then in the world had put a period to the night of ignorance in which the Beasts of Prey had domineer'd and to their Monastic denns themselves The enlighten'd part of mankind was weary of growing pale among papers and sometimes red hot with arguing about terms of art and all those barbarous too that had formerly hid the God of nature and would no longer account implicit faith the only justifying one and could not more esteem the imposing of such a blind faith commendable that was made previous to mens quest after pabulum for their Souls then that practice of the boy of Athens who did put out the eyes of birds and then expose them to fly abroad for food The Learning then introduced into the world shew'd that the hierarchical grandeur of the Roman Church was not extant formerly in the learned times when the old Roman Empire flourish'd but was contrived in the times of ignorance between the Bishops of Rome and the Leaders or Princes of the Barbarians and that it had its beginning from the Inundations of the Northern people so that with Mr. Colemans leave by the way Popery may be call'd too a pestilent Northern heresy and that to the end that those Barbarians might not find out the original of the papal power and see how narrow the stream of it was at its fountain when every Bishop was call'd Papa as every woman is now with us call'd Madam and Lady that the Pope by affronting the Emperors power effected a strangeness between the Greeks and Latines by means whereof the Barbarians being brought up in prejudice against the Graecians neglected their Language to the decay whereof in the world not only the decay of the purity of the Latine Tongue may be imputed but also of History Geography Geometry skill in antiquity and even the worlds not knowingly then conversing with the Latine Fathers It was in an age of non-sense when a Canonist venturing to be a Critic told the world concerning the Greek word Allegoria istud vocabulum fit ex duobus vocabulis ab allo quod est alienum goro sensus and when an old Schoolman Thomas de Argentina thus gave the derivation of latria istud vocabulum fit ex duobus vocabulis à La quod est laus tria quod est trinitas quia latria est laus trinitatis But the very understanding of two ordinary Greek words namely 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 equal priviledges in ecclesiastical matters to the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople allow'd by a General Councel that were obvious to every enquirer into history did quite blow up all pretences of the Popes supremacy and one versicle in that long unknown Greek Book 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 viz. Luke 24. 47. which shews that the teaching of Repentance and remission of sins in the name of Christ by his own order began at Ierusalem did surprize thinking men with amazement when they heard a Pope and General Councel calling Rome the Mother and Mistress of all the Churches and anathematising all who think otherwise and saying further extra hanc fidem nemo potest esse salvus for this the Trent Councel did Thus then the abolition of the papal power here brought the world at the first step out of a blind Chaos into a Paradise of Knowledge and help'd Christians to demonstrate to themselves and to Jews and Pagans the truth of the Christian Religion for the certainty of the doctrine of which during that time of papal darkness the world had only the assertion of the present age that call'd it self the tradition of the Church but by the introduction of the Greek Tongue and other learning Christians had the sense of the Greek and Latine Fathers and those historical Records that brought down to them the certainty of the Miracles that were wrought in the founding of Christianity from the Primitive Christians who saw them 'T was the restoration of learning in general help'd them to say with Tertullian fidem colimus rationalem and with St. Paul I know whom I have believed and without the introducing of humane learning the Protestant Religion could no more have been advanced to its height in the world then men can be perfected in Astronomy without the knowledge of Arithmetic Luther came into the field arm'd with the Knowledg both of the Greek and Hebrew Tongues when he was to contest with the Errors of the Papacy and he having for his Antagonist Cardinal Cajetan who was the Legate in Germany and an eminent School Divine and who made a home thrust at Luther out of the Scripture according to the Vulgar Latine translation Luther told him in plain terms That that translation was false and dissonant to the original and hereupon the Cardinal thô he and the Papacy too had one foot in the grave Cato â—like fell eagerly on the studying of Greek that he might be able so confute Luther and his followers out of the Scriptures and was put to it to make his weapon when he was in the field And can any one think now that in this present state of England when we see so many that are Critical Masters of Experimental Philosophy and who by means of the great useful pains formerly taken by Erasmus Sir Thomas Moore and others in restoring Philological Learning have now entire leisure to devote their Studies to the substantial Knowledge of things and whose Motto is Nullius in verba and who know that if they would have every one trust them they must take nothing on trust from any one and who know that since truth doth always sail in sight of error they must all the way go sounding by experiment I say can any one think that it was less easie for the Sun to go back Ten degrees on Ahaz his Dial then 't is to make this Age run back to implicit faith and ignorance and barbarisme And is it to be thought that men who weigh Silver in Scales will not weigh Gold I mean not examine notions of Religion with care when they are so cautious in others Can we think that men who will not part with those Notions that salve the phaenomena will quit those that save their Souls and especially considering the proverbial addiction of the English genius to Religion and considering too that men by long use and Custom have been habituated to the profession of a rational Religion and that it can plead here a hundred years prescription It is certainly more easie to unteach men the use of the Sea-Compass in Navigation then the use of Reason in Religion and the inclination of the Needle to the North is not likely to be more durable then the tendency of mens affection in England to the Northern heresy so call'd and it is more easie to teach all Mankind the use of Letters then to unteach it to any one man and when the temper of an inquisitive Age is like a Trade-wind carrying men toward Knowledge and toward a rational Divinity they may
in King Iames's time for making the Oath of Allegiance a Praemuniment in our Consciences against Popular as well as Papal Usurpations I shall here call in Testimonium adversarii I mean the publisher of Cardinal Perron's long Oration made in the Chamber of the 3d Estate or Commonalty of France upon the Oath of Allegiance exhibited in the General Assembly of the three Estates of that Kingdom and in his long Preface to which he calls our Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance detestable but saith That the greater number of the Deputies of the 3d Chamber did frame the form of an Oath which they wished might be ministred in that Kingdom as that which bears the name of ALLEGIANCE in ours whereby the same principal Article is abjured namely That no French King can be deposed for any Cause whatsoever and that the contrary Opinion is Heretical and repugnant to the Doctrine of the Scriptures But this difference is found between the two Oaths that whereas the English one in one of the Clauses seems to exclude not only the Authority of the CHVRCH over Kings but even of the COMMON-WEALTH also yea tho it should be accompanied even with that of the Church that of France shoots only at the abnegation of the Churches Authority The Author however in that Preface and which was Permissâ— superiorum contrary to the Loyal Sentiments of the Majority of that 3d Chamber inserts very impiously and disloyally That Kingly Authority cannot come immediately from God to any man but by Miracle and that all the Kings whom we know do either rule by force of Conquest and in that Case the Authority of the Common-wealth if it be Vsurped may be resumed or by Donation Election Marriage or Succession of Blood in which Cases Kings forfeit by not performing the Conditions under which either they or their first Ancestors did enter whether they were expressed or necessarily implyed But neither that Author nor any other Roman Catholick Writer hath writ with greater Contempt of and Spight against the Power of Kings than some Nominal Protestant Authors have to the scandal of Christianity done and that I may shew how necessary it was that the Oath of Allegiance should be levelled at the outragious Principles of Disloyalty in Protestants as well as Papists I shall conclude my Answer to this Objection with a reference to a Book of some vile Nominal Protestants who having according to the Bishop of Winchester's Expression aforesaid derived Doctrines of Sedition and Rebellion from the Church of Rome 's Writers were I may add grown therein perhaps more learned than their Masters It was printed in 8 o beyond Sea in the Year 1556. and called A short Treatise of Politick Power and of the true Obedience which Subjects owe to Kings and other Civil Governors with an Exhortation to all true English men Compiled by D. I. P. B. R. W. Who the Authors of it were I know not nor the meaning of those initial Letters of Names but do judge it to be in Principles of Sedition and Treason as bad as Doleman of the Succession or Mariana and to have startled King Philip and Queen Mary as much as the Book of Killing no Murder did Cromwel I never in the Course of my viewing Books saw but one of them and the Reader will quickly see why no Library durst in the Reign of those Princes harbor it 'T is there asserted That the Body of every State may redress and correct the Vices of their Governors and ought so to do And the Book endeavours to prove the lawfulness of killing Tyrants by the Law of Nature and prophaneth the Book of God by citing for a desperate use some extraordinary Acts of private Persons there recorded and indeed a loyal man cannot read the Book without horror and especially when he shall consider what were the effects of this detestable Book It helped to provoke the fury of Philip and Mary to flie out into the Arbitrary Proclamation several Months before her death for the declaring of any one a Rebel and being without delay executed by Martial Law with whom that and other Books of that Nature printed beyond Sea should here be found And another effect of the publication of that and those other Books was to irritate the Government against those poor Innocents who were here martyr'd and who sufficiently abhorred such Treasonable Books for this Book was published beyond Sea and probably imported here about two years before her death But for the honour of our English Exiles then I judge that none of them had a hand therein I having observed many Words and Idioms and Phrases there to have been Scotish It is probable that King Iames and his Ministers had heard of this execrable Book wherein some Nominal Protestants trumpetted out their Principles of real Rebellion and no wonder then if the Oath of Allegiance was therefore framed with Clauses to secure the Government from all irreligionary Principles of Protestants as well as Papists It hath been objected in the second place against our being become bound to the Kings Heirs and Successors by Virtue of those Oaths that it is by all Casuists agreed that among the Tacit Conditions that are presumed to be in all Oaths and which are to be regarded as much as if they were express'd Rebus sic stantibus is one and that that therefore as none of the King's Heirs was then excluded from the Privilege or Right of his Lineal Succession by the Legislative Power so if things thus stood with him at the time of the Descent of the Crown that is at the time of the Kings decease the Oath obliged to the payment of absolute and irrespective Loyalty to him then and that thus when the King's Heirs and Successors were Kings and Queens of this Realm according to the Style of some old Oaths they would be Entitled to our Allegiance and not otherwise In Answer to this Objection I shall say first that if we should admit that which is not true that the Rebus sic stantibus were so to be applied in this Case yet it is most clear that the Takers of these Oaths who were any Members of the Three Estates in Parliament were thereby ipso facto and actually bound as I have said in the 7tâ— Conclusion not to do any Act there to exclude the Succession according to proximity of Blood and moreover any of the People who took these Oaths were thereby Morally bound not to choose any to represent them in Parliament from whom they might fear their endeavouring of such Exclusion Secondly Premising that there was somewhat of irreverence in supposing that the Legislative Power would ever afterward make a Solutio contiâ—ui as I called it in the Hereditary Monarchy yet it must be said that any supposed Act of that kind would be Null and Void as the Loyal and Learned late Writers of the Succession have shewed and to whose Writers of that Subject I refer and therefore our Obligations to
