Selected quad for the lemma: judgement_n
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A47974
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A letter from a clergy-man in the country to the clergy-man in the city, author of a late letter to his friend in the country shewing the insufficiency of his reasons therein contained for not reading the declaration / by a Minister of the Church of England.
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Minister of the Church of England.
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1688
(1688)
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Wing L1369A; ESTC R26839
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46,996
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46
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for that their Consciences cannot comply with the execution of some Laws made by their Predecessors in matters of Religion Constantine the Great Lucius Ethelbert by the established Laws should have persecuted Christianity but then they must have done it against their Consciences Julian found Christian Laws in the Empire but he could not be bound by them against his Will and retain the Authority of Emperor What would you have His Majesty do bring in an Exclusion Bill against Himself lay down His Crown and Scepter at your Feet and turn Subject to serve you Or would you have Him do worse prostitute His Conscience to your pleasure and act against the interest of His Soul to serve yours of the World Indeed what would you have Him do wiser and safer for His own Conscience and gentler and kinder for ours than what is imported in that Declaration which we suppress notwithstanding His Majesties Command to publish it and against which your Letter endeavours to stir up the madness of the People and to alienate their Hearts and Affections from so Gracious and so Wise and so Religious a Prince You would have Him perhaps represent the Business to His Parliament and leave it with them to excogitate some expedient for this emergent difficulty Well and what must He do in the mean time Sin against His Conscience No suspend For Gods sake then what is this stir for You know Sir His Majesty has already attempted something of this Nature with His first Parliament but with no success If you answer It was not probably to be expected then The Nation had not time enough to bethink themselves to take a Right Understanding of the thing and to apprehend the reasonableness of His Majesties Proposals To all this I agree with you Magna molimina tardè moventur Matters of so great moment and springing from such a surprising Vicissitude of State could hardly be so soon digested Yet His Majesty Dissolved not that Parliament till after He had condescended to Treat further of that Affair in His Closet with most of the principal Members and till He assured Himself of an utter averseness in them to any reasonable Complyance If you say then He must leave it to the issue of the next Parliament after so long a time as they have had to think over again You say right and so His Majesty intends and so He would have us signifie for the Peoples Satisfaction by Reading this Declaration Well but in this longer protraction of the time to another Parliament what would you have Him do Put these Laws in execution not only against the Safety of His Person but of His Conscience too Persecute what He accounts the Truth Apply Force where in His Conscience He judges nothing but Persuasion to be used I know no remedy for His Majesties Conscience in the interim but a further suspending and dispensing still with such Laws Nor do I believe that you or any Man else can assign a better Why He may not then make known the Continuance of His former Purposes in his first Declaration and why may it not be published by us the Ministers of Conscience and whose Duty it is of all Men to be most tender and of all others towards His Majesties Conscience And why not in our Churches and Chapels where we have insinuated generally to our People our own Mistakes in common with others even almost the whole Nations first hastily taken up false Conception of His Majesties Purposes Rightly to inform His Majesties Conscience so far as is becoming will not be taken amiss from us But if we find Him at a Point and that He is not to be moved from His Sentiment in these Matters I am confident none of us dare I am sure ought not to advise His Majesty to sin against His Conscience no more than we would do it our selves against ours Upon which Concession we cannot fairly censure and oppose in the manner we do His withdrawing His Authority from those Laws in the practice and prosecution of which His Conscience must needs be violated These are the Straits into which our Gracious King is driven at this Juncture He chuses according to His Judgment to offend Man rather than God Can we blame Him Nay ought we not rather to applaud Him for it We of the Clergy ought of all Men to lay our Hands upon our Mouths and make no Clamors nor give Him any Molestation on this account It is our own Doctrine in His Majesties Application while there are such Diversities of Religion among us and none more infallible than other on our Principles and while Temporal Laws will be medling with them and determining their Controversies unless they could make it a Shoo to fit to