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Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
friend_n	answer_n	letter_n	receive_v	778	5	5.2253	4	false

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ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A89004	A late printed sermon against false prophets, vindicated by letter, from the causeless aspersions of Mr. Francis Cheynell. / By Jasper Mayne, D.D. the mis-understood author of it.	Mayne, Jasper, 1604-1672.	1647 (1647)	Wing M1471; Thomason E392_15; ESTC R201569	52,704	63

me who doe daily pray for I begin to be weary of fighting with shades that this unnecessary conflict may at length end in a Christian peace between you the opponent and me the defender of From my Chamber this Afternoone Feb. 4. 1646. The Sermon against False Prophets J. MAYNE In the evening to the afternoone in which this Letter was sent M. Cheynell returned an Answer not so large I confess as I expected but composed of Language so complying with my desires that I unfainedly felt a new strife within my self how having hitherto tolerably borne his rougher assaults I should preserve my self from being conquer'd by his civilities Which I confess have such a forcible charme upon my nature softend and tutor'd to it by Religion that the World cannot afford an Enemy who shall raise such a tempest of persecution against me but that I shall be ready to afford him my Imbraces and Armes if he will be content to be received there in a calme I do farther confess that M. Cheynell by undertaking to secure me against the danger which might have followed a publique dispute hath not onely verified my expression and shewne himselfe a generous adversary but by that engagement of himself hath made me see what reason I have to complaine of my hard fortune which hath left me onely the will and not the power to be in the like kind as generous to Him back again His Letter was to a syllable this SIR You may be confident that the Messenger was not sent by me because he return'd without you and without his fees I never writ up one Letter to London that did in the least measure reflect upon you if your Sermon had not been printed I had not spoke one word against it I desire to deale with you in a rationall way and therefore I doe accept of your Academicall proposition or challenge so often sent me and because I find my prayers in some measure answered and you more civill then heretofore I shall deale freely with you I doe here under my 〈◊〉 b●nd assure you that if you be questioned for defending these Propositions in a Scholasticall way you know reproaches are not Scholasticke in the publique Schools I will answer for you the Parliament will not question you for any learned nationall debate about Prelates or the Common-Prayer-Booke for the satisfaction of your self and others I will meet you if you please at the Doctor of the Chaire his lodgings to morrow about two of the clock in the afternoon I doubt not but by his advice we shall agree upon termes fit to express the points in Controversie if you like the proposall be pleased to send your approbation of it in two lines by this bearer to Mert. Coll. Feb. 4. 1646. Your friend to serve you FRAN CHEYNELL To this Letter which was the last I received from him by the same Messenger that brought it I return'd this Answer which was the last he received from me SIR I shall God willing meet you to morrow at your houre at the Doctor of the Chaire's Lodging Where if you be as willing to submit to the termes which he shall think fit to put the Questions in which we are to dispute upon as I shall be there will be no variance between us there nor shall we I hope bring any with us from the Divinity School Where Sir you shall meet one who is so great a lover of truth that if you can convince me for being all this while in an Errour I shall think my self indeed a gainer by this conflict And no longer stile my self the defender of the Sermon against False Prophets but one who for being confuted by you ought to remain From my Chamber Feb. 4. 1646. Your Affectionate friend and Servant J●SPE● MAYNE Here if any be curious to know how this last act of our conf●●●nce ended or what Catastrophe did sh●● up the conflict between us which had so much busie Epitasi● and expectation in it I could wish Master Cheynell himself were the Historian Nevertheless none will have reason to thinke me partiall or unfaithfull in my Report having not only Master Wilkinson if I deliver false story but the Doctor of the Chaire to disprove and contradict me At whose lodging in Christ-church when we met First with a prudence becoming the gravity of his person and the Dignity of his pl●●e he told us that he could not think it fit to fit moderatour to any disputation which was not either preformâ and conduced to the taking of a degree or pro T●●mi●● which is a Di●●●ity exercise at which the Vniversity Statutes require his presence in the chaire Next if we resolved to meet in the Schools without a moderatour his advice was that Master Cheynell should have his scribe and I mine to write down faithfully his Arguments and my Replyes which thus taken and compared would not be so liable to the variations of report as when the eares and memories of the h●●●ers are their only Register There remained but one difficulty which was how to make us agree upon questions fit to be disputed in such a publike way M. Cheynell utterly refused Mine and the Doctor of the Chaire thought it no way reasonable that in the dangerous attire they wore I should accept of his especially the first Which upon M. Cheynells unlocking of the full extent and meaning of the termes revealed