and Principles Religionary and indeed to speak more properly of that part of Mens Principles only that is Irreligionary and against Nature The words of exterminating and recalling are often used by Cicero as signifying the contrary and when Mr. Coleman's Letters shewed such an imperious design in him for the Revocation of Popery that had been driven away and banished or exterminated hence by so many Acts of Parliament and even for the Extermination of Heresie out of the North as occasioned such apprehensions in the Government of what was intended by other innocent and modest Papists that made the gentlest of Princes in a Speech in the Oxford Parliament say and if it be practicable the ridding our selves quite of all of that Party that have any considerable Authority c. none need wonder at the past warmth of Subjects expressed against the Recalling of the Exterminated Papal Power nor yet at the warmth of their Zeal against the Principles of the Iesuites propagating an Internal Power here when they had been exterminated from Rome it self and when the Lord Chancellors Speech to both Houses had mentioned the Proceedings against Protestants in Foreign Parts to look as if they were intended to make way for a general Extirpation They are poor Judges of things who think that Doctrines of Religion cannot be said to be exterminated out of Kingdoms and their Laws without the Banishment of the Persons professing them Who accounts not Protestancy sufficiently exterminated from being the State-Religion in Italy and yet Sandies his Europae speculum tells us That there were 40000 professed Protestants there Is not Iudaism sufficiently Exterminated from being the Religion at Rome tho thousands of professed Iews are there tolerated 'T is the publick approbation of Tenets or Doctrines and not any forbearance or indulgence to persons who prosess them that gives Doctrines a place within the Religion of a State for to make any State approve of a Doctrine contrary to what it hath Established is a Contradiction But the truth is the famous Nation of the Iews formerly Heavens peculiar People on Earth having not been more generally guilty of Idolatry during their prosperity than of Superstition during their Captivity and Oppression and Extermination from their Country hath taught the World this great truth that the readiest way to propagate Superstition and Error is by the Exterminium and Banishment of Persons Whatever Church any men call their Mother if the Magistrate finds them to own the Interest of their Country as their Mother and to honour their true Political Father they cannot wish their days more long in the Land than I shall do I remember under the Vsurpation there passed an Act of Parliament as 't was called for the banishment of that famous Boute-feu Iohn Lilburn and under the Penalty of the Vltimum supplicium and he shortly after returning to England and being tried in London where he was universally known and the only thing issuable before the Iurors being whether he was the same John Lilburn those good men and true thought him so much transubstantiated as to bring him in not guilty and when ever I find any Papist not only willing to change the Name Papist for Catholick but the thing Papistry for the Principles of the Church of Rome under its first good Bishops and before Popes beyond a Patriarchal Power aspired to be Universal Bishops and Universal Kings and that even a Iesuite instead of the Rule of Iesuita est omnis homo hath alter'd his Morals and Principles pursuant to the Pope's said Decree so far as truly to say Ego non sum ego I shall not intermeddle in awakening Penal Laws to touch either his life or liberty Nor can any Presbyterians with justice reflect on the Zeal of any for the Continuance of the Laws for the Extermination of Presbytery when they shall reflect on the Royal Family having been by their means as is set forth in this Discourse exterminated out of the Realm into Foreign Popish Countries and of which they might easily have seen the ill effects if their understandings had not been very scandalously dull But there is another happy Extermination that I have in this Discourse from Natural Causes predicted to my Country and that is of the fears and jealousies that have been so prevalent during our late fermentation concerning which the Reader will shortly find himself referred to in many Pages in this Discourse and to have directed him to all of that Nature would have made the Index a Book I have in this Discourse designing to eradicate the fears of Popery out of the Minds of timid Protestants by the most rational perswasions I could shewed somewhat of Complaisance in sometimes humouring their Suppositions of things never likely to come to pass I have accorded with them in the possibility of the Event of Arch-Bishop Vsher's Famous Prophecy tho I account the same as remote from likelihood as any one could with it and do believe that if that Great and Learned Man could have foreseen the mischief that Prophecy hath occasioned by making so many of the Kings good Subjects disquieted thereby and which by at once Chilling their Hearts and heating their Heads hath rendered them less qualified for a chearful and steady discharge of their respective Duties he would have consulted privately with many other Learned and Pious Divines about the intrinsick weight of the matter revealed to him before he had exposed it to the World for that in the days when God spake by the Prophets yet even then the Spirits of the Prophets were always subject to the Prophets and there is no Fire in the World so bad a Master as the Fire of Prophecy It is observable that there hath scarce since this Prophecy been a Conjuncture of time wherein men uneasie to themselves would make the Government so but this Prophecy hath been reprinted in it and cryed about and few Enthusiasts but are as perfect in it as a Sea-man in his Compass The substance of it was to foretel Persecution that should happen in England from the Papists in the way of a sudden Massacre and that the Pope should be the Contriver of it and that if the King were restored it might be a little longer deferred A person less learned than that Great Prelate could easily give an Account of the past Out-rages of Massacres that have been perpetrated by Papists and of the tendency of the Iesuites Principles to the very legitimating of Future ones but the most Pious and Learned Man in the World ought with the greatest Caution imaginable to pretend to Divine Revelation of Future Contingencies in a matter both so unlikely and so odious as this and which might probably occasion so much Odium to so many innocent Papists and so much needless trouble to so many timid Protestants That Pious and Great Prelate did not I believe foresee that at the time when his Prophecy should dart its most fearful influence St. Peter's Chair would be filled
But if this Question of Toleration had not here been at the end of its Race and if no such thing had happened as the Declaration of Indulgence and Dissenters thereby manumitted from Penal Laws saying Soul take thy ease and presently Acting the Part of felo de se by effecting the Cancelling of that Declaration and if the Controversy were now to begin to start forward I account it would cause but a very short fermentation among us For no Books need be writ to prove the lawfulness of what an Act of Parliament hath permitted to every private Family and to a certain number of other persons to participate therein with them And if Dissentership would now call for more Toleration it s very being called on to name its Tenets in order â—o the security of the Government in granting it to more persons to assemble together in enjoying it it s very naming them would I believe soon perimere litem in the Case and some of its Tenets would perhaps appear too little and others too great to require the formality of Debate It is even ridiculous to suppose that any Iesuites and Dissenters would now dare to demand Toleration for the Principles of the Crown-Divinity of each mentioned in the Oxford Censure None of them would now dare to be Confessors of Religionary Principles that would make Kings Martyrs And as I think that the Pope needed not crave Aid from his Vatican nor the Oxford-Convocation from their Bodleian Library to confute monstrous Tenets Condemned by either for in this Case according to the words of Tertullian advers Valent. Demonstrare solummodo destruere est so I likewise think that both Popish and Protestant Recusants will be ashamed to crave Aid of Toleration from the Magistracy for Principles they are ashamed to own or indeed for any but what they shall first own and the rather when our Protestants shall recollect with what vigorous Expedition the great Owners of that Name in Germany published their Religionary Confessions as Alsted tells us in his Chronâ—logia testium veritatis where he makes mention of the Augustan Confession tendred to Charles the 5th and the States of the Empire in the year 1530 and of the Confessio Suevica in the same year and of the Confessio Basileensis in the next year and of the Confessio Helvetica in the year 1556 and of all the other great Protestant Confessions exhibited severally to the World before the year 1573. Such of our Dissenters therefore who have to this year 1684 made it their business to be Anti-Confessors by hiding many of the particularities of their Principles and giving the World cause perhaps to say Difficilius est invenâ—re quà m vincere and who yet assume the name of Protestancy will perhaps hardly think it possible for them to gain Toleration for their further being called by that Name without shewing the Title of their Principles to it As on the account of what I have said it would be a Persecution to the World for the most ingenious men to trouble it with Discourses of the lawfulness of Toleration so it would too be to trouble it with Discourses of the unlawfulness of denying Toleration to men who either deny their Principles or deny to give an account of them a duty that can plead as clear a jus Divinum for it self as any Form of Church Government and by Vertue of which Christians are to be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks them a reason of the hope that is in them with meekness and reverence There are some Principles to which it is by all agreed that 't is unlawful to give Toleration namely to those that disturb Civil Society nor would it appear otherwise than ridiculous to the hoodwink't sober Party of any Sect that when the Magistrates reprove them in those words of our Saviour yee worship yee know not what the Magistrates by tolerating them at that time should give cause to others to tell them yee tolerate yee know not what I have observed it in the Course of my reading that there is one great point of Religion on which the hinge of Loyalty doth very much turn that several Eminent Papists and Non-Conformists have not dared to speak their plain agreed sense of and as to which it may therefore seem very rational that they should and that is How far the Civil Laws of Princes or the Municipal Laws do bind the Conscience a Point that the Council of Trent could not be brought to Define and herein 't is obvious to consider that tho 't is on all hands granted that in any thing contrary to the Divine Law natural and positive those Laws do not bind the Conscience and that the jus Divinum of the Papacy Presbytery or Independency would not be caught with a why not on the holding the Question in the Affirmative that Humane Laws do bind the Conscience in things not contrary to the Law Divine yet are the Adherents to those Religionary Models conscious to themselves that in many particulars necessary to bring them into practice there must be a Sanction of thâ—m by Penal Municipal Laws and they hoping to have the Magistracy and its Power on their side and to Act in Concert with them according to that Saying of the Emperor to his Bishop Iungamus gladios and knowing that the Authority of the Magistrate to support both Religion and Loyalty and for the Custody of 〈◊〉 Tables hath as clear a jus Divinum as their Plat-forms can have and that therefore the Civil Power 〈◊〉 not let its jure-Divinity be taken too by any with a why not as it would be if the Question were held wholy in the Negative they have in their Writings been generaly obscure and short in that point and have hoped by their power and interest to keep the World from calling on them to explain But I have in my occasional Converse with some of the most learned of the Non-Conforming Clergy observed them in Discourse to speak out their minds plainly and Categorically enough that Humane Laws do not bind the Conscience and to account it an absurd thing to make any Penal Law bind the Conscience even in matters purely Civil and wherein there is no pretence of any things enjoyned concerning the Worship of God and yet where the things under Penalties enjoyned are of great importance to the State. The men of somewhat hot rather then distinguishing heads tho they know that Humane Laws are necessarily Penal and tho they believe that Oeconomics do best subsist by their Wives and Children and Servants being bound to observe those their lawful Commands by the Tye of Religion that they intended should be effectually obeyed have not considered that Politicks would likewise thereby be best preserved nor learned to distinguish the Penal Laws where the Magistrate intended to oblige the Subject in point of Fault and where only in point of the Penalty but our clear-headed and loyal hearted Sanderson who may
