted of the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy both which he hath often taken and as often declared his detestation of the Covenant which Mr. Cressy will never be able to prove he ever
took And if he had it could not be wondered at since by the age he was of when he published his Book in defence of Archbishop Laud which some who knew it well assured me to be but twenty eight years I cannot suppose him to be when the Covenant was first appointed to be administred to all Scholars in the Universities above the age of thirteen years if so much and cannot be conceived to be at all instructed in the principles of the Church of England which had been long before that discountenanced and suppressed And no body doubts but that there are very many reverend and learned persons who have now great and unquestionable affection and zeal for that Church who did in their minority and under that accursed and tyrannical Government take that lewd Covenant and whose affection and zeal is not the less for having taken it But of all men it least becomes Mr. Cressy to put them in mind of the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy when himself broke from the obligations of them and his own subscription though he was near if not full forty years of age when he last repeated those obligations and himself acknowledges that the Doctor had the courage even in those ill times to write against all the Religions which were then professed and countenanced in his Ironicon that he is so angry with And I do profess that I am not of the Doctor 's mind in all things which he says in that Book yet as Mr. Cressy will never undertake to confute it so I am not sorry that no body else hath gone about to answer it I will not accompany Mr. Cressy in his uncharitable passion which every expression how lawful soever that he dislikes kindles in him by treating others as he doth Archbishop Cranmer whose memory will be preserved as of a most worthy Prelate and glorious Martyr notwithstanding the foul imputations he is pleased to cast upon him Yet I must tell him that if that unhappy and ill advised Queen who had just reason to be offended highly with that Archbishop could have found that the Law would have condemned him for Treason she rather desired to have had him hanged for a Traitor than to have him burned for his Religion since she wanted not other instances enough of her severity in that kind But the Law would not extend to serve her turn that way if it would no body would have blamed her for having prosecuted him with the utmost rigour whereas many good men then did and since have for proceeding the other way with him It is not new to find those who have been adjudged Traitors by the Law of the Land looked upon in his Church as Martyrs which he well knows is the case of some who were executed for the Gunpowder Treason But he will answer that is no act of the Church which hath never declared them Martyrs it may be so and it is as true that the Church hath in some times Canonized those who were by Law known to be guilty of High Treason though not executed for it as Saints for whoever understands the Law as it was in those days cannot doubt but that Thomas Becket was guilty of High Treason and might legally have been proceeded against for it as he was condemned afterwards for it though the assassination of him was in no degree warrantable or to be excused Many other examples of the same kind may be given however it is a very sorry exception that Mr. Cressy takes to Cranmer's subscription of his opinion that he remits the judgment thereof wholly to the King So says he a final judgment both touching Government and Doctrine is by the prime Bishop referred to a King of about nine years old a great glory surely to the English Which is a suggestion below the wisdom and experience of Mr. Cressy who cannot but know that in all Kingdoms hereditary that the King is not less King for being but nine years of age and that all sentences and judgments are as much referred to him then as when he is at full age and the transactions are concluded in the same method and formality as they would be then As that opinion of the Archbishop was considered by the Privy Council and whatsoever was done afterwards which was not in all particulars agreeable to that opinion was concluded by the Parliament Nor is he much graver in his Comical discourse of the Kings Title of being Supreme Governour of the Church of England for he knows that head is not in the title though if it were it would be of no other signification that the King may thereby ordain Bishops and Priests himself which he well knows the Crown always disclaims and the Church never admitted but knows very well that the King hath as much authority to appoint and authorize those who shall do both within his own dominions as the Pope who doth neither with his own hands hath in his own Territories or others where by the consent of the Princes he hath that jurisdiction I shall say nothing in defence of the Hugonots of France of whose communion I do not profess my self to be they are of age let them speak for themselves yet I may say that I do not comprehend how their Confession of faith obliges them to be Traitors and Rebels whensoever the honour of God which he says is the defence of their execrable Religion is concerned and it cannot be denied that there have been many rebellions in France by the Catholicks since there have been any in which the Hugonots joyned who for these many years have given great testimony of their signal affection and fidelity to the King and when they were known to have temptations which many Catholicks did not resist And Mr. Cressy knows that there are many very learned men amongst them whose lives are not reproachable and whose writings for the learning contained in them and the modesty with which they are represented are thought worthy to be answered by the reverend Bishops themselves and other eminent and learned Catholicks who are contented to answer their Arguments and their Allegations with all possible candor and condescension and without any bitterness of language and therefore I cannot but lament on the behalf of our Nation and our manners and of the English tongue that the good spirit of France and the urbanity that is there used in handling Controversies in Religion hath not made greater impression upon Mr. Cressy who hath lived so many years amongst them as might well have disposed him to have followed their example and might have convinced him that rudeness of stile and impetuosity of words in contradictions of the highest importance which can relate to Religion are not essential to the being a good Catholick and since he urges the great liberty the Hugonots enjoy joy in France as an argument against the severity he will call it by a worse name of the Laws of his Country which forbid any exercise of the
Romish Religion in that Kingdom he will not take it ill that I put him in mind that as the Hugonots have great obligations to his most Christian Majesty their true and lawful King for his clemency and justice towards them in defending and protecting them in the enjoyment and possession of all those rights priviledges and immunities which are granted to them by the Law of the Land so they do enjoy no more liberty than by that Law is due nor can it be taken from them without a bare-faced violation of the Law which is of no more force to defend the Subjects in their other possessions than it is to defend the Hugonots in the exercise of their Religion and yet with all this right and legal title to protection no Hugonot in France dares revile the Bishops or the Magistrate much less the Religion that is established there nor mention the Laws without reverence or do any thing that is scandalous to the government or that is not allowed by the Law whereas a Benedictine Monk who by being so hath renounced his subjection to his King by chusing other Superiors for himself with obedience to whom his obedience to the King is inconsistent who hath deserted the Religion and the Church in which he hath been educated and to which he hath vowed subjection and in that respect cannot but be less acceptable than those who have never been subject to it who is so obnoxious to the Laws that he cannot securely live one day or set his foot in England notwithstanding all which this man hath the courage to enter into it publickly to defie the Laws traduce the Government treat the Bishops and the reverend Clergy and the Christian Religion that is established there by Law and all the professors of it with those scoffs and derision and contempt as if they were Turks and Pagans and if he had a warrantable mission to convert them would not yet in common prudence and discretion become him and seems contrary to any good and Christian intention and all this while in his triumphant stile as if he had subdued all Protestant Churches he complains lamentably of the cruel persecution against Catholicks God be thanked the King hath many good Catholick subjects of another temper of spirit who with all duty acknowledge the goodness and indulgence of the King in permitting them to live with that ease and security that they have enjoyed from the time of his Majesties blessed restoration without any distinction between them and any other of his subjects and desire nothing more than the continuance of the same ease and protection and take care to provide and warily entertain Confessors of the same humble and grateful spirit Is there one Roman Catholick in England of the Laity or the Clergy that hath suffered in the least degree in his Person or his Estate for being a Roman Catholick whether many have not gotten by it who would not have been considered under any other title many men do doubt since the time of his Majesties blessed restoration Did they ever enjoy the like tranquillity for a quarter of that time since the Reformation The King looked upon many of them as persons who had deserved well from his blessed Father and himself which cannot be denied and upon the rest as good subjects and upon all of them as men who had suffered with him if not for him in the late barbarous times of Usurpation His Majesty graciously remembred the humanity he had found in many Catholick Countries and from some Catholick Princes who always besought him not to be severe to his Catholick subjects when God should restore them to his protection and it was not agreeable to the gentleness and clemency of his Majesties nature when he pardoned all the breach and contempt and violation of the Laws almost to the highest and foulest transgressors upon his arrival to awaken those Laws for the destruction of his poor Catholick subjects which upon the matter had slept even in that season of Tyranny though a more arbitrary power had been exercised for their ruine as well as for theirs who had been most active and faithful to him And the whole Nation was as well content with that his Majesties lenity and did not think it reasonable that the general and universal joy which filled the hearts of all men with the blessing of the Kings return should be eclipsed or interrupted by the tears and sighs of their Roman Catholick neighbours and that they who had born their full share in the late persecutions should undergo new vexations by the exacting those penalties which they were liable to by Laws which had been necessary to be provided against them in times wherein there was more cause to be jealous of them than they hoped there was or would be hereafter This cannot be denied to be the case of the Roman Catholicks in England for many years after the Kings return until the rude and boisterous behaviour of some of them disturbed the happy calm they all enjoyed and the vanity and folly of others made that ill use of the Kings bounty and generosity towards them that they endeavoured to make it believed that it proceeded not from charity and compassion towards their persons but from affection to their Religion and took upon them to reproach the Church of England and all who adhered to it as if they had been in a condition as well as a disposition to oppress it and to affront and discountenance all who would adhere to it and so alienated the affections of those who desired they should not be disquieted and kindled a jealousie in others who had believed that they were neither able or willing to disturb the publick peace to think that they were willing to attempt it and had more power to compass it than was discerned This hath changed the face of that affair and even compelled his Majesty to with-draw that countenance from them that he was willing should have been more propitious to them if they had known how modestly and innocently to have been happy under the shadow of it and this mischief the wisest and the soberest Catholicks of England have long foreseen would be the effect of that petulant and unruly spirit that swayed too much amongst them and did all they could to restrain it and Mr. Cressy shall do well to revolve how much he hath contributed to this storm which seems to have a little shaken the repose they were in and to take heed that the Catholicks of England may not undergo more prejudice from the distempered carriage and behaviour of him and two or three more for no body is incensed against those who with gravity and sobriety defend and maintain the Religion they profess who have contracted a scurrilous stile that hath been long laid aside and declined in such debates to exalt themselves in against the Religion of the Kingdom and those who are obliged to defend it than could be brought upon them by any
combination of the Presbyterians and Independants whom they do likewise as unskilfully to their purpose irreconcile to them as if they could subdue the whole Kingdom and so care not whom they provoke If the noise and clamour and evil-speaking of these men do awaken the sleeping Laws to take that vengeance upon them that they were ordained for and which yet remain in that drowzy posture that their own modesty may reduce them to the manners of Gentlemen and Subjects or if the Kings mercy continue as obstinate toward them as their guilt and provocation so that he thinks fit still to abate the sharp edge of the Laws towards them in which very few men wish his Majestie less merciful there are still other Laws which the dignity of his Government will not suffer him to restrain and which are provided to vindicate those who do their duty from the extravagant passions and insolence of those who observe no rules of good behaviour and of peaceable conversation And what may be inflicted upon them of this kind will be unpitied by all good Catholicks and will never be thought a persecution of their Religion and it may be their Superiours at least upon their observation to what ill use they put their tongues may exact from them that silence for cherishing whereof their Order was first instituted and hereafter only imploy such in their missions as may return to them again without doing them any harm or bringing prejudice to the Religion they profess Mr. Cressy thinks he hath a wonderful advantage against the Church of England because he says he can find no religious Orders in it he cannot hear so much as of one single person whom he might call a Fanatick for leaving the flesh and the world to the end he or she might intirely consecrate themselves to God in solitude and exercises of spiritual prayer and mortification and if God should call any one to such a state of life there is an utter want amongst them of instructors or instructions proper for it I will not enter into any discourse of the benefits or inconveniences or ill uses which are too often made of those Monasteries and Religious houses of the He 's and the She 's I have nothing to say against them nor do I doubt that there are amongst them many persons of great learning and vertue and therefore I shall say no more but that most Catholick Kingdoms think the number of them too great and frequently forbid the erecting more of them and the Popes themselves have done the like in Italy and have dissolved many of them but I may say which is as much as is necessary to say that we have no cause to lament the absence of them in England since any defects which arise by the want of them is so abundantly provided by the noble Colledges in both the Universities and the great Free-Schools all so plentifully endowed not only for the good education of Youth in all principles of vertue piety and good literature but for the support of them after they are bred in the improvement of their parts for the service of the Church and of their Country insomuch that it may be truly said that more Scholars are liberally maintained upon the