it self to be a kinde of Trojan horse consecrated indeed to Pallas without but lined with an Ambush of Armed enemies within For besides the Words Missall Breviary and Pontificall against which I before gave in my exceptions by A pr●●●●is decerpta popidoque obtrufa Master Cheynell said he not only meant those parts of our English Lyturgie which have been borrowed from the Church of Rome but the Scotch Lyturgie too as it was imposed upon that Nation by the Sword Which though it were a mistake in him to say it was imposed by the sword since the date of the reception of it in that Church was the year 1637. At which time the Sword of both Nations lodged peaceably in the Scabberd and though upon the perusall of it since E●●nde it the same in all points with ours but only in the contraction of the forme of the Administration of the L●rds Supper and so for the matter of it as defensible as ours yee having been turned out of that Kingdome and Church as solemnly as it was at first introduced that is by an Act of Parliament To whose birth the King and Houses concurred for me to have disputed publiquely for the second reception of it had been the way not only to raise a Northern Army of men against my self who would doubtless have thought it a very bold piece of insolence in me to disallow in a publique dispute the proceedings of a whole State but of such Northerne Women too whose zeale upon the first reading of that innocent Lyturgie mistook it for the Mass booke and thereupon converted their Joynt-stools upon which they sate into Weapons with which they invaded the Reader and chaced him with his New-born Popery in his hand out of the Church These Reasons being layed to those other which in my last letter but one produced to shew how scandalous as well as unsafe it would in all likelyhood prove both to the Vniversity and my self if I should publiquely maintaine a question which carryed so much danger with it I prest M. Cheynell with the intimation which he gave me in his last letter which was to stand to that frame of Questions which the Doctor of the Chaire should contrive for us To whose Ordering of the terme of his first Question if he would submit I promised him to accept of his other t●● th●● 〈◊〉 in the D●●t●● 〈◊〉 the Chaires opinion the termes of his third Question were something hard in th●●● 〈◊〉 ●orm● into which he ●●d ●ast them To this his reply was that after the Words p●pulo obtrusa in his first Question he would allow me to insert these two words of Mitigation ut fertur Whereto my answer was that this addition would so litle deserve the name of a Mitigation that it very much increast my burthen and hung more weights upon me Since hereby I obliged my self not only to stand up for the Re-admission of the Scotch Lyturgie which could not be done without an affront offered to the Act of State that banisht it but for the Justification of all the unknown practices of the Prelates who had the contrivance of that Lyturgie against the Sinister reports and Calumnies of the incensed people Who as for some yeares they have been falsely taught to thinke the Order of Bishops Antichristian so looking upon their persons through the mist cast by some False Prophets before their eyes it ought to be no wonder if their best Actions have seemed Popery The Conclusion of all was this M. Cheynell at length without any farther Clouds of discourse told me plainly that to any other alterations then this he could not consent being bound up by his instructions to hold this Question only in the latitude sense which was signified by the termes in which he had Arrayed it Whereupon the long expected scene between us closed and the Curtaine to this Controversie was let fall And we after some mutuall exchanges of Civility parted I hope like two Divines in perfect Charity with one another THE END

declines that part of entercourse which obligeth one mans letter to carry some correspondence to anothers and instead of a confutation only multiplies questions and urgeth me to prove divers passages of my Sermon which M. Cheynell's part was to convince because the superscription of it darkly and the close of it more clearly required me to meet him at an English disputation the next day at S. Maries before the Townsmen and their wives very unfit moderators certainly in the points there to be discus'd I for the present to divert that meeting return'd him this short Answer SIR THough in the Letter you sent me yesterday by I think Jellyman the Cobler you have given me such a tast of your Logick as well as civility that I have small encouragement to meddle any farther with you unless you will promise hereafter to write with better consequence and less distemper yet Sir least you should triumph over me as one beaten by your Arguments not by your rudeness I have thought fit for once to return you this answer First that without the danger of a dark room as I told you before I cannot consent to meet you at S. Maries at two a clock Next that I do imbrace your offer to meet me at Latine weapons in the Divinity Schoole when the Doctor of the Chayre comes to town Thirdly that if your Syllogismes be no better then your wit which I perceive strived to be facete when it adventured to say that you feare my weapon will have more false Latine then true steele I doubt the Poet you contemne so much will go equall with you in the conquest Lastly not being ingaged I confess to preach thrice a day I will with as much dispatch as I can put order to your chaos and return a fuller answer to your strange letter wherein I know not whether you have less satisfied or more reviled From my Chamber this morning Jan. 22. 