and a printed Devotional Office called The Office of the immaculate Conception of the most holy Virgin our Lady approved by the Sovereign Pontiff Paul the 5th had been much in vogue in the Papal World yet the Pope by his Decree of February the 17th 78. damned that Office and as I may say threw it over board And of this the Author of Iulian the Apostate might have took notice if he had pleased when in his Comparison of Popery and Paganism he instanced in the transprosing of part of the Psalms to the Virgin Mary after the mode of this Office that had been suppressed about 4 years before The old stubbornness of Popes against the making any Reformation of Abuses and Errors in their Church hath been commonly observed but I believe that considering the great Figure England makes in the World it may not be unlikely that the brisk Spirit of Opposition against Popery that had displayed it self in England for about 8 years before the Plot-Epoche and the sharp and learned Books that were in that Conjuncture printed here against the Abuses of the Church of Rome might much contribute to the laudable Proceedings of this Pope in those Decrees I have mentioned And therefore when Nature had thus enforced the Papal Chair in so great a Measure upon Recantation and a great deal of pretended infallibity was thrown over-board and that even relating to some Principles that might be called Religionary it may reasonably be thought that the same operation of Nature will produce among our little Protestant Recusants a tacit renuntiation of the Irreligionary part of those very Principles that both the World and themselves must needs see they have transcribed from Popery The Complication of the Principles of Irreligion that hath joyned the Iesuites Popery with that of our former Presbyterians Popery hath long been as visible as the great Isthmus I spake of that joyns the Mexican and the Peruan parts of the new World and as I being to explain as in a Dictionary what I meant by Popery I would not expose my self to the Critical Religionary Controvertists by nicely defining Popery the Observation being no less than a Rule in the Civil Law that omnis definitio in jure Civili periculosa est parum est enim ut non subverti possit but gave the Description of my sense of it as before in this Preface so if I were to give a Description of our Scotch Presbytery as Covenanted to be here introduced I would take the said Description of Popery and only mutatis mutandis say that by Presbytery I mean the power of our Presbyters in imposing Creeds and Doctrines and Rules of Divine Worship on men and the Presbyters jurisdiction interloping in that of our Princes and their Laws and the doing this by the Charter of Jus Divinum and as they are Christs pretended Vicars and do account that its intended Arbitrariness here in England justly appeared as terrible as that of Popery and that our Consciences being enslaved to a Foreign Bishop is not more inglorious than their being so to our fellow Subjects and that a blush being divided among ten thousand Ecclesiasticks after they had out-raged our Laws and our Consciences would have here been no more seen by us than one at Rome on occasion of any Popes there blushing after they had so done I have observed in this Discourse how that part of Presbytery that may tho erroneous be called Religionary as practised in some Foreign Churches hath here decayed and must so naturally more and more and was glad to hear That since the putting the Laws in Execution against Protestant Recusants those of them who were called Presbyterians have on recollection of thought and after Conference had with our Divines forborn their former Schismatical Separation from our Churches and that particularly in our Metropolis they have in all things been ameinable to the Doctrine and Discipline of our Church except as to the submitting to have their Children baptized with the use of the Sign of the Cross there and their Superstition in not complying with which will I hope not be long lifed The gradual encrease of the Christenings in some Parishes in the Country that I have seen Accounts of and in which places the Dissenters formerly were very numerous hath been to a far greater Proportion than the gradual Encrease by me remarked as to London and within the same years And a Learned Divine who is Minister of a Parish not far from London hath acquainted me That the number of Communicants being there about the beginning of those years but a 100 hath since arisen to 400 and I believe that generally the numbers of Conformists may have much encreased in the Country beyond the proportion of their Encrease in the City and may probably do so for some years Tho there are several Merchants and rich Traders in our Metropolis who are Dissenters yet I have observed that the gross of their numbers consists there of ordinary Retail-traders and as these have been naturally Sufferers there by the Cities so much removing Westward and by the Retail-trade being so much gone to the other end of the Town and are likely so to be more and more so it hath been and will be natural to them to be more and more querulous according to the saying of Omne invalidum est Querulum And in this Case it will be natural to them both to support their decaying Trade by Religionary Combinations and perhaps to fancy Religion it self breaking together with their Bankrupsy and both for the Consoling one another as Socii doloris and likewise relieving one another thereby to endeavour to keep Heterodox Religionary Societies as long and as much as they can But Necessity the known Mother of Industry must naturally in time cure them of their Poverty and Temptation to Heterodoxy thereby Our Quakers are by many thought to be a kind of a Roma subterranea but whether justly or no I enquire not nor shall I give my opinion in it till the Principles of their Light within shall be exposed to that without many of which Principles have hitherto been by them kept as hid from the World as were the Subterraneous Lights preserved in the Roman Monuments and as to which Principles they are perhaps conscious that when they shall be exposed to the Air and Light of the Sun they will be as naturally extinguished as those Monumental Lights were when occasionally brought into the open Air. But one of their known Tenets being the unlawfulness of Oaths I account they have an advantage thereby beyond the Presbyterians or Independents in their Claim to Indulgence by demanding it in a Doctrinal point wherein there is Dâ—gnus vindice nodus by reason of some words in the 5th of St. Matthew and 5th of St. Iames seeming primâ facie very emphatically and vehemently to forbid all manner of swearing as the Commentators generally observe And in this point they are entituled to a very true and
the City of London was burnt in the Year 1666 by the Papists designing thereby to introduce Arbitrary Power and Popery into this Kingdom they will not think it strange that they should not be permitted to live in any of our Cities again till they have shew'd how orderly they can live in one of their own And therefore I think we may without breach of Civility or at least violation of justice apply to them some part of the words which I find quoted by Dr. Bramhall Lord Bishop of Derry in his just vindication of the Church of England out of Gers. part 4. Ser. de pace unit Graec. as the farewell Speech to the Bishop of Rome when the Graecian and all other Eastern Churches parted from him whom they acknowledged only as a Patriarch Namely We acknowledg your Power we cannot satisfie your Covetousness live by your selves How it is in the case of the People of Switzerland Papists and Protestants living apart by themselves in several Cantons cannot be unknown to your Lordship Nor that the Protestants and Papists when they there made their League at first joyntly to maintain their Liberties against the House of Austria then agreed upon this also That if any of the Natives living in the Cantons of either side should change their Religion that then they should be permitted respectively to sell their goods and transplant themselves to the Canton whose Religion they embraced But I shall tell your Lordship That of late the Popish Canton Switz did break this agreement and would not suffer some of their Native Inhabitants to partake of this freedom and did confiscate the goods of some Families that changed their Religion and at the instigation of the Fryars and Iesuits they condemned some of them to death and others to the Gallyes which was the cause of a Commotion among them The Gentleman of Ireland who discourst somewhat to me of the Transplantation of the Irish Papists told me it was into the Province of Connaught and think into the In-land parts of that Countrey for to have trusted them to live in Maritine Towns there whereby they might have let in an invading Popish or other Forrainer were to have trusted them with the power of the Keys of the Kingdom And he further told me That the transplantation was managed with much satisfactory tenderness to those Papists and that as to English and Irish it had partly the nature of a bargain that gave content on both sides and secured them against each other after all the mutual exasperations that had passed and when 't was fresh in the memory of both English and Irish that 't was the promiscuous and scatter'd dwelling of the English among the Irish before the Rebellion that tempted the Irish to butcher them and made the English Sheep for the Slaughter and when it was not likewise forgot that in former Wars the partition or distinction of the English Pale did secure the English inhabiting within its district I askt the Gentleman if they were not stinted to a certain number of Priests and care taken that none of them should be Iesuits and that the chief Governour of the Countrey should know their Names and whether any Priests Natives of that Country were allow'd them as to which enquiries he did not fully satisfie me but I supposed that since all Religions have a Priest-hood that somewhat of that kind was allowed them and that since the Order of the Iesuits was invented in the Year 1540. by the Pope as a Poysonous Stumm to put a new fermentation into the Romish Ecclesiastical Rites and Discipline which were almost dead with age and like vina vetustate edentula and quite dispirited with the Thunder of the Doctrine of Luther and the lightning of Learning and Knowledg then flying through the World and that that Order of the Iesuits was as it were a Court erected to begin with execution and to confute gainsayers by cutting their Throats No Iesuits were permitted to officiate among those transplanted Papists and considering that the Priests Natives of Ireland were the known fomenters of that Rebellion that both English and Irish might rather consent to some Secular Priests bred in Holland or France being employed in the New Irish Colony and who had no knowledg of the Intrigues of the several Interests in that Country and would not by kindred or relation to any of the great Families there perhaps be tempted into Factions I have heard from that Gentleman of Mr. Peter Walsh a Fryar in Ireland and of his endeavours in the Art of Cicuration of some of the Romish Clergy Layety who there were Wolfes and that without Sheeps cloathing and reclaiming them to Principles and Practices consistent with civil society and what proficiency his Disciples have made therein I being a stranger to that Kingdom