every Foot and to stretch to every Conscience such Mutations and Troubles of State as we meet with now are like frequently to return and the Government will ever and anon be off the Hinges new Exclusion-Bills to be brought into Parliaments new Plots and new Subjects for almost every new Prince To prevent such Convulsions of State and probably at one time or other Dissolutions of the Government as new Religions and new Consciences now a days multiply His Majesty wisely propounds that there be henceforth no disability on account of Conscience as of Kings to Reign so of Subjects to serve their Princes In the mean time nevertheless for the satisfaction of our Consciences as well as His own His Majesty further declares That he is resolved to use His uttermost indeavours to establish Liberty of Conscience on such just and equal Foundations as will render it unalterable and secure to all People the Free Exercise of their Religion for ever And to those of the Church of England principally and especially the Protestant Religion as by them profest and as by Law Established he will protect and maintain supereminently above all others as the National Religion That as we shall give the Check to no other so neither shall we be Checked by any in the free Exercise of our Consciences nor in the quiet and full enjoyment of our Possessions You would have His Majesty continue to us and protect and maintain us in our Dominion over all the Consciences of the Nation in the putting to Death Banishing Imprisoning Confiscating and by all other means not to call it persecuting suppressing and keeping under all others of a different Persuasion His Majesty would lend us His Power and Authority to do all this for us too if in Conscience he could but I think we ought to excuse him in that and I hope all Persons of Honour and Conscience will tenderly consider His Majesties Case as their own and be satisfied that the King does no more in this Affair than what any truly Conscientious Man even on our own Principles must have done And as Himself has been on this account hitherto necessitated to suspend the execution of the Penal Laws and Test so they also when convened together in
When the King in whose Prerogative it is to make Peace and War sets forth a Declaration signifying His purpose of making War suppose with the Dutch or French May His Officers in the several Places where this Declaration is to be published suppress it and refuse to obey His Command unless according to you they can approve the Matter of it and be satisfied in the King's Reasons and Grounds of the War I see not but upon your Doctrine there is more Reason for it here than where you would instigate us of the Clergy to give so dangerous and pernicious a precedent to the whole Nation A Consent of Acquiscence and Submission as I said to the Wisdom and Justice of the King is enough in such Cases and with no more than that Armies of their Subjects do follow our Princes into the Field with the expence of their Blood and Treasure and not stand bogling as you would have us at nothing but Reading or Publishing His Majesties Declaration On this Principle it will be hard for His Majesty on whatever just and necessary occasion to raise an Army among Disciples of your teaching Nay it is a wonder if suffered to proceed that it does not disband that He has There is rarely a Concurrence of all Judgments and Votes to the making of the Laws themselves in Parliament and so not such a Consent as we call internal Nevertheless an external or if you will call it a permissive Consent of all to the Enacting and Publishing it as a Law. Now suppose any of the Members of such a Parliament giving the Charge at an Assize or Sessions in the Office of one of His Majesties Judges or Justices of the Peace must he pass over and omit the recital or reading of such Laws as he does not in his own Judgment approve or to which he had before refused his consent and suffrage in Parliament Many of those Breves or Letters Patents in the behalf of poor distressed Sufferers to which we are required to excite the Peoples Charity I have heard accounted by Clergy-Men little better than Cheats and yet make no scruple of reading them and that with a whatsoever Law Statute or Provision to the contrary notwithstanding Innumerable Instances of this kind might be offered if there were need to shew that he who cannot consent to the Declaration with a Consent of Approbation may yet read it with a Consent of Acquiescence and Submission And further what if you cannot Consent to the matter of the Declaration or the Expediency of it in it self can you not consent to Read it in the nature of a Proposal Not as common Cryers altogether but yet as Men whom our Ordinaries as well as the King do make use of to these purposes His Majesty would have us signifie His Pleasure that he would Treat with His People by their Representatives in Parliament concerning the necessity of His Suspension of the Penal Laws at present and about certain Overtures of Terms and Conditions offered in Exchange for the Repeal of them for the future All this is but by way of Proposal Conditions and Terms offered and all the way with a reserve to the Parliament No absolute Consent is required but only conditional if such propositions be liked or can be made practicable What if it be proposed to take of the Test and