1646. The Author of the Sermon against false Prophets J. Mayne This Letter might have beene lengthened with many other reasons besides those already set down to shew how unfit 't was for mee to meet M. Cheynell at an English disputation at S. Maries as M. Yerbury did As first because the frame and carriage of the whole dispute between us in all probability would have been as irregular and tumultuous as the other was where because neither of them kept themselves to the lawes of disputation which enjoyne the Disputants to confine themselves to Syllogisme raised from the strict rules of Mood and Figure which admit not of extravagancy In the judgment of all Schollers who were present it was not a Dispute but a wild conflict where neither answered one another but with some mixture of ill language were both Opponents by turnes Next because the greatest part of the Auditory would have consisted of such a confluence of Townsmen and women as understood good Arguments and Replies as little as they do Latine and so the issue of this Disputation would probably have been the same with the former where M. Cheynell was thought to have the better by one Sex and M. Yerbury by the other Loath therefore to forfeit my discretion before such an Incompetent Assembly of witnesses with as much dispatch as one ingaged by promise could make I returned to his Letter this fuller Answer SIR Among the other praises which greater friends to the Muses then I perceive you are have bestowed upon Virgil he hath been called the Virgin Poet. Yet Ausonius ordering his Verses another way hath raised one of the most loose lascivious Poems from him that I think ever wore the name of a Marriage-song Me thinks Sir and I doubt not but all they who shal compare them together will be of my opinion you in your Letter have just dealt so with my Sermon it went from my hands forth a sober Virgin but falling into yours it returns to me so strumpeted so distorted in the sense and misapplied in the expressions that what I preach'd a Sermon you by translating whatever I have said of false Prophets to the Parliament have with the dexterity of a falsification transformed and changed into a Libell This I do not wonder at when I remember what the Physitian was who said that where the Recipient is distempered the most wholsome food turns into his disease just as we see in those harmfull creatures whose whole essence and composition is made up of sting and poyson the juice which they suck from flowers and roses concocts into venome and becomes poyson too Having said this by way of Preface to my following Reply first Sir confining my self to your method how you spend your morning thoughts being impossible for me outright to know unless your thoughts were either visible or you transparent I desire you wil not think me over-curious if I open a door upon you and proceed by conjecture You say you use to spend them upon a better subject then a pot of dead drink that hath a little froth at top and dregs at bottome To what passage of my Letter this refers or why a language which I do not understand should possess the porch entrance to yours I am not Oedipus enough to unriddle But if I may guess what your morning thoughts were when as you confess you did let them loose by your pen to discharge themselves upon me in a shower of rude untheologicall flat downright detraction though they were not employ'd upon a frothy subject yet they shew that you were at that time in his distemper in the Gospel a piece of whose raging and distraction 't was to fome at mouth Next Sir had I been present at your Sermon as I am glad I was not for I desire not to be an Auditor where I must hear my self libelled from the pulpit I shal easily grant by the taste which you have given me in this short Conference with you of the perspicuity of your stile and the clearness of your matter that 't was possible enough for me not to understand it I doe therefore acknowledge it as a favour from you that you will let me no longer wander in uncertainties or write to you upon the mis-report of a fallible Intelligencer but will your selfe be my Clue to guide me to what you said Which favour you have much heightned by robbing your weightier employments of so much time to convey it in as might have been spent in providing your selfe to preach thrice a day and yet not doe it so hastily or with such a running negligence as to be thought to preach but once a week As for your Text and the Doctrine built upon it at whom soever it was shot I shall not quarrell with it But how your Corollary should concern any thing that I have said in my Sermon contrary to your Doctrine I cannot possibly imagine who do there onely speak of the vanity of some of our Modern Prophets who can see Idolatry in a Church-window And do onely strive

and undivided as Christs coat But since the Soldiers did cast lots upon it so much heresie as well as schisme hath torne it asunder that 't is now become like Josephs coat imbrued in bloud where no one piece carryes colour or resemblance to another As for the Discipl ne and Government of our Church if you would speak your conscience and not your gall you would confess that the frame and structure of it was raised from the most Primitive Modell that any Moderne Church under the Sunne was governed by A Government so well sized and fitted to the Civill Government of the Kingdome that till the insurrection of some false Prophets who presumed to offer strange fire before the Lord and reduced a Land which flowed with milk and honey into a wildernesse they agreed together like the two Scripture-brothers Moses and Aaron and were the two banks which shut up schisme within its channell and