know not but according to that saying bonus est quem Nero odit have the better opinion of him for those endeavours of his having been Crown'd with the Popes Excommunications It was a noble saying I have heard of one of the House of Peers this last Parliament I hate not the persons of any Papists but I am an enemy to Popery In like manner I should be glad that all the Mercy were shewn them that were not Cruelty to the Public but they are to excuse any one that will not forget that when they begun the last outragious Rebellion in Ireland which no words need or can aggravate they enjoy'd there equal Priviledges with the English if not greater the Lawyers were Irish most of the Judges Irish and the Major part of the Parliament Irish and in all disputes between English and Irish the Irish were sure of the Favour and any one would be inexcusable to this Kingdom who forgot that King Iames's unparalel'd kindness to his Popish Subjects in suspending the execution of Penal Laws against them in sparing their purses in remitting the arrears of what they owed Queen Elizabeth for pecuniary penalties nay giving into their hands what money of theirs as his due was in the Exchequer was but the â—rologue to their intended Tragedy on the Fifth of November And what provocations they had to be ill wishers to the Life and Crown of the last King as appeared by the detection forementioned presented to His Majesty by Arch-Bishop Laud and a Charge given against them in Print by the Reverend Dr. Peter Du Moulin which he offer'd to make good and ad quod non fuit responsum let any one Judg who further does look on the Parliaments Addresses in Rushworths Collections And unless some of them had loved ingratitude for ingratitudes sake they would never have enter'd into that Conspiracy against his now Majesty whose Life is the delight of all Mankind but theirs And yet since according to that expression that God is not the God of the Iews only but also of the Gentiles so it being true that the King is King of the Papists as well as Protestants King of
heard your Lordship reproacht for having any interest contrary to that of your Country or indeed to the repose of Christendom And as in Nature we see all heavy bodies tend by their own Center to the Center of the Universe so have I still thought that your Lordship alwaies endeavoured by the pursuing your own good to pursue that of the Kingdom and that your endeavours of promoting the good of your own Country have tended to the good of the World And that in every Scheme of your Politicks whether Civil or Ecclesiastical pollicy you have took your Model from the Great Architect of Nature doing things fortiter and suaviter and with regard to his works of which 't is said in the 8 th of Wisdom Mightily and Sweetly doth she order all things And he that builds so is a Workman that need not be ashamed either of himself or of his work that is both strong and fair such a Councellor need not be aâ—hamed of his Councel 'T is one of the worst sort of Reproaches to which a Councellor at Law can be exposed to be called a crafty Counsel that is one who secretly gives advice for the perverting of Justice and the law and to do that vile thing is more odious in a Counsellor of State And of this subject when I formerly discoursed to your Lordship I remember you were pleased to say it of your self to me That you had a great aversion from giving whispering Councel to your Royal Master and that it hath been your humble motion to him to command his Councel to give him their advice in writing Your Lordship is by one particular accident a necessary subject for the Worlds compassion namely by your having out-lived most of the eye witnesses of the many memorable things you have done for the World. If the people of England your Contemporaries were six Millions at the time of your birth five of those Millions are now lodged in graves persons above the Age of Sixty making but a sixth part of Mankind I reading lately in Tully de Senectute was pleased with what he saith of old men both de facto de jure praising themselves he saith there videtisne ut apud Homerum saepissimè Nestor de virtutibns suis praedicet Tertiam enim jam aetatem hominum vixerat he had lived almost 300 years when he went with the other Grecians to the Trojan War and where he gave such weighty advice that Agamemnon said he should make quick work of the taking of Troy if he had ten such Councellors as Nestor was Quod si acciderit non dubitat quin brevi Troja sit peritura He never wish'd saith Tully to have ten Ajaxes It seems the General thought that an old Commander would be weighed down with a tenth part of an old wise Councellor But Nestor had bury'd all those thrice over who were born with him and he lived to see his Country-men doubled once and a half 200 years being the space judged for a Nations doubling and if he would have his Atchievments in his first Century Celebrated and witnessed he must be his own Herald and witness in his own cause I will not apply Nestors case to your Lordships as to your doing right to your self by praise for you have no more occasion to do that then Tully had who saith there Nihil necesse est mihi de meipso dicere quanquam est id quidem senile aetatique nostrae Conceditur But do think that any Protestant Prince who can say he hath ten such Councellors and resembling your Lordship in the experience of near fifty years spent in the affairs of State in critical times and with success and equal to you in all â—orts of Learning and in the knowledge of the Law and publick Records and in Eloquence and Courage as well as in the hatred of Popery he may add Quòd non dubitat quin brevi Roma sit peritura i. e. without such dilatory Troy Sieges as have been formerly laid to it He saith elsewhere Apex senectutis est autoritas Quanta fuit in L. Caecilio Metelio quanta in Attilio Calatino in quem illud elogium unicum Vno ore plurimae consentiunt Gentes populi primarium fuisse virum And this Authority or Reverence of old age is so weighty that it seems reasonable that in the criminating one that hath this badge of Nature there should be what Tully calls authoritas testimonii and any single witness had need to have an allowance se primarium fuisse virum that would convict such a man for diamonds are not to be cut but with the dust of diamonds 'T is not for nothing that the Scripture cautions the not receiving an accusation against an Elder but by two or three witnesses and I am told that the Canon-Law requires seventy two Witnesses to convict a Cardinal who is a Bishop accused of any crime but heresie and forty four in the conviction of a Cardinal Presbyter and twenty six to convict a Cardinal Deacon and seven to convict any Clerk. And therefore I think that it was a commendable tenderness and worthy of English Judges in a Trial at the Kings-Bench to acquaint the Jury that they are to weigh and consider the credibility of witnesses pardon'd for perjury and both the Judges of the Kings-Bench and Common-Pleas resolved it That the credit of such a person was left to the breast of a Jury The Bishop of Rome who claims that Monarchiall power which is potestas restituendi in integrum Sententiam passos quandoque absolvendi paenam non infamiam quandoque poenam infaniam abolendi and who as Aquinas saith 2. 2 ae q. 68. ar 4. potest infamiam Ecclesiasticam remittere yet allows the School-men to apply distinctions to that priviledge of his and to interpret it of infamia Iuris not Facti for labem illam quae turpi facto annexa est nemo delere potest as Soto concludes De Iustit Iure l. 5. q. 5. ar 4. No man who ever he be can wash out that stain of infamy which by Nature is inherent in a foul wicked Act because saith he ad praeteritum non est potentia when the infamy is inherent by the Nature of the fact and not positive by Law. But still our merciful Laws of England allow a person after a pardon for the infamy of perjury to be a witness reserving his credibility to the Jury and who may after the former crime obtain to be belived by them when they shall have found that he hath acquired an habit of virtue by the series of many actions in his following Life no man being supposed able in a desultory way to leap out of a rooted habit of Vice into an heroical habit of Vertue and so è contra for that nature doth not pass from one extreme to another but per medium 'T is true indeed in case of Treason where the life of both the King and Kingdom is struck at and
staking his title to a Heaven and a Crown of Glory I have then such a concern for another as I have when I see a great Ship just launching off the Land into the water and do then apprehend an immortal Soul launching it self into the great Ocean of Eternity and am afraid of its being overset But when I think of a mans having honestly sworn already and in the greatest concern namely in the detection of a Conspiracy against his Kings Crown and Life and consequently having invoked the Omnipotent God to be conditionally his Revenger his Executioner as well as Judge and further think of any one that shall tamper with such a witness and offer him a great Sum of money as his viatical expences to hell to swear contrary to his former oath and by that New Oath to renounce his expectation of a Crown of Glory in Heaven and to endanger his Princes Crown and Life on Earth and to attempt a Mortal wound on Gods Vice-Roy in the dominions of his Soul I mean his Conscience I have both all possible horror overwhelming my thoughts on such a tremendous instance of the degeneration of Mans Nature and I have all the compassion imaginable for your Lordship on one of Mankindes pretending to think it possible that your house should with your consent be turned into a denn for such a Monster An Areopagite was discharged from the Seat of Judicature because he threw away from him a small bird that fled to him from the pursuit of a great one and it was therefore supposed that such a judge alwaies carried cruelty in his breast for that charissimum Deo animal call'd Man and such is the compassionate tenderness of your Lordships mind toward injured and persecuted Mankind that one of those may be allowed to Nest within your house as freely as a poor bird without it But birds of Prey I mean Romes Vultures and either suborners or witnesses suborned to recant have no plea for your Shelter and I am confident rather then your house should be a cage for any such unclean birds you would be content as the expressions of the Prophet are that the Satyr should there cry to his fellow and that the Schrich Owle should rest there and that the wild Breasts of the Desert should also meet there Your Lordship sees what a preferment the Papists designed you for that after according to some of the Narratives of the Plot Sir W. G. was designed Lord Privy-Seal you were to be a providore for a suborned cast witness and a Iackal or provider for the roaring Lion that walks about seeking whom he may devour In fine my Lord they designed your Lordship to be an entertainer or an Host for the Devil But your Lordships name being taken in vain by those who would have retained Mr. Dugdale to take Gods so and the Devils tempting any to undertake for your house being a Sanctuary to a devil are not new things for wonder when you please to consider that the Devil presumed to undertake for Almighty Gods protection when he tempted the Son of God. It seems the shewing to Dugdale the several Kingdoms of the Earth where he should be safe could not prevail with him to be a fugitive from his Conscience and tho it appeared in several Trials and particularly my Lord Staffords the temper desired to have him and that he was sifted winnowed as wheat Yet neither his Faith nor the faith of his Testimony failed him after all the cribration thereof and all that was gained by the endeavour'd suborning him against himself as well as others against him was only the fate of the Thrush who is sometime birdlimed and took by his own excrements Is it not then an example of rare modesty that the diabolical tempters should be the accusers of the Brethren I mean of some of the Kings witnesses that would not be Bribed from attesting the truth in the case of their Political Father The Age wants not the instance of an honorable Person who courting a Lady in order to marriage thought her at last not worthy his farther amours yet who because he did once profess to love her he fought one who reproach'd her vertue But his example is not more herocial than is the practice infamous for such who courted some of the Kings Witnesses both by importunity and gold to espouse their interest and when both were totally and finally rejected make it the the most study'd part of the Romance of their Lives to dishonour them and to shamme inventions of New Tragi-comic Plotts upon them but Plots so damn'd dull as to be seen through