sole charge and charity of the several Founders and greater emoluments assigned for the encouragement of learning in England than can be said of any Kingdom in Europe how much larger and richer soever and I believe the Common-wealth of Learning in all other parts doth think and with great reason that all kinds of Learning are at this day in as great a heighth and perfection as they have been in any age in any Kingdom of the world and Mr. Cressy cannot forget though he doth not care to acknowledge that himself had his education in a Religious house founded by Walter Merton where he received a much more liberal and bountiful education and support than he hath ever had from S. Benedict and from whence he brought more learning than he hath found in any other place that he hath since inhabited or I doubt than he hath yet about him In this Religious house where I think he lived as many years as he hath done since under a worse discipline he had opportunity and obligation to consecrate himself to God in as much solitude as would contribute thereunto and to exercises of spiritual Prayer and mortification He was as much bound to chastity and to all kind of temperance as the severe Rules and Statutes of a magnificent Founder could oblige him and which he was likewise sworn to observe And I believe he under went as severe and a much more beneficial Novitiate there in which silence likewise was a part of the mortification as he did afterwards at Douay for I saw him in both those It is very true there and in all other Colledges if they found that the obligations they were under were stricter than they could submit to they are at liberty to quit those benefits their Founder hath bequeathed them and to dispose of themselves according to their inclinations otherwise they may enjoy the other to their lives end as very many do who prefer that solitude before the pleasures of the world It is very true that the Church and State of England did by observation and experience find that vows did not make people chast who would not be restrained by conscience of their duty to God and that those actions were not worthy the name of vertue and piety I speak still only of our own Country which were the effects of force and want of opportunity to decline them In a word the practice they had too much testimony and evidence of made them conclude that the mischief from those inclosures constraints and vows was greater and more apparent than the benefit and advantage and so they thought not fit to restrain that liberty which God and Nature did allow to all those persons who would decline the profit of those Communities in which they were possessed of them and betake themselves to another condition of life And I doubt not but Mr. Cressy knows that many learned Catholicks have always been and still are very averse to those vows and inclosures of Women which seems not to be much favoured by the Church it self the constitutions whereof require a greater number of years than are now required before they receive the vail and whether the scandalous lives of many Religious men abroad brings not a greater prejudice to the Religion they profess than their habit and vows brings honour to it I leave to his observation The other defect he finds in our Church of want of instructors and instructions for those in case God should call any one to such a state of life in solitude and exercises of spiritual prayer and mortification is yet more strange Without doubt if God doth in truth call any one to such a state of life he will not leave him destitute of instruction and
instructors and he may be very confident if he finds neither of those that God hath not called him Sure Mr. Cressy cannot forget the names of very many persons it may be both men and women with whom and in whose conversation he had the honour and the happiness to spend many years of the most innocent part of his life from whose grave and learned information and excellent example he might have led a life more useful to God his Country and himself and in which he would have had less to answer to all three than that which he hath since by worse counsel and example given himself unhappily to And for Books I shall not supply his Catalogue with the names of many more of the same kind which he might as well have mentioned but I shall put him in mind of the excellent pious and devout Sermons which are constantly preached in that Church much better I believe than he hath heard in any other language and there was no restraint upon him but if he had liked other Books of devotion better he might have read the life of Mother Teresa that abounds in those visions he admires and that mystical Theology he delights in and even his own Sancta Sophia if any other man would have taken the pains to have put it together in that Colledge he was bred in with the same liberty he hath done either ever since sure good Books are not wanting in that climate For Miracles whereof he says we do not pretend to one not so much as the curing a Tertian Ague to testifie that our Reformation is pleasing to God I shall say no more than I have done We have not many to boast of and very good Catholicks think they boast of too many and would be glad to be without the mention of most of them and I do believe that very many pious men of his Church do believe that the restoration of the Church of England from that dust and ruines to which the barbarity impiety and sacriledge of the late rebellion had exposed it and in which the Roman Catholicks his Majesties own subjects more delighted and triumphed to see it almost buried than any other Catholicks did is a greater miracle of Gods mercy and power and if we make our selves worthy of it even a testimony of his being pleased with it then all those of which they brag so much are an evidence that he is pleased with what they do I have never had the luck to see his Church History which he is offended with the Doctor for stiling a great Legend which he knows is the stile given to those Collections in all Languages and he challenges the Doctor more scornfully to give to the world a pretty little legend of his reformed Saints The Doctor could very well have given him as large a list of as extraordinary persons of most profound learning and most exemplary lives of the Church of England since the Reformation as any other Christian Kingdom can supply him who it may lawfully be presumed since their deaths have enjoyed those sacred mansions of bliss which God hath prepared for those who please him but we are not ashamed that our Church is too modest to confer the sacred title of Saints which God hath reserved to his own only disposal for them to whom he had before assigned such a proportion of grace as is answerable to that high station and doth not receive the advice nor communicate the power in that particular of or to any person or jurisdiction upon Earth yet it shall be glad and doth pray that all such whom the Church of Rome hath presumed to call to that honour without any ambition or privity of their own may really enjoy the same And we do not in the least degree apprehend the displeasure of God Almighty upon our Church because it doth with all humility and after all possible endeavour to be capable of his favours leave the disposal of all the places and offices and imployments in his own house to his own gracious will and pleasure And though we do not pretend to know so much of their modern Saints as to think that they were of the same Religion with us Yet we do presume to say that the primitive Saints and Martyrs were all as much our Saints and Martyrs as theirs that is that we are as much of the same faith with those as they are We are as firm in the Apostles faith who were the first Saints and Martyrs of Christ as they can pretend to be We adhere as much to all the doctrine they taught and endeavour to practise all the duties which are enjoyned by them as sincerely and diligently as they do During the twelve persecutions which were the times when those prodigious Armies of Martyrs for their numbers were levied it may lawfully be presumed that very much the major part of them for those persecutions raged much more furiously in the East than in any part of Europe never heard of the Church of Rome none of them professed to have any opinion in which we differ from them The first and only subject of their Martyrdom was that they loudly avowed the birth passion and resurrection of our Saviour and their peremptory refusal to offer sacrifice to or to acknowledge the power of the Pagan Gods and the last would have excused them and preserved their lives whatsoever they had thought of the other so that there was no other point of controversie in issue but whether they were Christians and their marvellous and without doubt divine courage in affirming that and asserting that doctrine so soon after they were informed of it and before they were acquainted with any other operation of it than in their courage to lay down their lives for it was the whole ground and merit of their Martyrdom For according to the best evidence we have of those dark times and of that darker affair we may reasonably believe that many thousands of those blessed Martyrs lost their lives within a day an hour or less time according as the wild and brutish rage of the Iudge could find ways for their torture and execution after the moment of their conversion in which the spirit and zeal of the new Christians to die for their faith was little more stupendious than the implacable rage of their persecutors was in the vindication of the honour of their Pagan Gods for which the husband condemned his wife the father his son the brother his brother and all relations those who were nearest and dearest to them to the most exquisite torments that could be devised Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum How the Church of Rome comes to ingross all these Saints and Martyrs to themselves as their peculiar Patrons and Advocates an evidence cannot easily be comprehended except they conclude the because they have a power to make or to declare Saints they have likewise a power to appoint them what they shall do after they are Saints which
is a species of Logick they make often use of to many purposes For our parts we have as much reason to be confident of all the good offices they can do us in Heaven as the others are but because we do not know what their province there is or whether there be such a line of communication that they know what we would have them to do for us we acquiesce in a profound veneration of their lives and of their deaths and a full confidence that they do enjoy the reward of both without importuning them by any particular address of our own in our behalf having an assurance in our selves that they will do us all the good they can though our ignorance knows not how to ask it from them and this is all that our Church informs or instructs us of our duty and behaviour to Saints And Mr. Cressy will not take it ill that I tell him if his Church History consists in the lives of any Welch Saints and Martyrs or of those who were before the year six hundred as there were many more before than there were after he cannot reckon those to belong to the Church of Rome since he well knows that before the arrival of Austin the Monk in England there had never been mention there of the Bishop of Rome but most of the Christians had been long before driven into Wales by the tyranny and power of the Pagan Saxons who spent their time more profitably by subduing the other parts of the Kingdom than they could have done by pursuing them into those mountains and narrow retreats where they could better have defended themselves So that the British Christians remained for some time in some quiet in those parts and lived under the direction of their Bishops and Prelates in the exercise of the Christian Religion according to the institutions which they had received from their first Planters and after Austin came into this Island with a worthy and no doubt a very pious intention and God blessed him so much that he converted a Pagan King and most of his subjects who were at that time only they who lived within the circuit of Kent which opened a door to him and those who succeeded him for a larger conversion for which his and their name ought always to be mentioned with reverence and gratitude as blessed instruments God used for the good of the Nation though they were not the first Planters of Christianity in the Island as Mr. Cressy well knows and that when Austin desired to confer with the British Christians and had two several meetings with their Bishops and Prelates they were so much offended with the proposition he made to them of their subjection to the Pope that they did not only positively reject that but would not consent to change the course of their observation of Easter in which they had always concurred with the Eastern Christians nor yield to any thing else that he proposed left they might be thought to have any respect for the Pope So that I say if his Saints are before the year six hundred he hath no claim to them but must either be content to be without their merits and miracles or that we may have an equal share with him upon our joynt stock of Christianity and I hope he hath not in his History inserted the lives or miracles of any which have been left out as exploded upon the reformation of more ancient Legends Methinks Mr. Cressy seems to imitate the example of angry women who think it lawful to give worse words than they receive which is the natural progress of choler he provokes first the Doctor by reproaching him with the number of Fanaticks amongst us to tell him that there is Fanaticism likewise in many of their Church and so mentions the Visions and Revelations and Miracles in many persons of great esteem amongst them and by those pertinent instances puts him into great wrath and he again to be revenged on him will no longer be contented that we have too many Fanaticks in the Church but will prove that the very nature and essence of our Church it self and our Religion is pure putid-Fanaticism A man would have expected upon this undertaking that he should presently have singled one of the Articles of the Church that is so founded but that would have held him too much to the point and restrained him from those wandrings with which he is so delighted that would withhold him from falling upon the person of the Doctor or upon the Presbyterians and Independents with whom no body can blame him for being angry for they drove him from the Church by driving him from his preferments in the Church And from this charge upon the Church without any one instance he falls again upon the Presbyterians and Hugonots of France and reckons up some of the opinions they hold and maintain and then says pag. 94. That he must take the boldness to tell him a great boldness indeed that the Doctor himself does hold the same and if he denies it it is because he is ignorant of what passes in his own mind Now the Doctor must be lost for if his own denial cannot absolve him from being concluded to be of an opinion and Mr. Cressy knows better of that which the Doctors ignorance keeps him from discerning of what passes in his own mind he is to blame if he doth not lade him with all opinions which he wishes he would own But to prove this intricate averment like a great Magistrate he takes upon him to administer many questions to him and kindly to make answer to them on his behalf and so makes him as arrant a Fanatick as he can wish Yet after all this he is compelled to confess with perhaps That it would be rashness in him to affirm that the Church of England doth ground her faith upon such a Fanatick principle as the Doctor lays and if the Doctor wrongs the Church of England he good man is unwilling to wrong her with him And in this fit of good nature he makes a kind of an Apology for the Bishops who may be deceived themselves in the Doctors principles by the negligence that is used in licensing Books to the Press or rather the Doctors virulence against poor Catholicks was so highly approved by the grave Censor Librorum that rather than it should be hindred from doing mischief to them he was content that the Principles also should pass which utterly destroy the foundations of his own Church and so concludes with some instances of the perfunctory care that is taken in the licensing Books The Church of England cannot but be now secure when a Benedictine Mark is so vigilant as to stand Sentinel that she may receive no prejudice from her own Children and he doth very well to put the Bishops in mind that they may be more solicitous what Books are suffered to be printed who have no less obligation upon them to look that no