suffered not heresie or sedition to overflow their bounds In short Sir I know not into what new forme this Kingdome may be moulded or what new creation may creep forth from the strife-full heap of things into which as into a second Chaos we are fallen But if the Civill State doe ever returne to its former selfe againe your Presbyterian Government which was brought forth at Geneva and was since nursed up in Scotland mingled with it if I be not deceived in the principles of that Government will be but a wild Vine ingrafted into a true Vpon which unequall disproportioned Incorporation we may as well expect to gather Figs of Thistles or grapes of thornes as that the one should grow so Southerne the other so Northerne that one harmonious musicall Body should arise from them thus joyned What Errors in Government or Discipline were committed by the Prelates I know not neither have you proved them hitherto chargeable with any unless this were an error that they laid an Ostracisme as you say upon those that opposed your Government I beleeve Sir when Presbytery is set up and you placed in your Consistory with your Spirituall and Lay-Brethren you will not be so negligent or so much asleep in your place as not to find an Ostracisme for those who shall oppose you in your office In the meane time Sir to call them or those who submitted to their Government A Prelaticall faction because the then wheels of their Government moved with an unanimous undisturbance is I beleeve a calumny which you would faine fasten upon them provoked I suppose by the description which I have made of the conspiracy of the False Prophets of Jerusalem in my Sermon I must deal freely with you Sir do but probably make it appear to me that this Faction in your letter was like the Conspiracy in my Sermon Do but prove to me that the Prelates devoured soules That they took to themselves the Treasure and precious things of the Land That to effect this they kindled the first spark towards a Civil War then blew it into such a flame as could not be quencht but with the bloud of Husbands ravisht from their Wives and the slaughter of parents prest and ravisht from their children Doe but prove to me that they made one widdow or built their Honours upon the ruine or calamity of one Orphane Lastly do but prove to me that the Priests whom you make to be the lower orbe of their Faction did so mingle and confound the services of the Church as to put no difference between the holy and profane or that in complyance with them they saw vanity and divined lyes to the people and I shall think them capable of all the hard language which you or others have for some yeares heapt upon them Till then Sir pray mistake not Concrets for their Abstracts nor charge the faults of persons upon the innocency of their functions Prelacy is an Order so well rooted in the Scripture though now deprived of all its Branches in this Kingdome that I verily perswade my selfe that as Caiaphas in the Gospell when he spoke Prophecy perceived not himself at that time to be a Prophet so you over-rul'd by the guidance of a higher power have in this Paragraph exceedingly praised Prelacy whilst you laboured to revile it For either it must be Non-sense or a very great Encomium of it when you say that as long as it enjoyed a root here in this Kingdome it had not onely a destructive influence into the evils of the Church but of the Civill State too If the Influence of it were so destructive of evils as indeed it was pray with what Logick can you say that Salus populi quae suprema lex est did compell the Parliament to extirpate a thing so preservative and full of Antidote both to Church and State Sir if mens styles denominations be to be given to them by the place clymate where they are borne bred I shall grant you are an English nay an Oxford Christian But if you preach maintain that Religion as to be propagated by the Sword I must tell you that an English Presbyter may in this case be a Turkish Prophet and that though his Text be chosen from the Gospel yet the Doctrine raised from it may be a piece of the Alchoran I shall allow you to say that the Protestants in Ireland had a Right to the defence of the free exercise of their Religion against the furious assaults of the bloody Rebels But when you tell me that Christ is King of Nations as well as King of Saints which I shall grant you and say that as one of his wayes to make Proselytes is by the perswasion of his Word and Spirit so if that will not do his other way to break the power of Antichrist that is as I conceive you mean to convert men from Popery is by civill and naturall meanes that is if you meane any thing to compell them to be Protestants by the Sword Me-thinks I am at Mecha and heare a piece of Turcisme preacht to me by one of Mahomets Priests In short Sir whether the Papists in England were confederate with the Irish Rebels I know not But doe you prove demonstratively not jealously to me that the Queene and her Agents had an intent to extirpate the Protestant Religion and to plant Popery by the Sword and the Army that should bring that designe to pass shall in my opinion be styled an Army not of Papists but of baptized Janizaries As for your bidding me dispute the right of taking up Armes in such a case with the Parliament First I must desire you to accept the Answer which Favroinus the Philosopher gave to a friend of his who askt him why he would let Adrian the Emperour have the better of him in a Dispute I am loth to enter into an Argumentation with those who command Thirty Legions Next Sir if I were of consideration enough to be heard to speak publickly to that Great Assembly having first kist my