in the opening of the first Act and Plots that were most thin where the Actors cryed to themselves like Bayes in the Rehersal Now the Plot thickens and where nothing of the three Vnities was regarded and which no marvel if they brought such confusion still to the Actors as the Story makes to have once happen'd to the old Red-Bull Players at the Tragedy of Doctor Faustus when they complained that they had one Devil more than their Company and when they said a quarter of the house was carried away Your Lordship out of a generous indignation that such Whifflers in Politics should think to lay a tax upon the belief of the Kingdom both without Act of Parliament and without Sense and indeed contrary to the sense of several Parliaments did during a Paroxysme of the Gout cause your self to be carried by your Servants to be present at Councel when the Papists pretended Presbyterian-Plot was there to be considered And if it be true what Mr. Hobbs saith in his ingenious History of the Civil Wars of England That Monsieur du Plessis and Dr. Morton Bishop of Durham writing of the progress of the Popes power and entitling their Books one of them The Mystery of Iniquity the other The Grand Imposture were both in the Right for I believe there was never such another Cheat in the World the Mercury of that cheat being sublimated into the invented cheat of that Plot was too nauseous and strong for the belief of the Kingdom to be able to swallow We may therefore be very well allow'd to put the old great interrogtory of Cicero to these Catilines How long do you abuse our patience especially considering how much to windward we are of them by the detection of their real Treason and do see both the smoke of our gunns and those of their own they fire at us annoying them and while we have had the just advantage of Plaintiffs against them and whereby their recrimination against some of our great number has seemed only dirt thrown in their own defence and at worst but Catilines accusing of Cethegus and considering that we know it only proper to he Religion to justifie the Maintaining the dignity of holy Church by Lies and calumnies Thus Guymenius a famous Popish Doctor ex tractatu de Charitate Proposit. 7. p. 176. cites Bannez 2. 2. quaest 70. art
least one World of hereticks the author of the Compendium needed not by his Rhetorick to reflect on my Lord Bishop of Lincoln's Candour gentleness in saying yet if it be a breach of Christianity to crush the bruised reed and of generosity also to trample upon the oppressed I wish his Lordship may be found guilty of neither c. for behold any single Jesuite according to Campian tho but like a reed shaken with the wind is able to bruise all Protestant Scepters and any little toe of that Order can trample all Heretical crowned heads to dirt and the Number of the Papists in England if reduced to the least of Numbers is not according to Campian to be slighted if one of them be a Iesuite for that that one Jesuite will carry the advantage of odds against all Protestant Kings and Princes that one may say my Name is legion for we are many but as that legion-spirit could not without the Divine permission ruin a herd of Swine off from a Steep place so neither can all the legions of Iesuited evil Spirits in the World drive a King Kingdom from Precipices at their pleasure And Queen Elizabeth in spight of all the arts and power of Rome outlived eight Popes and lived to change all her Counsellors but one all her great officers twice or thrice some Bishops four times and died full of years and did see and leave peace upon Israel And now I shall Entertain your Lordship with a further Reason of my charging the present Popes declaration aforesaid about some opinions of the Casuists as carry with it a face of some thing like shamme and my reason is grounded on what was said in a publick Sermon before an honourable Audience namely that the propositions of the Casuists therein were not Condemned by the Pope in the Consistory which would have made the Censure more authoritative but by the Pope and Cardinals of the Court of the Inquisition upon which a remarkable thing follow'd the Iefuites in France who were much provoked at this Censure moved the Procureur de Roy or Attorney general at Paris to put in a Complaint against the publishing that Decree since it came from the Court of the Inquisition which not being acknowledg'd in France nothing Flowing from that authority could be received in that Kingdom upon which the decree was prohibited and suppress'd And may not the English Popish Priests say the same thing the Inquisition was never received in England and therefore that declaration of the Popes obligeth us not here and we will prohibit and suppress it as much as we can No doubt but the present Pope fearing that the Noysome and Infectious smell of those Opinions of the Casuists being more offensive to the minds of Men then any snuff of a Candle can be to their Nostrils they were ready to cry for the removing of the Candlestick of his Church out of its place went about to extinguish them in the most Summary Manner that he could and therefore attempted to do it by the Court of the Inquisition well knowing that in the Consistory of Cardinals all proceedings are so dilatory and the old magi there so used to do every thing pian piano that they would consume many pounds of new Candles in debating whether or no and how the old snuff should be removed and perhaps would have thought to have contented the World in the mean time with giving it some perfumes but the Pope being afraid of the Iesuites perhaps as sometimes the Grand Signior is of his Ianisaries doth not for fear himself should be extinguished by them so far as I may say follow the light within him as to throw away or tread out that snuff of those opinions as containing a malum in se or declare any of them to be ill as contrary to the principles of the law of nature in which case neither he nor God himself indeed could have dispens'd with them tho yet any honest and ingenious Heathen would on the least occasion given have declared them so As Cicero and Seneca and many others have done and which had the Pope done and the Iesuites or any Papists persevered in the making those principles the Rules of practice his Kingdom had thereby been ipso facto divided against it self and a diffinitive sentence had been thereby given by the Pope that all who had dy'd owning those principles and practices had been sunk for ever into the burning lake Therefore as I said before I hope this declaration of the Popes such as it is will give an alarm to our English Papists to deal seriously with their Souls and to consider as if it were for their eternities these and other Principles of their Religion and that if they will not be thereby perswaded to be almost Protestant Christians yet to be altogether Masters of as good Moral Principles as the Heathens I named and If any of them can but give us a Moral certainty of their Principles being but such I shall never repine at any favour that any new Law may afford to such of them If therefore any of our Lay Country men Papists not guilty of the late Plot shall desire to be heard and to say any thing toward this effect some of us have heard of these principles before mention'd as own'd by our Casuists and Priests and Confessors that are now thus condemned by the Pope and we did not believe that those our spiritual guides did own such Principles but now our Eye seeth by the condemnation thereof that they were before own'd and made rules of Practice Wherefore we hope that who ever do own them will abhor themselves and repent in dust and ashes and others of us did formerly think them Consistent with the Christian faith and the peace of Kingdoms and with humane Society but we now abhor those principles and repent in dust and ashes We are ready to let the King and Kingdom and the World have a moral certainty that we desire no power to change the Religion in England by Law establish'd and we are willing to receive Instruction from any that shall be appointed by publick Authority to give it to us concerning what other principles beside these Condemned by the Pope are inconsistent with Religion or the publick Peace and in case any shall offer to give us dispensations either for principles or practices contrary to those we renounce as inconsistent with the publick peace we shall be so far from accepting of such dispensation that we shall detect the offerer thereof before a Magistrate as much as we would an enemy to His Majesty We are ready to give active or passive obedience as to all the Laws in being We believe not the Bishop of Rome to have more power in His Majesties Realms by Gods word then any other forraign Bishop as was by Acts of Parliament and publick Recognitions declared in the Reign of Henry the 8 th We are willing to render the Kingdom as secure from
Capite usque ad Calcem retexuerunt ex divina Sophisticam fecerunt aut Aristotelicam saith he in vitâ Hier. praefixâ ipsius operibus And Doctor Colet the Dean of St. Paules whom Erasmus often in his Epistles calls praeceptorem unicum optimum did as Erasmus saith in his life account the Scotists dull Fellows and any thing rather then ingenious and yet he had a worse opinion of Aquinas then of Scotus And tho Luther had angred Harry the 8th by speaking contemptibly of Thomas Aquinas whom that King so highly magnifyed that he was call'd Rex Thomisticus Collet was not afraid to Pronounce in that case as Luther did And here it may not by the way be unworthy of your Lordships observation as to the concert that is between the Genius of one great Witt and another that Erasmus and Mr. Hobbs had the same sense of School-Divinity and School-Divines For Mr. Hobbs in his Behemoth or History of the Civil-Wars speaking of Peter Lombard and Scotus saith That any ingenious Reader not knowing what was the designe of School-Divinity which he had before siad was with unintelligible distinctions to blind Men's eyes while it encroach'd on the Rights of Kings would judge them to have been two the most egregious blockheads in the World so obscure and sensless are their Writings The New Testament was no sooner open'd and read then in Erasmus his translation and in the English Tongue but the Popes Cards were by the Clergy that playd his game thrown up as to all claim of more Power here by the word of God then every other forreign Bishop had and both our Universities sent their judgments about the same to the King which methinks might make our Papists approach a little nearer to us without fear of infection for we allow the Bishop of Rome to have as much Power by the Word of God as any other Bishop and 't is pitty but that Judgment of our Universities were shewn the World in Print and sent to the French King and particularly the Rescript or Iudgment of the University of Oxford as not being any where in Print that I know of but in an old Book of Dr. Iames's against Popery Cromwel the Vicegerent to H. the 8th had as Fuller saith in his Church-history got the whole New-Testament of Erasmus his translation by heart but the sore Eyes of many of the Clergy were so offended with the glaring-Light the New-Testament in Print brought every where that instead of Studying it as that great Primier Ministre did they only study'd to suppress it and thus Buchanan in his Scotch History saith that in H. the 8 ths time â—antaque erat caecitas ut sacerdotum plerique novitatis nomine offensi eum librum a Martino Luthero nuper fuisse Scriptum affirmarent ac vetus testamentum reposcerent i. e. They look'd on the New-Testament as writ by Martin Luther and call'd for the Old Testament again And the truth is if Luther had then set himself to have invented and writ a model of Doctrines against Iustification by works and redeeming our vexation from wrath divine by Summs of Mony and against implicit Faith and many gross Papal Errors he could not possibly have writ against them in terminis terminantibus more expresly then the Writers of the New-Testament did But the New Testament was then newly opened and the legatees permitted to read the whole Will over translated into a language they understood after they had been long by fraud and force kept out of their legacies by the Bishops Court of Rome whose Artifice had formerly in effect suppressed that Will and that inestimable legacy of liberty from all impositions humane being particularly shewn to Mankind there was no taking their Eyes off from this Will nor taking it out of their hands nor suppressing the study of the Greek language it was originally writ in King Harry the 8 th had received his Legacy thereby who before was but a Royal Slave to the Pope and the triumph of an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 was eccho'd round his Kingdom like that of Archimedes when he had detected