lewd seditious Books are sold as that none such may be printed And if this kind advertisement of Mr. Cressy hath that operation upon the Magistrates of all sorts both the Printers and Sellers and it may be the Buyers of the multitude of Popish Books which are every day vented with as much freedom as the Book of Common-Prayer they of his own Religion will have new cause to celebrate his prudence and acknowledge the great advantage he hath brought to their cause by his pen as he hath to their persons by his modesty and his manners Mr. Cressy comes at last after very much passion and much more virulence against the poor Protestants than the Doctor hath expressed against the Roman Catholicks to a matter of importance indeed in which he believes which might have kept him from triumphing so soon he is absolute master of the field and that is to peace and unity which he says is more fit to be the subject and argument of writings composed by Ecclesiastical persons that is unity of faith and doctrine pag. 102. and in truth whoever is really an enemy even to that unity of faith and doctrine how hard soever to be attained must be an enemy to mankind but I must tell him too that the writings of Ecclesiastical persons have not hitherto in any age contributed to the production of that unity I mean such who have a pride petulancy of understanding obstinacy of will that will suffer nothing to be called peace and unity but a prostration of all other men to their dictates Mr. Cressy and his Ecclesiastical Friends affect and insolently prescribe a unity that is neither practicable nor desirable and there are other Ecclesiastical persons as humorous who are such enemies to unity that they think it not necessary to peace especially in Ecclesiastical matters that is in matters of Religion all men may think and speak and do what they please and upon the irrationality of these last the former impute all the folly and all the madness that would introduce the most uncontroulable confusion to those who observe order and discipline with more regularity and obedience than any of the pretenders will do It must not therefore be the Ecclesiastical persons who have given each other too ill words to be of one mind who can procure this unity of faith and doctrine that must constitute this peace but it must be the writings and actions of Magistrates who by the execution of those Laws and rules which the wisdom of the State for which they are made have provided for that purpose can infallibly establish that unity and peace that is necessary for it Magistrates who do not pretend any jurisdiction out of their own limits nor will suffer those who live within it to be disobedient much less to revile the Laws which are provided for the publick peace Where there are no Laws confusion is necessary and natural and where the Laws are not executed it is as unavoidable and in some degree necessary So that where unity is not as much provided for as is necessary for peace it is the Magistrates fault and not the fault of Ecclesiasticks who can only prosecute it by the ways prescribed by the Laws I say where unity is necessary for nothing is more mistaken or more misapplied than this precious word Unity Who doth not know or hath not had it frequently in his observation that men who have the same end affect several ways which lead to that end and he who goes the farthest way about may possibly come sooner to the end than he that believes he goes more directly to it However if he comes thither later he is liable to no other reproach than being laughed at for being longer upon the way than he needed to have been I knew two Gentlemen of good quality and fortunes one of which I think is still living who were very near neighbours in Berkshire and lived in that good correspondence and conversation as persons of quality and authority in their Country use to do they had both very frequent occasions to ride to London and the house of one of them was the confessed way of the other thither but the difference was whether from thence the nearest way was by Windsor or by Maidenhead and in that they were so great Opiniators that they still parted at the door and one took the one way and the other that which he conceived to be nearest and in twenty years they never made the journey together How light soever the instance seems to be it will be found fit enough to be applied to very many differences of opinion which by the excess of fancy on the one side and the defect of judgment of the other are blown up into a magnitude that dazles the eyes of too many spectators and for the determination of the rest there wants not a submission and obedience to authority the difference only is where that authority is placed to which obedience ought to be paid We of the Church of England hold ours to be due to the King the Church and the Law Mr. Cressy would have us pay it to the Pope which we cannot submit to not because he is fallible but because he is not a Magistrate who hath any jurisdiction over us In matters that concern Religion we resort to the Articles of the Church which we are obliged to conform to He would have us observe the Canons of the Council of Trent which we are forbidden to do and he as an English Catholick is not bound to upon which we shall enlarge hereafter and this election to believe that the Church of England which flourishes at least as much in learned and pious men as any Church of the world can better direct English-men in the way to Heaven than the Church of Rome is the greatest use we make of our reason which is not like to deceive What that union is that was intended certainly by our Saviour when he left his Church established under spiritual Governours will best appear by the rules he prescribed and the directions he gave in order thereunto which we may lawfully believe he never intended for such a unity as Mr. Cressy and his friends dream of and that he foresaw the same could never be and depended more upon what was necessary towards it upon the civil Magistrates than upon the Ecclesiastical power He prescribed the essential principles himself of that Religion which he intended should be established and left persons trusted by him who not only knew his mind but knew all things which are necessary to be known for the accomplishment of it And no temporal or spiritual authority under Heaven hath power to alter any thing that was setled by him or his Apostles who were the only Commentators intrusted by him to explain whatsoever might seem doubtful in what himself had said and they performed their parts with that plainness in what is necessary that there remains no difficulty to men
in sancta Romana Ecclesia atque altera in Galliarum tenetur Respondet Gregorius Papa Novit fraternitas tua Romanae Ecclesiae consuetudinem in qua se nutritam meminit sed mihi placet ut sive in Romana five in Galliarum seu in qualibet Ecclesia aliquid invenisti quod plus omnipotenti Deo posset placere sollicitè eligas in Anglorum Ecclesia quae adhuc ad fidem nova est institutione praecipuâ quae de multis Ecclesiis colligere potuisti infundas non enim pro locis res sed pro bonis rebus loca amanda sunt Ex singulis ergo quibusque Ecclesiis quae pia quae religiosa quae recta sunt elige haec quasi in fasciculum collect a apud Anglorum mentes in consuetudinem depone If Austin had conformed himself to these Instructions it is very probable that he might have had as good success in reconciling the Eritish Church who principally insisted against any deference to the Roman not comprehending any possible reason for such a superiority or if the successors of Gregory had been of his temper and Christian prudence Christendom had been much better united at this day or more innocently separated and unanswerable reasons for the reformation of some errors which had unwarily creeped in or removing some scandals which could not otherwise be kept out would not have been so often rejected upon no other reason than that the Bishop of Rome was not of that opinion nor would whole National Churches because they have with the consent of the Soveraign power removed some error which the other chuses to retain be reviled with the names of Hereticks and Schismaticks and the universal be contracted within the Province of Rome and not be allowed to be members of the Catholick Church because they will not be subject to that of the Roman which would usurp the authority of condemning many more Christians than are contained within the community thereof To make any profession of a willingness to submit mens judgments for the sence of Scripture to a lawful General Council besides that I do not know that there is any difference upon any Text of Scripture that concerns Salvation I confess I take it to be very impertinent and in that respect not very ingenious since it is manifestly impossible for any such Council ever to meet whilst that of Rome challenges the sole power of calling it and pretends to such a Soveraignty in it that nothing must be debated by it but what is proposed by the Pope or his Legats and all Kingdoms or Provinces as well as private persons who will not submit to his Soveraignty shall be excluded from thence under the notion of being Hereticks so that all Protestants must appear as Delinquents to be censured and condemned which would be a strange condition to submit to when no body can compel them to appear but their own Soveraigns Nor can it be called a free Council where all who ought to be looked upon as members of it are not equally free When General Councils were first called all the Christians of the world were one mans subjects who could both compel as many of them as he thought necessary to be present and to obey and submit to whatsoever was determined whereas now there being so many Kings and Princes who have much larger Dominions than the Emperor and are equally Soveraigns in those their Dominions and none of their subjects can appear there without their Soveraigns consent And lastly it being a Catholick Tenent that how numerous soever the convention in Council is and how universal soever the consent is in what is determined the Canons made there are not obligatory to any Kingdom before it be received and submitted to in that Kingdom upon which the Council of Trent is not yet received in France and in many other Catholick Countries and therefore it will be very hard for Mr. Cressy to justifie the defending or urging the authority of that Council in England where it was never received and hath been always rejected And for these reasons it may reasonably be thought morally impossible for any general free Council ever to meet which must grow every day more impossible as the Christian Faith is farther spread and when the whole world is converted as we do not only pray it may but believe it will be it will be very hard for the greatest Geographer to assign a place for the meeting where the Bishops from all parts may reasonably hope to live to be present there and to return from thence with the resolutions of the Councils into his own Country For the Instruments and means of unity which Mr. Cressy says were left by our Lord to his Church for the preservation of unity besides that most of those means are as applicable to the Church of England as to the Church of Rome though none of them in the terms he uses appear to be enjoyned or left by our Saviour let him but prove the Ninth and Tenth That the ordinary authority is established in the Supreme Pastor the Bishop of Rome and that his jurisdiction extends it self to the whole Church c. and in case any Heresies arise or that any Controversies cannot be any otherwise ended he hath authority to determine the points of Catholick truth opposed c. I say let him prove this and he hath no need of any of the other means and I will give him farther this advantage over me that if he can prove that I am obliged to conform my judgment in any thing to the determination of the Pope more than to the determination of the Bishop of S. Iago I will go to Mass with him to morrow and Mr. Cressy himself might be a good Catholick if he had not unwarrantably to say no worse of it subscribed to the Bull of Pius the Fourth which is no obligation by the Council when he submitted to his new Ordination though he were of the same opinion And if that Tenth proposition of his be the doctrine of the Catholick Church the Colledge of Sorbon hath been often to blame in not consenting to it and I know not how the Iansenists in France can be excused for paying not more reverence to the judgment and determination of two Popes upon the five Propositions for Alexander the Seventh confirmed what Innocent the Tenth had first defined nor was the silence that is since submitted to in those particulars an effect of the Popes authority but of the Kings which amounts to little less than a revocation at least a suspension of the Popes Decree The Argument that the Doctor uses from the Tragical miscarriages of Popes is very apposite and convincing to those Propositions which Mr. Cressy would perswade men to believe do establish his personal Supremacy He says that our Saviour hath committed a Supreme jurisdiction to the person of the Bishop of Rome over the whole Church that in case any Heresies arise or any Controversies in causis
that he says is not to be imputed to want of authority in the Pope but to the unruliness of mens passions and pride and I say it serves the Doctor 's turn if his authority be not such as can curb and suppress the unruliness of the passions and pride of his own Subjects He will not understand how the Doctor can say that the Church of England makes no Articles of Faith but such as have testimony and approbation of the whole Christian World of all Ages and are acknowledged to be such by Rome it self and in other things she requires subscription to them not as Articles of Faith but as inferiour truths which she expects submission to in order to her peace and tranquillity Mr. Cressy is the only man alive that can find obscurity in this clause and I confess his exception to it is so obscure that I will rather rely upon the Readers understanding of the most exact plainness of it than inlarge my self in any explanation and I wish that he could say as much for the Church of Rome that it makes no Article of Faith but such as have the testimony and approbation of the whole Christian World of all Ages our complaint is that he multiplies articles of faith to that degree that he will not suffer us to be saved for believing all that most Christians believed for a thousand years together without the least doubt of their Salvation nor will he yet let us know the full extent he would have our faith reach to for we are no less obliged to submit to what he or his Successors shall declare hereafter to be matter of faith than to what is at present contained in the whole Canons of the Council of Trent which makes it absolutely necessary for the peace of Conscience as well as the peace of Kingdoms to protest against and as far as in us lies to restrain that exorbitant authority but of all arguments it is a most pleasant one that if the Church of England believes nothing as of faith but what the Popes and Church of Rome do likewise believe Therefore it follows that the Church of Rome notwithstanding its Idolatry Fanaticisme c. failes in no necessary point of faith which would be true if it added nothing to that confessed faith that must destroy it He then involves himself in his old circle of the Churches authority and of that Churches being the Church of Rome and of the residence of that authority being in the Person of the Pope which whosoever refuses to submit to must be an Heretick to all which enough hath been said before nor can I enlarge upon it without saying somewhat that I have said before which I have no mind to do We come now to the Seventh and Eighth Chapters concerning Penance c. upon which I shall enlarge the less because the Church of England is so far from condemning Confession or Penance that it uses and commends both and upon Confession always satisfaction is enjoyned there as much as in the Church of Rome it is true that with us it is not so positively enjoyned that is men are not compelled to it nor are those forms used in ours or those interrogatories administred by which those secrets are extorted from Men and Women which they would willingly conceal and which may lawfully be concealed as in their Church but Penitents are lest to their own liberty and their own method of drawing such information and comfort from their Confessors as they believe most useful to them which was the original end of Confession and from which very many good Catholicks believe there