Penal Established Laws What is there in this contrary to the Laws of the Land as you frequently but rashly suggest Is the Repeal of a Law against and not rather agreeable to the known Laws of the Land As to the method which the King uses to this purpose what can be objected against our Consenting to that If any Nobleman or Gentleman design the Repeal of a former Established Law his Method for the compassing his end must be by making known his Mind and his Reasons Ordinarily Books are Printed and Published all over the Nation to this purpose before the Convention of Parliaments what does the King more in this matter than other Men And so for Recommending by us to the People such Persons to sit in Parliament as may comply with His Majesty in the business of the Declaration What is it more than Proposal And what is it more than we ordinarily do for the Nobility and Gentry at their Request Do not Letters fly about and Horse and Man all over the Country Night and Day for the Election of such Persons as are by one or other Recommended to us This His Majesty desires us to signifie by His Declaration but yet leaves us free after all And what is the matter now we cannot declare to the People these and others His Majesties Proposals We nor they are ever the more compelled or interpreted to comply with them Again What if we cannot fully consent Are there not many things done by us both for our selves and others but with an half or a doubting Consent Do we not perform many Commands of our Parents of which we are not so fully satisfied sometimes for their Expediency and sometimes perhaps for their Lawfulness And are not indeed almost all the Consents of Men in their Converses and Negotiations one with other of this kind Does the reading this Declaration ingage us in an evil and unlawful Action as necessarily as your Simile of Fire burning Wood Have we no Reason of the least doubt in this Matter Have we robbed the Bishop of Rome of all his Infallibility If there be as I believe with the most there is something of doubt in the other Balance then that is a good Rule which heretofore we used to commend to the Dissenters in the business of Conformity It is good to doubt on the best side Let us fear we fin against God by disobeying our King. That we are to obey the King in omnibus licitis honestis is out of all doubt Whether this Command of His be altogether unlawful is not so certain Away then with your Obedience where you see you may be most certain This was after our own Measures I am sure once if we have taken no false Measures since And further If we cannot serve His Majesty in this with so intire a Consent as we wish we could Can we do nothing of Civility of Honour and Respect Does not this move us sometimes to strain a little out of our Byass If this Declaration had been a Speech of my Lord Russel's or a Letter of Dr. Burnet's we had been so kind to make them as publick as we could Some of us remember the Ordinances of the Black Parliament and the Proclamations of an Usurping Oliver and how though I believe somewhat against our minds a little slavish fear made us buckle to the reading them in our Churches and to give Thanks and fast as demurely as the best of them But it seems neither Love nor Fear can prevail with us in the behalf of His Majesty If it were but to have expiated and retriv'd that Sin and Folly of our Ingratitude when we like Blocks lay unmoved without the least sense of His Majesties more particular favour to us and when an universal ferment of Joy and Thanks transfused it self over the whole Nation but our singular selves A stupidity in which your Letter would tempt us to be hardned more and more This say you must have served in stead of an Address of Thanks which the Clergy generally refused though it was only to Thank the King for His Gracious promise renewed to the Church of England in his Declaration which was much more innocent than to publish the Declaration it self in our Churches I remember one of the famous Oxford Reasons why the Clergy should not Address was that it would be but I thank you for nothing and that His Majesties promise was but a Superogation over those Established Laws which had done more for our Protection and Security already than he could add Now I though it would have becomed wise Men however happy at present to remember how fickle and various Fortune uses to be Who knows what back Friends the Church of England may have infuture Parliaments as likely as heretofore in their most Halcyon Days and how much we may have occasion to be beholding to a Le Roy avisera to obviate their Attempts But this I conceive was not thought of in the Thanking Days when our Manners to our King was much of that Cynical sort as of Diogenes to Alexander Pray Sir stand out of our Sun and don 't hinder us of that you cannot give us Well Sir you for your part in stead of mending one Hole are like to make two You are for no Address of Thanks nor any thing like it Wherefore I pray God deliver the Church of England from falling into the Hands of such Botchers For my part I would advise them yet to Address to His Majesty acknowledging their Errour beg His Pardon trust in His promise and give him assurance they are ready to Read His Declaration whenever He please to Command them I should not give this Counsel if I were not their Friend and Sir Yours FINIS