the Imposture that had mingled so much dross in the Sicilian Crown 'T is true he retained the profession of several Papal Errors and such as he being vers'd in School-Divinity knew would still keep themselves in play in the World with a videtur quod sic probatur quod non accordingly as the learned Dr. Iones has observ'd in his Book call'd the Heart and its Right Sovereign that Image-Worship Invocation of Saints Transubstantiation Purgatory are and will be learnedly and voluminously defended on each side to the World's end Harry the 8 th therefore did in his Contest with the Papacy Ferire faciem and did fight neither against small and great but the King of Rome as I may say He attaqued the Pope in his claim of authority over all Christians the authority that Bellâ—rmin calls Caput fidei the head of the Catholic Faith. ' T is therefore very well said in a Book call'd Considerations touching the true way to suppress Popery in England Printed for Mr. Broome in the Year 1677 Whatever notions we have of Popery in other things the Pope himself is not so fond of them but that to gain the point of authority he can either connive or abate or part with them wholy though no doubt he never doth it but insidiously as well knowing that whatever consession he makes for the establishing his authority he may afterward revoke c. And so the Author saith p. 12. That Harry the 8 th for having cast of his obedience to Rome was therefore judged a heretic and that was look't on by Rome as worse than if he had rejected all its errors together He was a thorough Papist in all points but only that of obedience in comparison of which all the rest are but talk I account therefore in Harry the 8 ths time Poperies most sensible and vital part viz. the Popes supremacy did end in England per simplicem desinentiam The radical heat and moisture it long before had was gone like a senex depontanus it was held useless in a wise Senate He establish't the doctrine of his own supremacy without a Battel fought nor did any Rebellion rise thereupon but what he confounded with a general Pardon Many of the Scholars of the University of Oxford did mutinously oppose the introducing the knowledge of the Greek Tongue there and were thereupon call'd Trojans and others of the Schollars were as rohust and loud for that Language who were therefore called Graecians but by a Letter wâ—it by Sir Thomas More to that University and by the Kings Command which Letter is extant in the Archives of the public Library there the Schollars being admonished to lay by those names of distinction and likewise all animosity against the Greek Tongue and to encourage the learning of the same it was there at last peaceably receiv'd The day-break of learning
out of the Temple with as much ease almost as our Saviour did the Iewish Any one who shall consider the burden of Oblations that the devouteâ— Roman Catholicks in England lye under as to their Priests which we may suppose to be very heavy according to Mr. Iohn Gees account in his Book called The foot out of the Snare p. 76 where he saith That the Popish Pastors ordinarily had a fifth of the Estates of the Laity allowed them and that he knew that in a great shire in England there was not a Papist of 40 l. per annum but did at his own charge keep a Priest in his house some poor neighbours perhaps contributing some small matter toward it may well think our Laity will bid as high for English Prayers and for Wares they understand and see and weigh as the Popish Laity doth for Latine ones and Merchandize they are not allowed to examine and he who considers that the Priests of that Religion though thus pamper'd with Oblations yet knowing them burthensom to the Laity do feed themselves and them with hopes of the Restitution of Tithes to holy Church and even of that sort of Tithes alien'd from it in the times of Popery may reasonably conclude that our Divines whenever forced to fly to the asylum of Oblations will be restless in being both Heaven's and Earth's Remembrancers of their claim of Tithes appropriated to the Protestant Religion by the Laws in being and that a violent Religion and illegal Gospel will be but a Temporary barr against the collecting of Tithes from a Land only during an Earth-quake I shall here acquaint your Lordship with a passage in the late times relating to the Clerical Revenue in England worthy not only your knowledge but posterities and that is this A Person of great understanding and of great regard of the truth of the matters of fact he affirmed and one who made a great figure in the Law then and in the Long Parliament from the beginning to the end of it related to me occasionally in discourse That himself and some few others after the War was begun between the King and Parliament were employed by the Governing party of that Parliament to negotiate with some few of the most eminent Presbyterian Divines and such whose Counsels ruled the rest of that Clergy and to assure them that the Parliament had resolved if they should succeed in that War to settle all the Lands Issues and Profits belonging to the Bishops and other dignitaries upon the Ministry in England as a perpetual and unalienable maintenance and to tell them that the Parliament on that encouragement expected that they should incline the Clergy of their perswasion by their Preaching and all ways within the Sphere of their Calling to promote the Parliaments Cause and that thereupon those Divines accordingly undertook to do so And that after the end of the War he being minded by some of those Divines of the effect of the Parliaments promise by him notified did shortly after signifie to them the answer of that party who had employed him in that Negotiation to this effect viz. That the Parliament formerly did fully intend to do what he had signified to them as aforesaid and that the publick debts occasion'd by the War disabled them from setling the Bishops Lands on the Church But that however he was authorized at that time to 〈◊〉 them that if it would satisfie them to have the Deans and Chapters Lands so settled that would be done And that then those Divines in anger reply'd They would have setled on the Ministry all or none representing it as Sacrilege to divert the Revenues of the Bishops to Secular uses and that thereupon they missed both the Deans and Chapters Lands being sold. Those Divines it seems had a presension that the prosperous Condition of their Church would diminish the Charity of Oblations and therefore did not impoliticly try to provide for the duration of their Model by dividing both the Bishops Power and Lâ—nds among their Clergy And no doubt but in the way of a fac simile after this Presbyterian Copy the Popish Priests will in concert with the Pope even under a Popish Successor as well as now combine to lessen the King's power and advance the Pope's on promises from the Holy See that they shall have the Church Lands restored to them And I doubt not but a Popish Successor will support a Popish Clergy with what maintenance he can having a reference to the Law of the Land and likewise to the Law of Nature that binds him first to support himself and perhaps by keeping vacant Bishopricks long so a thing that by Law he may do he may have their Temporal ties to bestow on whom he shall please and perhaps by issuing out new Commissions about the valuation of the Clerical Revenue a larger share of First-fruits and Tenths legally accruing to him may enable him to gratifie such Ecclesiasticks as he shall favour But as I likewise doubt not that ever any accident of time will leave the disposal of such a great proportion of the Church Revenue at his Arbitrage as the Usurpers had at theirs so neither do I of his affairs ever permitting him to allow so large a share of that Revenue to his Clergy as the Usurpers did to theirs whom as those Powers durst not wholly disoblige and therefore unask'd settled on them toward the augmentation of their Livings the Impropriate Tithes belonging to the Crown and to the Bishops and Deans and Chapters though yet nothing of their Terra firma so neither durst those Presbyterian Divines who followed them for the Loaves and who once in a sullen humour resolved not to have half a Loaf rather then no Bread reject the Impropriate Tithes given them because they saw a new Race of Divines called Independent ready to take from those Powers what they would give and who were prepared by their Religion to support the State-government and some of whom had already acquired Church-Livings and others of whom in the great Controversie among all those Parties which was not generalrally so much de fide propagandâ as de pane lucrando would with the favour of the times easily have then worsted the Presbyterian Clergy in the scramble for that thing aforesaid that though Moreau in his learned Notes on Schola Salerni saith no Book was ever writ of yet I think few have been writ but for namely Bread. But herein on the whole matter the Vsurpers Policy was so successful as that ordering the great Revenues of the Church as they did and Appropriating the Bishops and Deans and Chapters Lands to the use of the State they by the augmentations arising from the Fond of the Impropriate Tithes to their Clergy and especially to those of them they planted in great Towns and Cities ty'd them to their Authority as I may say by the Teeth and kept them from barking against it or biting them which else they would have
in that Quarter to put an end to that which begins in Nomine Domini and that they will not be the rather willing so to do in regard that the North made the World feel the Malignity of both those Proverbs by its old well-meant charity to the Bishops of Rome And since in the days of Popery here in Harry the 8th's time it did pass in Rem Iudicatam that the Pope had no more power over us by the Scripture then any other forrain Bishop it cannot now but seem ridiculous to scruple whether he can thence claim more authority here than any other forrain Prince and he who was exploded here formerly when the Critical Spectators were not so many for having ill acted the part of a King on our stage of the World would be thought mad for personating one after the Play is over Thus too in a less people World Bartolus the famous Lawyer pronounced it to be Haeresie to deny the German Emperor to be King of the Vniverse the which any one would now account Madness to affirm And if in France hundreds of Years ago its Monarch greeted the Pope with the terms of fatuus amens for claiming a Supremacy in Temporals there 't is impossible he can be otherwise thought there now prosecuting a claim to Supremacy in things Ecclesiastic for even his pretensions to that the Clergy of France have damned in their Declaration by setting a General Council above him and which Declaration the great Monarch hath there ratify'd by a perpetual and irrevocable Edict And 't is but with a Consonancy to the nature of things that the Papal Infallibility should be concluded against in that Declaration and since as the Author of the Policy of the Clergy of France relates the Roman Catholick Church there doth so much swarm with New Phil sophers there call'd Cartesians and Gassendists whose new Philosophy has been there by Zealous Catholics observ'd to have ruin'd the mystery of the Real Presence for so the words are in that Book 't is no wonder if the growth of the Messieurs les scavants encreasing with the Populacy of that Realm makes any man's belief of his infallibility pass for a degree of madness accordingly as Mr. Hobbes Chap. 8. Of Man well observes that excessive opinion of a man 's own self for Divine Inspiration and Wisdome becomes distraction and giddiness and this probably may be the final result there of the late fermentation about the Regalia c. and the Pope be tacitly thought so as aforesaid and his Power there insensibly evaporate and without any visible distrubance given to it by the ratio ultima Regum for no prudent person would declaim reproachfully against any of a quiet Phrensy or molest and vex such a one tho living near him and would much less project the disgrace or mischief of such an one living at a great distance tho he should assume to himself bigger Titles than ever the Kings of India or Persia did and call himself Son of the Sun or Lord of the Sea and Land or like some of the Roman Emperors challenge Divinity or be styled Dominus Deus noster Papa And thus may the Pope quietly go on longer to call himself Monarch of the World without being call'd Names for it in France just as the Dukes of Savoy style themselves Kings of Cyprus without any gainsaying from the Turk who likewise did not menace the Pope for causing the Brother of the Vice-Roy of Naples to be in Rome proclaim'd King of Ierusalem nor when that Gentleman in Requital of that favour from his Holiness caused the