is at present too great a deviation God forbid the integrity and piety of any Church should be suspected much less condemned for the evil livers who remain within the pale of it No Church hath ever yet nor any will ever be but the triumphant without abundance of them yet it being the principal end and the most manifest perfection of Religion to introduce an innocence of life and a sincerity of manners into all those who profess it all Churches cannot too severely affect that Discipline which hath the greatest operation upon the lives and actions of their Children whether there are not some corruptions creeped into the common practice of auricular Confession whether the ordinary customary Confessors are not too remiss or over curious in examining and consequently in informing their Penitents or too easie and perfunctory in their absolutions will not become me to determine but Mr. Cressy well knows that very many learned and pious Catholicks do publickly lament the scandalous corruptions which have been practised and countenanced in that vital part of their Religion Who those Apostates from the Catholick Church are who have left their Monasteries out of carnal liberty and carnal lusts I am not at all informed but if they are so carnally minded I doubt some of them may be instructed by him to ask him how he forgot what he had formerly believed and whether he was in a moment inspired to answer to a new Catechisme full of new Articles of Faith If conscience hath had no influence upon them they have been very weak and not Roman Catholicks enough to be tempted by the Woman since they might have had the full use of her with much more good husbandry and less guilt without leaving their Monasteries for it is a ruled and a vowed case by most if not all their Casuists that fornication is a less sin than marriage and the reason they give is that the last is living in perpetual adultery Whoever hath lived in those places which are most inhabited by Religious Men is very little conversant with the Catholick same if he doth believe the major part of Religious Men to be enough mortified against that liberty though no doubt very many of them have subdued the temptation and it will not only be charity but common justice to think that those Apostates over whom Mr. Cressy so much infults have been governed by their Conscience since it was hardly possible they could be invited by the Woman having enough of that Sex at their devotion without the obligation and impediment of marriage and till Mr. Cressy informs us why Monasteries are better Schools of Holiness and Devotion than our Colledges are whose Discipline is as severe admitting cleanliness be to be preferred before slovenlines and doctrine much stricter enough hath been already said for their vindication and need not be repeated I think I understand the excuse that Mr. Cressy makes for the notorious transgressions which have been in the matter of confession and absolution in reference to which he says the Doctor is not ignorant that not very long since among several dangerous positions collected out of some modern Casuists such scandalous relaxations in administring the Sacrament of Penance had a principal place all which were not only condemned by the Bishops of France almost in every Diocess but also a Book the Author of which
undertook to defend them was solemnly prohibited and condemned by the Pope since which time he says such doctrines have been wholly restrained and silenced to which I shall only say that these modern Casuists continue still the greatest Confessors in all Catholick Countries and it is observable that not one amongst them hath ever yet renounced or disclaimed one of those dangerous Opinions or positions which stand so condemned and it can therefore hardly be known that such doctrines are wholly restrained and for their being silenced which they urge still as a matter of great reformation in those loud differences and as if all the passions and inconveniencies which arise from thence were thereby suppressed if not extinguished whoever hath any conversation with those adversaries may quickly discern that neither of them hath laid aside their propositions or the animosities against each other and the silence contributes so little of charity that poor Monsieur since he was known to be the Author of the Provincial Letters can scarce enjoy peace in his Grave Indeed if the Bishops of France were not over-powred and even silenced too by the Regular Clergy those excesses would in a short time be well reformed The danger is that in the method and form of customary confessions there remains still a contention between the Authority of the Scriptures and of the Church without which it could hardly fall out that so many men who all hours of the day and of the night indulge to themselves even without concealing it the practice of those sins which the Scripture hath prohibited under the penalty of damnation cannot be seduced by example or importunity hardly by sickness to eat flesh upon a day of abstinence nor from prophane or unclean discourse in that very time which can proceed from no other principle than that the disobeying the injunctions of the Church which without doubt ought to be observed is a greater sin than those of our Saviour and men would not run to confession as they wash their hands with a resolution to make them less clean as soon as they have done If those fountains of confession and absolution from whence so many draw the waters of life come to be poysoned or prophaned they were much better be dryed up for a time or carefully inclosed that men might not resort thither till they are better instructed in the use of them and we may without breach of charity believe that very odious corruptions and presumptions had broken into those sacred offices when the Church it self took so much notice of it and could not prescribe a more secret remedy than a publick Bull which Pope Pius the fourth thought necessary to publish Contra sacerdotes qui mulieres poenitentes in actu Confessionis ad actus inhonestos provocare allicere tentant Bul. To. 2. Nor can we suppose that this remedy wrought its effect when another Pope near one hundred years after was compelled to renew and inlarge that Bull with greater penalties as Pope Gregory the fifteenth hath done Contra sacerdotes in confessionibus Sacramentalibus poenitentes sollicitantes Bul. To. 3. In which it is observable that a greater latitude is permitted to Confessors for the discovery of this horrible impiety than is allowed for the discovery and prevention of the foulest Treason and after all this the condemning the dangerous positions of the modern Casuists hath been found as necessary which is still an argument that somewhat was still amiss in the administration of those Offices That great reverence was paid to the memory of many excellent persons after their death by visiting their Tombs and other commemoration of their vertues and noble actions hath great testimony from antiquity as ancient as we have any evidence of the practice of any formal devotions amongst Christians As the Primitive Christians amongst the Iews did not decline going to the Synagogues nor the practice of all things which were in custom with that Nation when the same could be innocently performed so amongst the Gentiles they observed whatsoever was in great reverence amongst them as the paying respect to the memory of their Ancestors always was and that did not contradict or offend any Christian Precept and it is not improbable that they might take that practice from them since the visitation of the Tombs and Sepultures of Martyrs is as ancient as Martyrdom it self but that those forms of Prayer for the dead which are now practised in the Roman Church were in use amongst Christians from the beginning till Protestantism arose Mr. Cressy will not prove and there is too great reason to doubt that whosoever doth believe that enormous sins which are unacknowledged and unrepented of at the death of the sinner may be expiated and consequently must be pardoned by what they who live after him can do for him hath a great temptation to live without that strict guard upon his affections and his passions which he might otherwise believe to be necessary But I do not think that any but illiterate Catholicks have that opinion whether the most learned amongst them are not well content that the rest in this and many other particulars should believe what they themselves do not believe I refer to Mr. Cressy assuring him likewise that if I did think that my Prayers or any thing else I could do could purchase the least ease to the Souls of my Friends or of my Enemies I would your them out with all may heart and should not fear any reprehension from the Church of England which hath declared no judgment in the point except it be comprehended in the Article of Purgatory and then the censure is no more than that it is a fond thing which in that case I would be content to undergo and for the many Masses which are usually said for them and which seems to give rich sinners some advantage I will say no more than that to my understanding that Priest who believes his Mass gives any benefit to the departed Soul hath much to answer that he doth not say it for charity but takes ten pence or a shilling at the rate that Masses are sold in that climate which seems to be more literal Simony than any act that passes under that reproach For the matter of Indulgences Mr. Cressy seems to be intirely of the Doctors judgment and opinion and therefore I cannot but wonder and lament that it being upon the matter the only Chapter in which he hath treated him with civility he chuses to conclude it so rudely as to say that every prudent Reader will easily discover from how poysonous a heart it issues and to how unchristian an end it was directed My exceptions to Indulgences is the deceit and fraud that is in them and the circumvention of the common people from which the Church it self cannot be excused there is scarce a Village in all the Catholick Dominions of the world which hath not one day in the year if not more the benefit of an
Indulgence to obtain which they visit such and such places and Churches so many times and in this expedition people of both sexes the lame and the blind tire themselves when whoever can read Latin finds that if he complies with the Precepts and Injunctions which are the conditions of every Indulgence of hearty repentance of all their sins and a sincere amendment of life and the like he shall be sure to enjoy all the benefits and more than are promised by that Indulgence though he should lie in his bed whilst others make those perambulations and yet this kind of fatuity is the ground of all those Indulgences and of the Pilgrimages which are undertaken except for Penance whereas if the conditions be performed they have no need of the Indulgence and if they be not they have no benefit by it though it costs even the poorest people some money which they cannot well spare in most places Mr. Cressy is not so sturdy a maintainer of all the points in difference with the Roman Church but he would willingly part with the Prayers in an unknown tongue though he says there is scarce a rustick so ignorant but well understands what the Priest does through the whole course of the Mass but I must confess my self so much more ignorant than his Rustick that though I have seen many Masses I never heard any nor saw any Congregation so intent as if they did desire to hear any thing that is said but whisper and talk and laugh except only at the Elevation and if the Congregation be great especially at a high Mass it is hardly possible that any considerable number of them can understand one word that is spoken nor is it held necessary for as the Priest takes more than ordinary care by an affected and industrious pronunciation not to have what he says understood so the people generally think themselves only concerned in being present and that it is not necessary for them to hear or understand what is spoken because all that relates to them is done and completely performed by the Priest He confesses that it was far from being the Churches primary intention that the publick office should be in a tongue not understood by the people for it was at first composed he says in the language generally spoken and understood through Europe by which I suppose he means the Latin tongue in which he is much mistaken both that Latin was generally spoken and understood through Europe I am not sure that it was the language of all Italy it self or that in the first composing of Liturgies they were all one and the same or in one Language In the East and throughout the Greek Church we are sure they had and still have different Liturgies and we have no reason to believe that in the Latin Church the Liturgies were the same throughout the West but were such as the Bishops allowed or made for their own Dioceses We know that the British Church retained its Liturgie for many years and that it was near if not above one thousand years for it was not till the time of Gregory the Seventh before Spain parted with the Gothish Liturgie and accepted that from Rome and how many alterations have been since made in it is known to all who will inform themselves and after all I think S. Ambrose's Missal is still retained in Milan notwithstanding the Bull of Clement the Eighth and of the succeeding Popes and therefore I cannot doubt but that and very many particulars in common practioe are parts of that Religion of State which may without breach of charity or unity be altered and reformed by the Soveraign in such order as such mutations are made for the advancement of Gods service in such a Kingdom or Province for which it is made But Mr. Cressy would find himself as much deceived even in the making up that breach if the Popes consent be necessary to it as he was formerly in his draught of a protestation or subscription for the fidelity of the English Catholicks yet we know that Pope Pius in the beginning of Elizabeth's Reign was very willing to have dispensed with the usage of the English Liturgie the Communion in both kinds and whatever else was practised in that Church upon condition that the Popes authority and supremacy might have been resetled in that Kingdom which he knew would be a good bargain and enable him to undo all the rest when he should think it necessary but Mr. Cressy would have proceeded more warily if he had before he left the Church in which he was first ordained a Priest procured a Reformation in those two particulars for which he is now so willing to compound Indulgences and the praying in an unknown tongue which are greater blemishes in the Church he hath betaken himself into than all he hath left in that which he is departed from We are come at last to the Doctors exception against the Church of Romes denying the reading of the Bible indifferently and with this exception Mr. Cressy makes himself very merry as if the principles of the Religion of the Church of England must fall to the ground or as he says utterly go to wrack if that liberty were denied for how then should every sober enquirer into Scripture frame a Religion to himself And so pleases himself with endeavouring to perswade others contrary to his own conscience that every one of the Church of England hath liberty to frame a Religion to himself whereas he well knows that every member of the Church of Rome hath as much liberty to frame a Religion to himself as any one of the Church of England hath who is as much obliged to conform himself to the doctrine of that Church as the other is to that of Rome And for the opinion it hath of the Scripture it answers for it self in these words Article Sixth Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation so that whatsoever is not read therein nor may be proved thereby is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an Article of the Faith or be thought requisite or necessary to Salvation How will this serve his turn to frame a Religion to himself But then he recreates himself with a Dialogue which he makes between the Doctor and one of his Parishioners which if he pleases is his own case whilst he triumphs in his conquests of those poor people which he perverts what do those simple creatures know of the authority of the whole Church when he amuzes them with points of Controversie of good works and of Christs very flesh and blood in the Sacrament contrary to the very evidence of all his senses to which all miracles have been subjected have those people any other knowledge or information of the sense of the Catholick Church than from him and would it not better become them to answer him that in those points they would chuse rather to believe their own Minister to whom
the care of their Souls is committed than him who is a stranger to them or if they have heard of him they ought the less to believe him Whoever knows the Doctor and Him or hath carefully perused their writings cannot be blamed for preferring the former before the latter But then how can these people who read the Scripture and appeal to it know that they have the true Scripture which is the word of God which is a worn-out question that hath been as often answered as asked The Church of Rome hath no other evidence of the truth of it than we have and the Tradition that hath derived it doth as much belong to the Church of England as to the other there is no difference between us in any particular that relates to Tradition where the tradition is as universal or as manifest as it is in that of the Scripture The Doctor is so far from saying or thinking that every Christian is to be a judge of the sence of Scripture that he doth not believe that every Church is fit to be a judge of it nor doth it appear that the Church of Rome it self which would be thought to be Catholick and instar omnium doth pretend to understand much less to judge of the sence of the whole Scripture and yet a very weak member of either may clearly understand the sence of those particular places which are necessary to be understood for his salvation as no man is so ignorant as not to know what the sence of Adultery and of Theft and Murder and the like which he is forbid to be guilty of and if he be so ignorant he will not be the more inclined to detest them by reading the School-men and if he be of the Church of England he knows whither to repair for advice and counsel in difficult cases and refuses not to submit to it But that no authority may be able to do us good he hath obtained a very extraordinary faculty to answer and avoid it and which is the nearest to smelling it out with his Nose that I have been informed of The Doctor to prove that the Christians in all times were indulged and exhorted to read the Scriptures besides many other arguments backs his demonstrations as Mr. Cressy confesses with an army of the ancient Fathers who are cited by him and their doctrine acknowledged by several late Catholick Divines of the most eminent account and which he himself confesses to be true but he says notwithstanding that no Catholick nor he thinks any other man in his right wits will grant that every Porter Cobler or Lawndress is capable to instruct themselves by reading the Scriptures alone or to clear the doctrine of the mystery of the Holy Trinity the Incarnation of our Saviour the Procession of the Holy Ghost c. In all which I do not know that he hath an adversary After he hath asked the Doctor a question or two of his own judgment concerning the Fathers concessions in those cases whether they did not suppose that they to whom they gave this license would for the sence of difficult points have submitted their judgments to the Church But then he undertakes to know that if there had been such an Architect of principles as the Doctor in the time of the Fathers they would not have been so zealous in their exhortations to a promiscuous reading of Scriptures For he says and hopes you will take his word for it that the Doctors principles do evidently contain the most pernicious Soul-destroying Heresie that ever assaulted Gods Church principles which banish peace charity humility and obedience utterly from the Church and State which if true as they could never have entred into the Doctors thoughts by reading the Scriptures so there can be no such antidote to expel those poysons as by the Scriptures for I will undertake to shew very plain places in Scripture of the sence whereof there is no doubt made for the confutation of all those principles and if he be of the Philosophers mind that more Syllogisms can be made for truth than against it he will not think the worse of reading the Scriptures for those principles yet he concludes that if the Fathers had foreseen these mischiefs they would never have given such advice yet he does confess that the four first general Councils never put any such restraint upon the reading the Scriptures for which he gives as good a reason as his answer concerning the Fathers because of the difference between the Heresies of those times and the Heresies of these times The Inventors of the ancient Heresies he says were great learned Prelates and subtle Philosophers and the object of their Heresies were sublime mysteries of Faith examined and framed by them according to the grounds of Plato ' s and Aristotle's Philosophy c. Hence he says it come to pass that in those days the Scriptures might be read freely enough by ordinary Christians without danger especially considering their intention of reading them was not to find out a new Religion but to instruct themselves in piety and to inflame their hearts in the Divine love pag. 161 162. But our modern Heresies he says are of a quite different complexion they are conversant about matters obvious to the weakest capacities as the external administration of Sacraments the jurisdiction of Superiors Civil and Ecclesiastical the manner of mens devotions the institution of Religious Orders the obligation of Vows the Ordinances of the Church touching Fasting Matrimony Celibacy paying of Tithes c. Or if about sublime mysteries men are taught to examine such mysteries by natural reason and the verdict of their outwardsenses Is not the English or sence of all this that towards the conviction of the highest and the greatest Heresies which ever were in the Church and which were only worthy of the name of Heresies and were condenned as such by the pure and strong evidence of Scripture the reading of the Scriptures might be permitted at least might be read without danger especially because the intention of reading them then was that men might be the better for it But that now in these modern Heresies upon the Sacraments and the institution of Religious Orders and Vows c. the reading the Scriptures are pernicious and serves only to find out a new Religion I can in truth collect no other sence than this from Mr. Cressy's distinction between the ancient and modern Heresies or for his conclusion that those godly Fathers who are cited by the Doctor and truly cited as he confesses had lived amongst us or if such Heresies had been then spread amongst their Disciples they would not have been so zealous in their exhortations to a promiscuous reading of Scripture I think they would because I am sure they would have had the same reason and would have wondered how any differences of opinion upon the Civil or Ecclesiastical jurisdiction upon the manner of mens devotions or upon the institution of Religious
orders or the rest come to be called Heresies And who had authority to declare them such If nothing that hath reference to any of these particulars was in practice in their time we have the less reason to acquiesce in the new invention of them and it will be the more worth our enquiry whether they who have put that brand upon them were not rather parties than judges and gainers by their determinations If those particulars can neither be confirmed by Scripture nor defended by reason we need not be troubled for their being called Heresies though there were no Scripture against them nor reason to confute them both which we conceive we have clearly on our sides let us examine them in order Concerning the external administration of Sacraments we take upon us to say that they rob the people of half that which our Saviour instituted and that besides the novelty of it for we say it was near if not full one thousand years before that violence was offered to Christianity they may as well defraud them of both as of either of the species and the answer they give to it can give no reasonable satisfaction to any for to that allegation that the body cannot be without the blood and consequently the bread contains both if our Saviour had thought so he would have instituted it in that manner the whole obligations of mystery depending only upon the institution then our Saviour well knew that in the sence they put upon it it would have been an institution directly contrary to the Law which our Saviour never violated for the eating the flesh with the blood was utterly unlawful and what was unlawful in the institution cannot become lawful since by any authority under Heaven and therefore they who cannot be suffered to receive it in both species are without the benefit of the Sacrament that was instituted by our Saviour and that is all I shall say of the external administration For the examination of the mysteries by natural reason and the verdict of their outward senses I shall only ask whether those outward senses are proper judges that that is bread and that is wine by their sight and their taste and their feeling it before the consecration which no body will deny How different the operation thereof may be after that mysterious action and the spiritual effect of it no man pretends to make a judgement by his outward senses but if he be admitted to taste both after the consecration why his senses should not be as competent discerners whether they remain still bread and wine as they were or are become flesh and blood which they were not before I cannot comprehend no more than why we should be bound to understand those few words literally which are so evidently contradicted by our senses which no other miracle ever was rather than many other metaphorical and allegorical expressions in which the Scriptures abound and which cannot be more controuled by the outward senses than this is For the jurisdiction of Superiors Civil and Ecclesiastical what Judge can there be but the Laws of that Kingdom where such jurisdiction is to be exercised and of that Church which ought to settle the publick manner of mens devotions For the institution of Religious Orders and the obligations of Vows the Bishop of Rome himself doth not pretend any power or authority to erect any Monastery Colledge or Religious House in any Kingdom or Province without the consent and approbation of King or Prince to whom the Soveraignty belongs and if they do admit such institutions to be made and such obligations by vows to be entred into as are prejudicial to the peace and happiness of their Dominions the institution is theirs and not the Popes and when their reason or their experience discovers any mischief or detriment to their other subjects to redound from those Institutions either in their original or by new orders and concessions or that the subjects under those Institutions are become less their subjects than their other fellow-subjects are and that they depend more on some foreign Prince than on them in their own Territories they may and ought to alter the form and institution or to suppress if they cannot reform the whole and if they cannot do this they cannot provide for the peace and happiness of the people committed to their charge And the like for fasting that is the observation of publick Fasts Celibacy paying of Tithes they can be no otherwise regulated than by the Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws of every Nation and Province and are so regulated and not in the same manner in all the Catholick Kingdoms and Provinces in Europe And therefore since that is the greatest objection Mr. Cressy makes against the reading of the Scripture that the contradictions which arise upon those particulars may be improved and inflamed into Heresies by the passion and humor of the Court of Rome we will rather acquiesce in the advice of the Primitive Fathers of the Church and believe that what the four first general Councils did not prohibit us to do we may lawfully continue the practice of and since the Church of England in conformity with the purest antiquity permits and enjoyns us to read the Scriptures we will obey its directions without caring what that of Rome forbids Mr. Cressy comes now in excuse of his just indignation against the Doctor 's Principles to discover a secret that his own unhappiness if not guilt gave the first occasion that those principles should be known and received into the Church of England and this discovery must be the more ingenuous because he is sure no man now alive knows any thing of it Then he tells you a story of his accidental finding and buying at a Book-sellers Shop Monsieur Dallies Book Of the true use of the Fathers which he shewed that night to his Noble Dear Lord Lucius Lord Falkland who reading a little of the Contents desired him to give it to him which he willingly did and that my Lord shortly after sent him a most civil Letter full of thanks both in his own and Mr. Chillingworth's name for that small present telling him that that little Book had saved him a most tedious labour of reading almost twenty great Volumes and then tells another story of Mr. Chillingworth and I confess when I read this notable discovery and knew that I was no great stranger to the transactions which had been in that time in that company I could not suddenly comprehend what his meaning or purpose was in making that relation but I quickly found that all his meaning was under the stile of his Noble Dear Lord as in truth he deserved from him the highest expressions of gratitude he could utter to traduce the memory of that incomparable Lord and to cause him to be thought a Socinian and I cannot enough lament that he hath found credit enough with two or three Persons of the Church of England who I am sure never knew I
by taking away the strong supporters which have hitherto upheld it and erecting rotten or mouldering pillars in the place and all this benefit and advantage may be lost or prevented by his fond and unseasonable advertisement if the King and the Bishops have prudence enough to make good use of it by driving away or discountenancing such a perfidious and unskilful champion May they not from hence apprehend that as he came to them upon a sudden and unexpected so that he is upon thoughts of returning to the Church for which he hath so much care and entering into a kind of correspondence with his adversaries by giving good counsel how to behave himself better But how comes it to pass that this miserable Doctor who he yet seems to think may mean well to be so stupidly couzened and deceived that instead of complying with his engagement to defend the Church he hath betrayed her and the whole cause to all the Fanatick Sects which have separated from her and with most horrible cruelty sought her destruction and with her the ruine of Monarchy All this tragical demolishing of foundations consists in this that he allows all sober enquirers to be for themselves judges of the sence of Scripture in necessaries and judges likewise what points are necessary This saying of his hath betrayed the cause of his Church and left her in a most forlorn condition tottering upon foundations and principles which to Mr. Cressy's certain knowledge were not extant at least not known in England thirty years since Let it be in the first place observed and it is sure worthy to be observed that this most pernicious proposition which hath in such an instant brought the Church of England into such a tottering condition is not made use of nor so much as taken notice of by any of those enemies of hers the Presbyterians Anabaptists or Independents who have been so vigilant and industrious so many years to make her totter and yet now the work is so near done to their hands by a secret friend who is the more able to do them good by his not pretending any affection towards them neither of them will put their cause upon that proposition nor apply it to their own designs and therefore it is possible that it may not be altogether so dangerous to the Church as he would have it supposed to be and of which it is probable he would not have given notice if he had in truth thought it to be dangerous In the next place let us examine whether the Doctor himself cannot make another and better interpretation of his own words than his implacable enemy hath done all good Physicians compound their Antidotes according to the nature and malignity of the poyson that their patients have swallowed Now the poyson that Mr. Cressy and his lurking brethren usually bait their traps with and by which they catch most of their prey is Their confident denouncing damnation against those and all those who are not of their mind that is who are not received into the Church of Rome and not intirely submit to all her dictates That the Scripture consists in dumb letters which cannot declare its own meaning and therefore is liable to be misinterpreted by the