Pope to be in Naples proclaimed Caliph of Bandas was the Mogul aggrieved thereby And thus probably too will the Enthusiast's who assert a Millennium or Universal Reign of Christ on earth with that quietness and gentleness that the ancient Fathers before the first Nicene Council did pass off the Stage of the World but it will seem ridiculous not to bind such Fifth Monarchy Men in Chains as Mad-men who have in England and Germany endeavoured to biâ—d Kings so and Nobles with Fetters of Iron and who would again make Convulsions in the State by the Diseases of their minds as once Mahomet's Epileptic Fits shook the World and who by promising us a new Heaven and a new Earth would confound the old and only give us a new Hell broke loose But the World will not now be blunder'd into Confusion by such wild Reformers In the Book of the Apocalypse of which Bodin tells us in his Methodus ad facilem Historiarum Cognitionem that Calvin's Opinion being ask'd he answer'd Se penitùs ignorare quid velit tam obscurus scriptor it must be confessed that the Majesty of the Style is agreeable to that of the rest of the holy Text and that the predictions of the future State of the Church and of its splendor in the World are not grosso modo utter'd or attended with any irregularity but on the contrary that God appears there as the God of Order and applying all the exactness of proportion and number and its very fractions to the great things foretold After one Verse hath accounted the number of the Beast to be 666 the next mentions St. Iohn's Vision of a Lamb standing on Mount Sion and with him an hundred forty and four thousand The Bodies of the Witnesses are mentioned to be unburied three days and an half The 4 Angels were loosed which were prepared for an hour and a day and a Month and a Year for to sâ—ay the third part of Men. The Woman was to be in the Wilderness 1260 days and to be nourished there for a time and times and half a time Blood came out of the Wine-Press by the space of 1600 Furlongs There were Seal'd of all the Tribes of Israel 144000. And in the State of Babylon mentioned in Cap. 18th where the voice from Heaven is heard Come out of her my People though all the various Sects of Religion that thrust one another into Babylon will admit of no proportion in their revenge yet it is there say'd Reward her even as she rewarded you and double unto her double according to her works in the Cup which she hath filled fill to her double But near the end of that Book where the great Scene of The New Heaven and the New Earth opens and the Vision of the New Ierusalem is described a Golden Rod was given the Angel to measure the City and the Measures thereof are particularized And tho I pretend not to understand the meaning of any of these obscure passages of Scripture yet one thing seems to me there as Conspicuous as the Meridian Light namely That as the Divine Providence did found the Old World in Number Weight and Measure so it likewise will the foretold New One. The exactness of the Numbers described by St. Iohn in that Prophetick Book written in the Island of Pathmos hath assured us that his imagination was much above the Vapors that
most vital part Sincerity hereby in danger to be exterminated For as 't is a thing well known to Merchants and Goldsmiths and Mint-Masters that if the Par as they call it or exact Proportion between Gold and Silver be not observ'd in any Country either the Gold will carry all the Silver out of it or the Silver all the Gold so it may be affirm'd too That if there be not a Par or Proportion observ'd as to Religion and Profit or Wealth either the Religion of a Country will carry out all the profit or Proventus of it or the profit will carry out or exterminate Religion I will not therefore here Prophecy that the World will never but say that it can never be fixed in a quiet and orderly State and free from the Importunity and Sedition of Hypocrites till its Present State be such that Men can neither get nor lose by Religion And till the World recovers this Golden Age namely that Gold cannot carry out our Religion and People us with Hypocrites or our Religion Gold the World will be but a great disorderly House and scarce worth any Mans being Monarch over it As the Irish call their last Rebellion by the name of the Commotion so some have happen'd to call the Present State of Peoples Minds in England which is so disorderly by the name of a Fermentation and this Fermentation can never be over in our English World till there shall here be neither profit or loss by Religion and that no Man shall be more or less Rich by more or less Combining with any Party to cry up or decry any Religionary Tenets or Propositions One would wonder that since Religion and particularly the Christian with its Credenda doth Crown the reason of Man and likewise annex by the exuberance of the Divine benignity a Crown of Glory hereafter to the Believers that any Men should for their belief of Propositions not contrary to reason and wherein the credit of the propounder was supported by Miracles expect to be rewarded in this World a humour that hath been regnant even among Christians from the time of our Saviour's being on Earth to the present Age and a humour that so poyson'd the Iews of old that they thought it not Tanti to have their minds freed from the slavery to Error unless the Messias would have deliver'd them from the servitude of the Romans and because he did not and did decline the being made an Earthly King when the Iews with their Hosannas were tempting him to it they Accused him Capitally for saying That he was a King whenas it was not he but they that said it and they put him to Death reverà because his Kingdom was not of this World and a humour that would not quit the Stage when the first Christians did but boldly still faced the World as appears by the notion of the Millennium having been so much applauded by all the Fathers of the Church and the Christians before the first Nicene Council But methinks from the Example of the Christians of old who did Ambire Martyrium to such a degree that St. Gregory saith Let God number our Martyrs for to us they are more in number then the Sands as if the work had been too hard for another Archimedes with his Arenarius to Calculate the number of the Martyr'd Christians and one Author accounts that excepting on the first of Ianuary there is no day for which Records do not allow 500 Martyrs at least and that for most days they allow 900 and who did ennoble the Christian Religion by shewing to the World an Example of Contempt of Death and even of Life beyond that of the Ancient Romans I say from the Example of those Christians who did in shoals dye daily for their Religion Ours may if they please be taught the modesty not to expect daily livelihoods from it and to account they have very fair play if they do not lose their livelihoods by it 'T is moreover observable that under the Iewish Theocracy Providence had then so ordered things that no Man should get or lose by Religon The Tribes had then their shares of the good Land by lott and the Levites only had that affluent proportion of the Proventus of the other Tribes that I have before Calculated and which would have tempted many of the other Tribes to have march'd over to the Officium and Beneficium of the Priesthood had not God their Monarch provided against that by the confinement of the Administration of the Priesthood to one Tribe and its descendents by natural generation But as to the notion of getting or losing by Religion I shall recommend to your Lordships reading a small Pamphlet printed in two sheets of Paper in Folio and call'd The great Question to be consider'd by the King and this Parliament c. to wit How far Religion is concern'd in Policy or Civil Government and Policy in Religion c. On the disquisition of which a sufficient Basis is proposed for the firm settlement of these Nations to the most probable satisfaction of the several Parties and Interests therein and subscribed by the name of Philo-Britanicus Who the Author of it was I cannot learn but do easily find by the Book that he is a Man of great Acumen of thought and that Matters of Religion and State especially relating to this Kingdom have been very much thought of by him and that the Author was certainly neither Papist nor Presbyterian and so far from being a favourer of the Church of England that he doth interminis make the publick Maintenance of the Clergy to have been the Bone of Contention in these Nations p. 8. and there saith It will be found to stand on the same foot with Abbies and Nâ—â—neries and their Lands and there further as a propounder would give all the Church-Lands to the Crown and the Tithes to the People and then tells us That all Fears and Iealousies and Animosities on the account of Religion will be pluck'd up by the Roots That Author in p. the 5th doth very acutely observe That Popery hath two Parts the one is that which is meerly Religious that is which relates properly to Religion or Conscience and which is peculiar to them such as the believing of Transubstantiation Purgatory Adoration of Saints and Images yea and the superiority of the Bishop of Rome over other Churchmen all which and those of this kind may be believed and professed without prejudice to Civil Society and as being matters relating to Conscience come not properly under the Magistrates Cognizance the other part is the opinion of the Pope's Power over Princes and States his obsolving the people from their Obedience his giving them dispensations to kill Princes and destroy them and allowing them not to keep faith to Hereticks and such like which as they are destructive to Government are truly no part of Religion but a politick contrivance long hatch'd by the Bishop of Rome and his dependants
and five hundred of Prebends after so many shall have drawn Blanks in the Lottery of Preferment those few that shall draw those Prizes need not be envyed for what they have acquired by the Theological Profession It was both with Justice and Prudence by our Laws caution'd that so great a part of the Clerical Maintenance should arise from Tithes for by that means our Clergy are engaged to make the interest of their Country and its improvement their own and had they not had so much of their maintenance sounded on Tithes but on Money out of the Exchequer as they had before this time lost excessively by Religion so Religion would have lost their Calling for that the price of Silver falling by the plenty of it and the plenty or encrease of our people making all the Products of our Country dearer it hath been advantageous to our Clergy to receive their Tithes in kind as it hath been to Colleges to receive a Quota of their Rent in Corn. But that still the maintenance of the inferior Clergy was too mean will appear even by the late Enemies of our Hierarchy being Judges for Mr. Nye in that Book of his called Beams of former Light having spoke of the Ministers Calling being once a gainful one saith p. 123. It is vtterly otherwise now not but that there is a very liberal Maintenance appertaining to Ministers and greater by the bounty of the Honourable Parliament then the Preaching Ministry have formerly enjoyed The gradual encrease of our People and Trade hath proportionably encreased the Clerical Revenue which on the beginning of the Reformation was presently sunk so that Latimer in his Sermon before Edward the 6 th said We of the Clergy have had too much but that is taken away and now we have too little and what Iewel in his Sermon notified to Queen Elizabeth of that kind I have mention'd and so languid was the State of the maintenance of the Inferior Clergy in her time that She by one of her Printed Ecclesiastical Injunctions Anno 1599. did under great Penalties forbid all Priests and Deacons to Marry any Woman without the Advice and Allowance first had by the Bishop of the Diocess and two Iustices of Peace which I suppose was caution'd by the Queen that the many Ministers who had not competent Livings to maintain themselves might not marrying Wives without Dowries by new Births encrease the number of Paupers in Parishes It is observable that in the late times the Iesuites did publish many Pamphlets in Print against Tithes and did animate the people to make Tumultuary Addresses to the Usurpers to abolish that maintenance of the Ministers wherein as their Politicks were so unjust to our Monarch that had they succeeded they would have barricaded the way for his return in the minds of too many of the People for fear that the payment of Tithes should return too so likewise were they so ridiculous by cutting off all hopes of the return of Popery here in any Conjuncture of time that less then an Army of Bellarmines would never have perswaded the common People to hear with patience any talk of Holy Church's