wit of bold and presumptuous men as the founders of all Heresies have been and therefore they can only be safe who receive and conform themselves to that interpretation of Scripture that the Church in the custody of which it is deposited hath given and declared to be Orthodox That that Church is the Church of Rome where there constantly resides a Supreme Magistrate who in case any new opinions shall start up to the prejudic of Religion which have not been enough convinced by former definitions of the Church hath full authority committed to him by our Saviour to declare and determine what is agreeable or contrary to the sence of the Scripture since it cannot be supposed that our Saviour would constitute an officer and not indue him with all necessary faculties or not qualifie him sufficiently for the discharge of so great a trust and from hence they resolve that the greatest danger of damnation is not from the commission of those sins against which the spirit of God hath so plainly denounced it but in an obstinate presumption in contradicting the opinions or directions of the Catholick Church and refusing to submit to the authority of the Vicar of Christ who hath the unquestionable power to bind and to loose to pardon and to condemn sins having the Keys of Heaven and of Hell and therefore whilst they will depend upon him and put themselves under his protection they cannot but be safe This is the common poyson which these men carry about them to administer to those who they find most like to be deluded and in the composition of it there are some ingredients according to the humour of the compounder which cannot be according to the Catholick prescription since that Soveraign power of their Supreme Magistrate the Pope is not nor ever will be acknowledged to be an essential part of the Roman Catholick Religion Let us now see what Antidote the Doctor hath provided for the prevention or expulsion of this poyson to confirm men in their absolute confidence and dependence upon the Scripture the force and virtue whereof that poyson would enervate he says That it is repugnant to the nature of the design to the wisdom and goodness of God to give an infallible assurance to persons in writing his will for the benefit of mankind if those writings may not be understood by all persons who sincerely endeavour to know the meaning of them in all such things as are necessary for their Salvation and consequently there can be no necessity supposed of any infallible society of men either to attest or explain those writings amongst Christians and this and no more than this is the sence of that which contains all that confusion which Mr. Cressy thinks must bring confusion upon his own Church as into that of the Roman and from thence the Doctor proceeds to shew how incompetent a Magistrate they have chosen to determine all differences in Religion which he proves by such arguments as are very natural for the proving thereof and for the answering avoiding whereof we shall be compelled anon to take notice of Mr. Cressy's admirable artifice and dexterity Now if the Doctor hath for want of skill in discerning consequences made choice of an improper medium to prove that which he hath a mind to prove God forbid that there should be such Tragical effects to attend that argumentation as the destruction of Church and State and it would be as unreasonable to condemn an argument that he who uses it thinks to his purpose because it was never used till within thirty Years One man says that the Scripture is so very difficult that no man can understand it without repairing to the advice of an adversary who will tell him the interpretation
the arms of such a Church that seems to believe or without believing to countenance such an imposture or any other thing contrary to common sense and repugnant to all motions of Piety Mr. Cressy will not part with the Doctor without kindly putting him in mind of his Souls health and that being a genuine English Protestant he will find an Excommunication denounced ipso facto against all such as shall in the manner there expressed openly oppose any thing contained in the Nine and thirty Articles in the Book of Common-Prayer and of Ordinations of Bishops and Priests c. which Excommunication he says is there declared to remain in force till the Offender repent of his wicked errour which he ought to revoke Having told him this he wishes him to reflect upon his Book called Irenicum long since published by him and comparing it with the Constitutions of the Church ratified with an Excommunication and thereupon to ask his conscience whether he hath not incurred that Excommunication since his guilt having been publick and notorious no repentance no retractation appears c. He foresees that himself who hath so often subscribed to those constitutions and so often taken those Oaths which accompanie them will be thought liable to that Excommunication having so apparently renounced all the obligations and shewed no other repentance than in a constant reviling and malice towards the Church in which he received his Baptism and therefore to clear himself from reproach he declares that the Doctor cannot doubt of the validity or legality of that Excommunication he for his part may so the Doctor is to look only to himself But if Mr. Cressy had not been in great hast as it cannot be denied that he hath used great expedition in his conclusion he might have thought himself obliged for the more full conviction of the Doctor to have alledged those particulars in his Irenicum which have involved him in that Excommunication and then that that Book was published by him after he had subscribed to the Thirty nine Articles c. neither of which he hath done nor I believe will ever be able to do I confess I have not the Irenicum now in my reach and therefore must only resort to Mr. Cressy himself for a vindication and methinks he contributes very fairly to it in a testimony he gives him pa. 100 without any purpose of good will towards him where he says It cannot be denied but that the Doctor did not during the late calamities joyn in the clamour for destroying the Church he was no root and branch enemy but on the contrary generously undertook their defence and with great boldness told his then Masters in his Irenicum that though Episcopal Government and Ordinations as likewise Deans and Chapters which anciently were the Bishops Councils were not necessary nor perhaps convenient as matters then stood yet neither was their utter destruction they might if the state pleased be retained without sin in all which he believes he hath laid an indelible reproach upon the Doctor but I must tell him that he hath therein given a larger testimony of the Doctor 's courage and affection to the Church than all his revilings will be able to deface For a young Scholar who had then no obligation to the Church by Oaths or Subscriptions and knew little of the constitution of the Church of England to tell his Masters as he justly calls them who had newly Murthered their King and perswaded the People to believe that Bishops were therefore suppressed because they were Anti-christian that they might still be retained without sin was such a flat contradiction to the Doctrine they would have the People be taught that he shewed more courage in saying so than all the English Catholick Clergy ever expressed who owed as much Allegiance to the King or would be thought to owe as much as any of his other Subjects yet never wrote one line or published one Opinion against whatsoever the Rebels said or did He might well say that Episcopal Government and Ordination were not necessary as matters then stood in a Government whose foundation was laid in the most precious blood of the King and the most horrid Sacriledge and Murthers that were ever perpetrated by Christians and when no honest man would or could be made a Bishop But it is too much countenance to Mr. Cressy's unwarranted calumnies to take pains to absolve the Doctor from his aspersions who stands an object of reverence and esteem with all men who have either for the Church However such is Mr. Cressy's modesty that for the excellent performance of his task he desires no other Iudges but the Prelates of the Doctor 's own Church which could have been no excuse for me to interpose my poor opinion in the matter but when he so frankly calls upon any indifferent Reader to judge between them two whether with better success he hath defended the cause of the Church of England against the Church of Rome or he Mr. Cressy the cause of the Doctor 's own Church against himself I may hope that I may be looked upon as one of those indifferent Readers who is called upon or authorized by him to speak my opinion in the matter and upon that supposition I do assure him upon the reputation of an old Friend that he hath very much hurt his own Church in his very passionate and uncomely way of defending her and in seeming to look upon some very Excentrick Lives in the estimation of most learned Catholicks as essential parts of their Religion and to make such Miracles and Dreams and Apparitions the very foundations of the Romish faith which the most credulous in the Church do but believe are possible to be true and the wisest and most learned think never to have been and lastly in undertaking to answer a Book which upon his own or his Associates clamour was necessarily to be full of citations of Catholick Authors and Testimonies contrary to what he averred and without applying any answer to them to declare that he will not examine them nor cares whether they are true or false So that his whole Book consists in nothing else besides the petulant insolent language but finding fault with the method of the Doctor 's arguing and his making use of new and other Principles than have heretofore been insisted upon in arguments of this kind and leaves all the material parts of the Book unanswered which possibly may make his Superiours believe that he hath not performed the task they imposed upon him very laudably For the Doctor having solidly discharged all that can be expected from him he needs no such private and obscure testimony as mine which can do him no good but he hath the acknowledgement of the King himself and the Church whose worthy Champion he deserves to be esteemed and it is like he performs the work the better because Mr. Cressy and so many of his Associates are so much offended and do so
bitterly inveigh against his Principles and all for the novelty of them that is he says somewhat that hath not been said before and which they are not provided to answer which is rather an argument that all disputing is to little purpose and that it is time to give it over because neither party is reformed than that what he says is easie to be answered there will be every day new Principles new Arguments to inform and convince and convert those who obstinately persist in old Errours They who are but moderately versed in the Controversies about the Substantial points in difference between the Protestants I mean which are common with all Protestants and the Church of Rome cannot but find that the Romish Champions have quite shifted the Scene in all their arguments upon the most material matters and have found new mediums to support their cause They are visibly weary all but the Iesuits of insisting upon the Popes infallibility you scarce meet with an argument from it in any Book that is Printed nor can you engage them in it upon discourse They are with great difficulty drawn into the matter of Transubstantiation but presently shelter themselves under the shadow of their Church and if they cannot avoid enlarging upon it they neither use argument or answer that ever Bellarmine relied upon being not satisfied with much he said in that point or Purgatory or some other matters which he hath handled more at large insomuch that it hath been observed these many years that Bellarmine's Controversies are so gathered up that they are not easie to be procured amongst the greatest Book-sellers and if they are ever reprinted they will pass a severe expurgation In these varieties and lawful changes of the method and order of disputation amongst learned men which cannot but be administred by the often saying and repeating the same things which are often evinced by a new medium after it hath been long unmoveable by an old why should it only be unlawful or incongruous in the Doctor or any other Writer in defence of the Church of England to introduce new principles if they will better contribute to the maintenance of old truths and which it is plain doth stagger them and forces them to fall upon the Person and decline the matter yet I am contented for the ending all disputes which are full of obstinacy and uncharitableness to concur in the reference and how ill soever Mr. Cressy and I have agreed from the beginning of his Book hitherto I am intirely of his mind in the matter and very words of his conclusion That there is a horrible depravation in the minds especially of Ecclesiasticks which depravation can now only be cured by the wisdom and power of the Civil Magistrate and to his wisdom and severity I leave it I have now waited upon Mr. Cressy to the end of his Book and I think have not left any clause in it of any importance unanswered and before I conclude I shall observe Cressy's own method in giving him some Counsel and Advice without taking much notice of his Post-script in which there is little addition of new matter but from the same temper of spirit some variety of bitterness with some new very ill words He wishes that if the Doctor thinks not himself obliged in Conscience by breaking all Rules of piety and humanity to do all manner of despight to his Catholick fellow Subjects he would hereafter please to abstain from reviling and blaspheming Gods Saints or traducing the most divine exercises of contemplative Souls more perfectly practised only in Heaven Alas the Doctor wishes and desires that all the English Roman Catholicks against whose corrupt opinions he hath with much strength of reason and very little passion writ very weightily but never against their Persons would be his Fellow-subjects give that evidence and security of and for their fidelity as their Fellow-subjects do That they would disclaim all kind of subjection to any other Soveraign and which till they do and which the Catholick Religion cannot hinder them from doing they cannot reckon themselves nor be accounted by others his Fellow-subjects And I do heartily wish not without some apprehension that Mr. Cressy hath not by breaking all rules of modesty and discretion brought more prejudice upon the Persons of his fellow-Catholicks than all the Doctor 's want of humanity hath done It was a little too soon to awaken all the Protestants of England that they might discern in what an ill condition they must be in if that Catholick spirit that discovers it self unwarily in him and others of his fraternity should have any prevalence or much countenance in the State To his blaspheming and reviling Gods Saints so absurdly charged upon him enough hath been said before nor is there evidence to induce the most charitable man to believe that all those are Gods Saints which stand in Mr. Cressy's Calender of Saints and it was very unadvisedly done that only one single line was not expunged if there was no more that gave the occasion of mentioning Saints and Miracles and Enthusiasmes which extorted from the Doctor all those animadversions which put the other into so much rage and fury that for the support of that one onely line he hath writ this whole Book that in every line is full of nothing but Miracles and Saints and divine exercise of contemplative Souls which by his favour is as new a Principle to defend the Romish Religion by as any the Doctor hath introduced against it and surely contains more of that kind of Learning than all the Books of pure aud solid Controversie that have been written since Luther begun his Separation as if he had a mind to put the verity of the Lives of the Saints in issue and to be strictly examined from which affectation I suppose his Superiours will divert him that they and their Miracles may be left to their own repose And for his most divine exercise of contemplative Souls more perfectly practised only in Heaven which is another new principle and which and the like must unavoidably be examined by new methods and argumentations it would be much better to leave those obscure contemplations to the Persons who delight in them and find relief by them which we may charitably hope is better understood by them than comprehended by us but if they will not keep their Cipher privately to themselves for their mutual correspondence and conversation but will constitute a new language in old words for the information and amazement of other men and will be then offended and shortly after condemn them for being without the effects which pious Souls naturally produce they should not take it ill if men who patiently hear what they say do in truth believe that they themselves are without any clear notions and can draw no sence out of that mist of words in which it is concealed Mental Prayer which they would fain make their imaginations understood by is a faculty every devout
man comprehends it signifying no more than performing that in thought which is otherwise done in speech and thoughts are as plain and easie to be understood as words can and whoever cannot express plainly and clearly to an other man whatever he thinks rather dreams than thinks but because the very noise of words do very often at least with some men disturb or interrupt or divert the thoughts they do pray very allowably and effectually and it may be more powerfully who apply themselves to God by fixing their silent thoughts upon God and upon what they desire of Him without using any words at all and this is mental Prayer which probably may keep the mind more and longer bent towards God than the pronunciation of words will enable or suffer it to be and yet I doubt it must have frequent intermission and relaxation and contemplation may hold its vigour longer upon other arguments than in the exercise of Prayer Men are not to be blamed and it may be less in our Country which hath and doth still suffer by men and women too of disturbed fancies who pretend to Revelations and Illuminations and such Enthusiasms not only to introduce many extravagant opinions in Religion but to warrant and justifie unquiet and seditious actions in the State from some light within which they insist upon in large discourses of words hudled together the meaning whereof other men cannot comprehend and therefore when they meet with this spirit revived again in the writings of some modern Catholicks within the space of nine and twenty or thirty years which had layn quiet or much quieter for four or five hundred years and scarce a mention of them in the common Catholick Writers of those times it cannot be wondred at that men are not willing to give any countenance to those infusions which have so often been discovered to be mere delusions or that many who have read all Teresa's visions and ecstasies and accidentally meet with some well exercised Quakers are apt to think their stile very like because they comprehend the sence of both alike and as it is some argument against the difficulty of a Book that it is translated into any other Language than that in which it is writ so when it is translated into very many Languages and understood by none or by very few who are not suspected for ignorance in the Language it is a great discouragement to the Reader if it be no reproach upon the work and I believe and hope that it is a fate Sancta Sophia will not undergo by being translated into as many Languages as Mother Teresa hath been But it may be that the objection which Mr. Cressy unwarily says keeps women from being admitted for witnesses of miracles in the Canonization of Saints in which he finds he was grosly deceived may be a good qualification of them for the receiving and applying extraordinary Illuminations and Revelations Naturally he says pag. 68. imagination is stronger in them than judgment and whatsoever is esteemed by them to be pious is easily concluded by them to be true and I must confess I have found more Nuns and Religious Persons who seem perfectly to understand that dialect than any other Catholicks with whom I have conversed I confess I am so unwilling to think lightly or speak pleasantly of any expedient that may possibly in other men advance devotion that I am most unwillingly drawn again into the discourse of it since I now find by casting my eye upon a little Treatise written by a friend of Mr. Cressy's or by himself to illustrate that subject that I am totally incapable of understanding it for though Mr. Cressy confesses that many persons even in the Catholick Church have been seduced by the Devil and their own pride to pretend to lights received from God which were either the effects of a distempered fancy or suggestions of the Devil which his friend likewise acknowledges and seems prepared to give advice how the one shall be discovered and distinguished from the other in which I would have been very glad to be instructed but am utterly disappointed by the first conditions that he establishes towards the discovery which is That the persons who pretend to Visions and Illuminations must necessarily be Roman Catholicks because he lays it a ground indisputable that all pretences and appearances of that kind in any persons of a different Faith are infallibly Diabolical which is so full a contradiction to the right of another sort of Enthusiafts who to many men seem to make their claim with as much reason and think that every instance that is urged out of the Scripture by this new Author of all the infusions and visions and illuminations and revelations from the Creation to the end of the Revelation may be as well applied to their justification as for that of the Roman Catholicks I am resolved to be no farther engaged in the Argument but for ever take my leave of it I am confident the Doctor is so willing to gratifie Mr. Cressy that he will deny him nothing that is reasonable but it is not a just request when himself hath declared in his Book that he will not examine one quotation which the Doctor hath with notable industry and punctuality set down to prove all he hath averred and that it concerns not him whether they be true or false he now requests him in his Postscript that he will not hereafter abuse the world by fathering on the Church the Exotick opinions of particular School-men it was his part to have shewed what School-men and what opinions the Church hath rejected and by representing the Churches Doctrines lamely falsly and dishonestly which he says is his enormous faultiness committed in his last Book through every one of the points mentioned by him which he says may be visible to all heedful Readers truly the more shame for him that would not have that advantage against him when he was without any other but he says irrefragable proofs are making ready of this if the Searchers would be quiet and let the Printers work but it is an even lay the want of that discovery will be always laid upon the Searchers though they cannot prevent the coming out of any thing else they have a mind to publish And it may seem strange after his confession in his Book that all is required in and by the Church of England is comprehended in the Articles and Canons and Book of Common-Prayer well known and published he would have it thought in his Postscript that they know not where to find doctrines for no other doctrines we defend and he shall do well to declare by what authority the Catholicks of England conform themselves to the Council of Trent that hath never been received in that Kingdom as it hath not been in some Catholick Countries and therefore is not obligatory there nor must he think he answers this question by saying that all Catholick Countries have received all that is
of the Essence of Religion and reject only some Canons which are indifferent for if any thing remains indifferent after the determination of the Council and may therefore be rejected it is manifest that the jurisdiction is not in the Council though confirmed by the Pope but in that power that rejects it and judges of the indifferency For his invitation of the Doctor to a Christening that a Colledge in Cambridge may have another name given to it than it is now called by S. Bennet or Corpus Christi Colledge the wit of it is enough answered when taken notice of The last Paragraph of his Postscript is a pure piece of Oratory and may be in imitation of no worse an Orator than Caesar himself who when he had tried all fair and foul means threats and promises to draw Cicero to his party and found it was impossible to engage him to be active against Pompey he only considered how to make him Neutral to sit still without doing any thing in the quarrel and writ to him Neque tutius neque honestius reperies quidquam quà m ab omni contentione abesse So Mr. Cressy after he hath heaped more ill words upon the Doctor and applied more reproachful Epithets to his grave and learned person and stile than hath been gathered together in so small a volume within these nine and twenty years he concludes his Postscript with desiring him to consider that Almighty God commands us to love Peace and Truth and then gravely informs him how they ought always to go together and left his too civil address to him should more work upon him than would become an adversary he quickens him for the better application of his Text by telling him that since he hath demolished all Tribunals in Gods Church which might peaceably end controversies and had endeavoured as much as in him lay to banish peace eternally from among Christians it was expected from him that he should give some testimony to the world that he is at least a seeker and promoter of truth and so proceeds very Rhetorically to perswade him that he doth not himself believe any thing that he says to others because he is too reasonable a man and of too great abilities to think that such a Book as his last can convert any Catholick who cannot read without trembling at the blasphemy of it and without a horrible aversion from one who would make their Church and their Faith odious Indeed I believe they will suffer very few of their Proselytes to read that or any other of his Books which may open their eyes or inform them of the darkness they are in If Mr. Cressy's word may be taken as no doubt it will he will tell them of blasphemies that may make them tremble though he hath not in his whole answer named one but if a man will not that is cannot give credit to all the stories which are told of S. Bennet and S. Francis he is streight a blasphemer of Gods Saints as he who will not submit to the authority of the Bishop of Rome demolishes all Tribunals in Gods Church which might peaceably end controversies and endeavours to banish peace eternally from amongst Christians whereas it is only that Tribunal that hinders and obstructs the peace which but for that judicatory would be generally imbraced The counsel I would now give to Mr. Cressy will consist in two kinds the first with reference to himself purely the second with reference to the cause If he thinks fit any more to write against the Church of England which I do not disswade him from that he will state truly and clearly the difference between it and the Church of Rome which he hath never yet done I advise him to remember that he hath been a member and son of the Church of England cherished and educated in her during the most vigorous part of his age and that he ows to that education all the learning he hath I will charitably believe that he saw or thought he saw good reason to withdraw himself from her Communion and that he is satisfied in his conscience with his present state of separation let it be so why should that hinder him from living fairly and civilly towards her It is an ungenerous thing to fall from streight embraces to publick revilings Men of honour after they have contracted friendships with each other for a long time and afterwards find cause from some mutation in manners and upon discovery of infirmities with which they can no longer comply to live at a greater distance towards each other to repose less confidence than they used to do and by degrees to grow strangers they yet retain such a decent behaviour that standers by can scarce discover any alteration of affections in them they are never heard to speak ill to traduce or disgrace one another and believe that it is a debt and duty due to their former friendship never to undervalue each others parts or to bring the honour of either into question common prudence and good breeding prevents those excesses and methinks in Religion the same temper should have a greater influence and Mr. Cressy should for his own sake allow some beauty to have been in the Church that did so long detain him and not desire to render her so ugly and deformed as takes away any excuse from any body for staying so long in her company This I expected from his natural genius and from the conversation he frequented where bitterness of words was never allowable towards men whose opinions were very different and if any new illumination hath perswaded him that such urbanity is not consistent with the zeal that Religious discourses should be warmed with he should suspect it for delusion He hath an excellent example given him by a Catholick learned and Reverend Bishop the present Bishop and Prince of Condun who treats an enemy more inferiour to him and more liable to reproach than the Church of England can be imagined to be to Mr. Cressy with such condescension and humanity as if they stood upon the same level with him And no question those strokes make a deeper impression upon all ingenuous men than louder blows and are with more difficulty repelled Whereas Mr. Cressy like a rude and blustering wind disturbs all sorts of men who stand near him offends and provokes all Classes of men with his unnecessary choler What can the King think to see his Laws and Government so vilified by his scornful expressions to hear his Royal Ancestor whose obsequies were kept and observed at Nostre Dame in Paris with the highest solemnity by the first great King France ever had in spight of the Pope's Excommunication called a Tyrant by one of his own subjects What can all the Protestant Nobility and Prelates of England think to see the Ecclesiastical and Civil Laws of the Church and State despised and trampled upon by a man who could not live an hour in that Air but by the
Kings mercy What must all the peaceable and well-affected Catholicks of England think who have enjoyed so long tranquillity by the King's grace and favour to find the calm they were in interrupted by the boisterous and unskilful noise of one of their own Preachers and to hear and see a jealousie kindled of their loyalty and good meaning by the impetuous breath of a Religious man that if it be not allayed by their prudence may devour and destroy their chief and most beautiful habitations Mr. Cressy therefore shall do well and wisely henceforward to demean himself with more temper and civility towards the Church and all the members of it of whose clemency and gentleness he may yet stand in need and if his passion will not suffer him to live as a Friend let his discretion prevail with him to live like a Neighbour at least like an old acquaintance as long as he thinks it convenient to enjoy the benefit of their quarters The advice that I give Mr. Cressy with reference to the matter is That he will contract the Controversie into what concerns the Church of England solely and to say all he can against the Articles and Policy thereof and not to make any sallies against Presbyterians Independents Anabaptists or other Sectaries who declare as great animosity against the Church of England as that of Rome hath always and therefore are more like to agree together And the first question that is proper and pertinent to be debated and which determination will go very far towards the reconciling all inferiour particulars is I. Whether a National Church hath power with the approbation and authority of the Soveraign to remove any errors or inconveniences which have been practised in that Church either by an Original corruption or by degenerating from what might at first be innocent into superstition or scandal and whether the long reception and continuance of what is erroneous or mischievous can restrain the Soveraign power from reforming it when he finds it necessary in the same peaceable order and method as he provides Laws in other cases for the well Government of his Kingdom II. Whether whatsoever is not of the Essence of Christian Religion instituted by our Saviour himself or declared or advised to be practised by the Apostles may not lawfully be looked upon as Religion of State in that it may be altered or improved or abolished by the Soveraign power for the better advancement of those ends which are essential and which no power on Earth can make alteration in And whether Gods promise to his Church be not to be depended upon in every National Church where learning and piety flourishes that it shall not fall into enormous error whereby Christianity shall receive prejudice and be not more like to advance and propagate devotion in that Church and Nation than any Foreign power whatsoever III. Whether the Bishop of Rome hath any authority given by God in the Dominions and over the Subjects of other Princes and what authority and power it is and what obedience and subjection it is which the English Catholicks conceive themselves bound to pay to him by the obligation of their Religion It being absolutely necessary for the personal security of Kings and Princes and for the peace and quiet of Kingdoms that it may be clearly made manifest what the authority and power is that a Foreign Prince doth challenge in an other Princes Dominions contrary to and above the Laws of the Land and what obedience it is that subjects may pay to such a Foreign Prince without the privity and contrary to the command of his own Soveraign nor can any general answer be satisfactory in this point They who conceive the Pope hath a Temporal and Spiritual power in England must explain what the full intent of that power is that the King may discern whether he hath enough of either as to preserve himself the peace of the Kingdom and they who insist upon his having a spiritual power as most of the most moderate Catholicks do without imagining that it can in the least lessen their affection and loyalty to the King which they do really intend to preserve inviolable must as clearly explain and define what they understand that spiritual to be which may otherwise be extended as far as the former intend the temporal and spiritual shall extend nor in truth can they be secure of their own innocence of which they think themselves in possession until they fully know from those who intangle them with distinctions what that spiritual power is and what submission they are bound to pay to it which seeming to be some obligation upon their Conscience it is fit they may be sure it cannot involve them in actions contrary to their duties which they can hardly be secure of and less satisfie others till they absolutely disclaim any power to be in him at all with reference to England as they will upon a full enquiry discover that he hath no other in any Catholick Kingdom but what is granted to him by the Soveraign power and the municipal Laws of the Kingdome which makes it differ so much in all the Catholick Nations of Europe and to be little or nothing out of it IV. Whether Catholick Subjects in England are not bound to give as good security to the King for their fidelity and peaceable behaviour as all his other subjects do and without which they cannot wonder that they may be made subject to such Laws and restraints as may disable them from being dangerous when they profess to owe obedience to a foreign Prince who doth as much profess not to be a friend to their Countrey and will not declare what that obedience is V. Whether his Majestie may not justly and ought not prudently to require the same or as full satisfaction and security for their allegiance as Catholick Subjects give for their fidelity to Catholick Kings if so how can the English Catholicks under pretence of Religion refuse to declare that it is in no Earthly power to absolve them from their fidelity to the King when no French Roman Catholick dares refuse the same it being a Catholick resolution in France and renewed upon the occasion of a seditious Book by a Declaration of the Sorbone concerning the Kings Independency in the Year 1663. Quòd subditi fidem obedientiam Regi Christianissimo ita debent ut ab iis nullo praetextu dispensari possint and whether any Catholick in France or Spain can refuse to profess that he doth not believe that the Pope can depose the King if the King thinks to require it VI. Whether since the Pope so lately caused his Majestie 's Catholick Subjects in Ireland to rebell and when out of the conscience of their sin they submitted to the King and subscribed and swore to the observation of the Articles agreed upon The Pope absolved them from the performance of their Oaths and took upon himself to be their General in the Person of
his Nuntio and assumed the exercise of the Regal power both at Land and Sea and imprisoned those Catholicks and threatned to take their Lives who had promoted the peace and desired to return to the King's Subjection And when since the Kings happy Restoration the Nobility and Catholick Clergie of Ireland thought it necessary to present some Testimony of their future Allegiance to the King in which they declared that the Pope had no power to dispence with their fidelity to his Majesty or to absolve them from any Oaths they should take to that purpose which Declaration was attested and subscribed by many of the principal Catholick Nobility and others of the best quality and interest as likewise by some of their Titular Catholick Bishops and many of their Secular and Regular Clergie But complaint and notice hereof being sent to Rome the Pope was so offended at it that he caused his Nuntio in Flanders to command some of the Clergy who had subscribed that Paper to attend him and threatned to excommunicate them and Cardinal Barbaryne at the same time writ a Letter to the Bishops and Clergie of Ireland in which he signified how much the Pope was displeased that such a subscription and declaration had been made and commanded them to discountenance and suppress the same and take care that it should proceed no farther and the Cardinal added That they should remember what they well knew that the Kingdom remained still under Excommunication This being the case it cannot but be very necessary that his Majesty should know what opinion his Catholick Subjects have of this Foreign power which will observe no limits but of his own prescription and will concern all Roman English Subjects to explain their sence of it that they may not be thought to desire only the protection of those Laws which gives them equal title to whatever all other Subjects enjoy and to be willing to be dispenced with for performance of all those obligations which other Subjects are under and in consideration whereof the other benefits are granted to them VII Whether the English Catholick Subjects are not bound in Conscience to submit to the Laws of the Land in all things which are not against the Law of God and who is to be judge whether they are against the Law of God or no and if Men are forbid to keep Company or to have conversation with dissolute and prophane Persons how they can justifie the living in continual company with and in constant profession of friendship to those who they conceive and believe to be out of a possibility of Salvation and for which if in truth they do believe it the saying they may believe as well as hope that they will repent and become Catholick before they dye when whatever they may hope they do not in truth believe that they will ever change their Religion so that it is more reasonable to believe from the learning reason and judgment of many Catholicks that they do not believe it whatever they are obliged to say or rather whatever others say to them and whether Protestants who do think that the Papists do really believe they must be damned are not very excusable if they avoid and decline any commerce or conversation with them even to the abstaining from buying or selling with them or from entertaining any Servant of that Religion since it cannot reasonably be presumed that a Servant can love a Master which it is his duty to do who he doth believe will infallibly be damned VIII How Mr. Cressy and the rest who have received Orders in the Church of England can justifie or excuse their being re-ordained after they change their Religion since so many Councils have declared against it and no one for it and since the succession of Bishops is as plainly manifest in one Church as in the other and in truth may be more doubted upon their own grounds in the Roman from the number of Schismes and the continuance of them in which so many excommunicated Persons have been consecrated Bishops and they again ordained Priests under the same condemnation which may be supposed to have made a great confusion by many Mens having conferred Orders who by their Rules I say were Laymen themselves However what difference can there be assigned why such of the Greek Church who come to them are not re-ordained but those of the Church of England are compelled to be IX Whether St. Peter exercised any jurisdiction or assumed any superiority over the rest of the Apostles during the Seven Years he remained at Antioch as he ought to have done if the Supremacy was annexed to his Person or in the Four and twenty Years he reigned in Rome and whether the contrary be not manifest by St. Paul's Epistle to the Galathians not so much by the Contest that was between him and St. Peter about Circumcision even at Antioch in St. Peter's own Diocess where St. Paul withstood him to his face because he was to be blamed which is poorly answered by those who say it was in the warmth of disputation when all men contradict each other without distinction of quality or degree But I say I do not urge the equality so much by that contradiction though it be not answered as by the matter occasion and substance of that Epistle which seems to be written principally upon that Subject St. Paul had converted that People the Galathians from Paganisme to the Faith of Christ and he was no sooner gone from them to another place but some other Christians for there was no attempt to reduce again to Paganisme were inclined to amuse with Scruples that they were not throughly informed of the whole faith that was necessary nor by one who had ever seen our Saviour and so was not like to be himself informed as well as they especially when St. Peter preached contrary to what the other taught so that the weight of what was objected by those whoever they were was the incompetency of the Person who had taught them in comparison of the other and particularly of St. Peter So that St. Paul could not at this time have been ignorant of that Supremacy if there had been any this Epistle being written above Seventeen Years after his conversion nor could he have avoided the mentioning of it upon this argument if he had known it especially since he writ that Letter from Rome where Peter at the same time was nor could he more clearly have confuted that Opinion than he hath done except he had believed St. Peter himself to have affected it which he had no reason to do since he knew who they were who had infused those suggestions He gives them a short accompt of his own Apostleship and how he had spent his time since of his first Journey to Ierusalem yet that he went not thither till three Years after his conversion and till after he performed many acts of his Apostleship in which he received no direction from any Of
to be burned as Hereticks very few days before having made new Laws for the discovery of them stricter than had been ever before And there is no reason to believe that he did not die as much a Catholick as he was when he writ against Luther nor did any Catholick Prince forbear to enter into the strictest alliance with him notwithstanding the Popes Bulls of Excommunication Deprivation and Interdiction nor was there one Mass the less said for it in England and after his death his obsequies were with all possible solemnity observed as hath been said before in Paris at Nostre Dame by Francis the First notwithstanding all those Bulls from Rome in all which nothing can be more observable than that the great Emperor Charles the Fifth who had threatned and compelled that weak humorous Pope into all those acts of folly and presumption against the King had no sooner made him commit that insolence but himself entred into a straiter friendship and confederacy with the Excommunicated King than had ever before been between them The other reason why they will very unwillingly expose their interest to this manner of debate is That it would divide their party which if they were solicitous only for truth would not prevail with them Other Catholick Kingdoms and Nations which differ from one another as well in the profession as the exercise of the Roman Religion as the French hold a Council to be above the Pope and the Spaniards the Pope to be above a Council and many other particulars when they come to know that the Crown and Church of England have established only amongst themselves such an exercise of Christian Religion that in all the substantial and essential points is the same which they profess without censuring them or what they find fit to do in their Countries and have only made such alterations as by the constitution of that Kingdom they may lawfully do and which they find more agreeable to the manners of the Nation and for the peace and happiness of the people They will not think themselves concerned in the policy of other Kingdoms nor the Popes authority so much of the Essence of Catholick Religion that they are bound to support all his pretences which are different in all those Countries which are most devoted to him and therefore cannot flow from any determination of our Saviour which would have made it the same in all places besides they too well know that in all the particulars proposed the Catholick Doctors are not of one mind who are now kept united to them by not knowing the constitution of the Church of England nor that the Roman Catholicks in that Kingdom refuse to give that security for their duty to the King and for their peaceable and good behaviour as all other their fellow subjects chearfully give and as are required of all by the Laws of the Kingdom and if they would perform that common duty it is very probable that there appearing no more danger to threaten the State from them than from other men those Laws which the iniquity of their forefathers brought upon them by their conspiracies and treasons may be suspended towards their innocent Children until such time as their peaceable demeanour and good carriage shall make it appear just to be abolished This expedient for the reasons aforesaid will be obstructed by the Religious and regular Clergie who have so absolute a dependence upon the Pope that they are in truth subjects to no other Prince and probably some few of the secular Clergie may concur with them though more of them if they can discern any security to themselves in disclaiming the Popes authority which few of them look upon as of the Essence of their Religion and have in their hearts as well as in their professions as sincere purposes towards the King and his People However I know not why all the Lay Catholicks of his Majesties Dominions should bind up their interest with those who have different obligations from them nor how they can excuse themselves from not throughly examining every one of the particular heads proposed by which they will receive this benefit and information that they will clearly discern what is necessary for them to retain and insist upon without which in their conscience as thus informed they cannot continue members of the Catholick Church and what is so much of the policy of the State that is warrantable or unwarrantable only as it is established by the Soveraign authority and by this means they will know how to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to render unto God that which belongs unto God the just distribution whereof is of an equal concernment to all Christians being equally enjoyned by our Saviour Christ. THE END A Brief Catalogue of Books newly Printed and Reprinted for R. Royston Bookseller to his Most Sacred Majestie THe Works of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond D. D. containing a Collection of Discourses chiefly Practical with many Additions and Corrections from the Author 's own hand together with the Life of the Author enlarg'd by the Reverend Dr. Fell Dean of Christ Church in Oxford in large Folio Nova Vetera Or a Collection of Polemical Discourses addressed against the Enemies of the Church of England both Papists and Fanaticks in large Folio by Ieremiah Taylor Chaplain in Ordinary to King Charles the First of Blessed Memory and late Lord Bishop of Down and Conner Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church With the Prayers Hymns and Lessons themselves taken out of their Authentick Authors In Three Parts In Octavo New The Christian Sacrifice and the Devout Christian and Advice to a Friend these last three Books written by the Reverend S. P. D. D. in 12. Eph. 4. 31. Pag. 11. Pag. 26. Pag. 31. Pag. 32. Pag. 219. Pag. 35. Pag. 68. Pag. 94. Pag. 102. Mark 16. 16. Ver. 14. Mat. 3. 14. Mark 9. 10. Luke 18. 34. Rom. 10. 9 Rom. 1. 29 30. Rom. 10. 9 1 Cor. 3. 11 12. 1 Cor. 4. 5. Mat. 13. 29 30. Lib. 9. Ep. 39. Phil. 1. 15 18. 2 Esa. 4. 21. 26 27. Numb 12. 1. Zach. 8. 19.