re-establishment here Tho as I have shewn that Tithes by reason of the equality in the Imposition of them and the diuturnity of time that hath habituated People to the payment thereof are a gentle part of the Yoke of our Ecclesiastical Government yet if the payment of them or any other Tax whether of Excise Customs or Chimny-money were for many years discontinued there would be no probability of bringing either the old Stagers or new Comers in the World to consent or hearken to their being re-established The Critical Observers of the Iewish State after Ten Tribes had made a Schism from the other two judge that there were two Conjunctures of time wherein their piecing together was fesable and that the great true Cause in Nature that hindred the Re-union of the Tribes was the aversion in the Ten Tribes to make three chargeable Journeys yearly to Ierusalem and to pay a double Tenth yearly out of their Estates besides Offrings and other Casualties to the Priests and Levites from which trouble and charge they had been relaxed by Ieroboam and by his Model of Idolatry and therefore the People having most inclination to that Religion that was cheapest and knowing that if they return'd to their old Religion they must likewise return to their old Payments to the Priests and Levites did venture to adhere to the cheaper Golden Calf and had the Iesuites here effected from the Usurpt Powers the Abolition of the Clergies Tithes which would have made the Return of the Church of England so difficult I may well argue that it would have made the Return of the Papal Religion and its chargeable Idolatry impossible whose Yoke of Payments neither we nor our Forefathers were able to fear But when senseless â—anaticks came with those Petitions against Tithes the more sagacious of the Usurpers knew that the hand of Joab was in them and they knew that hardly any Observation was more trite then that Popery gained ground chiefly in the poorer parts of the Kingdom where the despicable maintenance made the Ministry so too and where too the Pope would no more hunt for Converts then among the poor Norwegians but that it was of use to him to have the number of his Subjects increas'd in any poor places in a rich Kingdom where he tho a spiritual King might yet call his Subjects to Fight Sir Benjamin Rudyard takes notice of Popery's being an intruder among the poor Benefices of the North in the Speech before Cited and there saith p. 1. That to plant good Ministers in good Livings is the strongest and surest means to establish true Religion and will prevail more against Papistry then the making of new Laws and executing the old and there p. 3. relates what King Iames had done for the supporting of the Protestant Religion in Scotland where saith he within the space of one year he caused to be Planted Churches throughout that Kingdom the High-Lands and the Borders worth 30 l. a year a piece with a House and some glebe-Land belonging to them which 30 l. a year considering the cheapness of that Country is worth double as much as any where within an 100 Miles of London And p. 7. he mentions some Passages of Bishop Iewels Sermon before Queen Elizabeth where the Bishop having in general reflected on those that then caused the diminution of the maintenance of Ministers he further saith howsoever they seem to rejoyce at the prosperity of Sion and to seek the safety and preservation of the Lords Anointed yet needs must it be that by these means Forraign Power of which this Realm by the mercy of God is happily delivered shall again be brought in upon us Such things shall be done to us as we before suffer'd in the times of Popery c. 'T was there before mention'd how that Man of God with
the solid weight of their Fortunes or Industry are come to their Center of Rest must necessarily hate all Projectors of Earthquakes in Church and State and being well on their terra firma will never care to walk on the high Rope with the Poise of a drawn Sword in their hands and who will never venture their heads by wearing any discriminating Ribbands in their Hats nor give their heads for the washing or the rebaptising themselves with little Names of the distinctions of Parties and who generously valuing themselves on unmercenary Loyalty and unbribed Orthodoxy will neither rob Caesar or God of the things that are theirs and not expect that their Prince should impoverish himself by paying Tribute to them and taking them off by Gifts more then the Patriots in Queen Elizabeths days did and when I consider that the more thinking and knowing part among these and whose ease is only infringed by seeing so many objects that are uneasie must needs think and know that solid Trade and Industry can never thrive nor the Kingdom by it till the false Trade of Religion shall be exterminated I do fancy to my self that we shall shortly by the strength of this sound part of the Nation be able to weather the Crisis or decretory days of our feavourish distemper and that our disease will end in a natural cool and that as some fermentation may be said to be perfective as well as destructive and indeed life it self is but a Continuation of the vigorous fermentation of the Blood which is so long maintained as the Mass of Blood is kept hot and Circulating through the Veins and Arteries so we shall find this fermentation that has been in the Kingdom prove perfective to it and a continuer of the life of it For as one very useful property of fermentation is that while it separates all heterogeneous parts it leaves the basis as it were or main Ingredient of the Mass clear and pure and discards from it recrements or superfluities and another noble property thereof is that it exalts the Body fermented to what perfection it is capable of these effects do I expect of our Political Fermentation that hard word that is generally used in expressing the present distracted State of the Kingdom and that it will naturally cause in the Body of the People that superfluity of folly as well as naughtiness to be thrown off which will leave the substantial part of the Nation more clear and pure and will end in England's Ballancing it self first and then the World all our useless Religion-Traders having been swept away as the dust of our Ballance I grant that the Animosities among many Protestants of narrow Souls and Principles may last too long on the account of Religion and a great many deluders will make a great many deluded desperately obstinate against their Ecclesiastical Rulers but the People of England are too many to be crowded into the Prisons of such narrow Principles and this great and active thing called Nature that is always busie and which sometimes doth its business even by mens Idleness and the necessary effect thereof their Poverty will by the general necessitous condition of Luxuriants and Religion-Traders force them to be industrious and that industry will bring us to the State of a Britannia florens and too of a Britannia triumphans and rescue a populous Kingdom from the decay of its Trade that hath happen'd by our having been embarrass'd with a Holy Kirk or Holy Church Militant against the State and that affirmation which appeared so senseless in the Theology of a Popish Priest namely that Respublica est in Ecclesia instead of the Church being in the Common-wealth will equally appear so in the Writings of Mr. Carâ—wright for that he there affirmed and to be in any man's writings as absurdly said as it is in the Lexicon Geographicum in Folio Cantabrigia est quoddam oppidum in quo est Academia If any Dissenter should now trouble the Press with ingenious Books to perplex the Layety about the lawfulness of the ordination by Bishops he would want ingenious Readers for 't is now as much out of fashion for People to concern themselves about knowing the demonstrative certainty of the true ordination of their Pastors almost as 't was among the Iews of old to question who were the true Sons of Levi by natural Generation a thing that none but the Mother knew Our English World is likely to the end of time to be too busie to mind nice Questions of the uncertain Genealogies of Churches and each Protestant now will admit of the Credo Ecclesiam Catholicam without quarrelling about the Latinity of the expression and as in the History of the Council of Trent where the Thred of the Controversie about proponentibus legatis runs through the whole Council when it was told the Pope that Vargas granted that if the thing designed were only that the Legates shall propose no man would have complained but the Ablative proponentibus legatis did deprive the Bishops of Power to propose and therefore 't was fit to change it into to another kind of Speech the Pope replyed That 't was now no time to think of cujus generis cujus casus so in our Realm all Policy it self whether Civil or Ecclesiastical will now be accounted but Pedantry that by any previous questions puts off the debate of Capital Ships and their Maintenance and Equipage and the consideration of the necessity of great Supplies for that purpose will carry the Vote with a Nemine Contradicente among the People diffusive here that they will give no more Supplyes to Religion-Traders and that in order to the Nations being able as a Britannia florens in point of Trade to keep great Fleets at Sea 't is necessary that mens expectation should be bankrupt of gain by Castles in the Air or in fine that the very Corporation of the Trade of all Beggars should be broken which has so much diminished our other Trade The great States-man of this latter Age Mazarine projecting the growing Power and Glory of France did not long before he dyed wisely lay the Foundation of it by the extirpating out of the Metropolis and other Cities of that Kingdom those publick Nusances there called Beggars and since all Religion-Traders are in truth and reallity of the Trade of Beggars and the Multitude of them at present diminisheth the shame of that very Trade the destruction of it will probably by all be judged as the first thing necessary for the advancement of other Commerce And as the wisest course I ever heard of taken for breaking the Trade of Beggars in the Streets was that by the Iustices of Middlesex in their Printed Papers sent to the Church-Wardens Overseers of the Poor and Constables of the respective Parishes in the Suburbs whereby all Persons are desired and required by their Order to forbear to relieve any Beggars at their doors or in any other kind about the Streets so in
Plot that caused the Vote of its reallity to pass with a Nemine Contradicente there What Fautors of false Testimony the Jesuites principles are I have shewn and at the same time afforded my Testimony to the Heroic Vertue of many others of the Church of Rome and think it great and pedantical kind of Injustice to charge all Lay-Papists with a readiness to obey their Priests Commands by being ministerial in Cruelty to Protestants I remember I have read it in a printed Speech of Sir Audly Mervin the Speaker of the House of Commons in Ireland a Speech glowing with anger enough against the Papists where yet 't is said p. 24. In the Barony of Enishoan there are above two thousand Irish Papists can bring hundreds of Protestants to witness their Civil demeanor through the whole course of the distemper in this Kingdom And as the bloody Sect of the Zealots grew at last so odious among the Iews and another Order of such sicarii among the Turks so I suppose that of the Jesuites will naturally do among Christians and the Jesuites writ de haeretico Assassinando grow obsolete and especially in places where the Scene of Mr. Coleman's Northern Heresie lies it being an old observation that Northern Countries are more hospitable and less cruel than Southern In the very time of the dawn of Learning ushering in that of the Reformation it presently grew odious to the first-rate Ingeniosi to draw Heretics blood Our Famous Countryman Tunstal Bishop of Durham who had imbibed so much of the Mathematical Sciences that Vossus de Scientiis Mathematicis saith p. 40. Ante annos Centum quod excurrit magnâ cum laude praecipue ob sermonem purum perspicuum de arte supputandi egit Cutbertus Tunstallus and whose Book of Arithmetick writ with such pure Latinity is commonly extant was of such a temper that as Fuller tells us in his Church History the Bishopric of Durham had halcyon days of Peace and Quiet under God and good Cutbert Tunstal the Bishop thereof Sir Thomas Moor of whom 't is said that 't was writ on his Tomb that he was furibus haereticisque molestus yet in his Vtopia rouls neither of them in Blood and in his Chapter there concerning the Religions in Vtopia he makes divers kinds of Religion not only in sundry parts of the Island but also in divers places of every City some worshipping the Sun and some the Moon and some other of the Planets and the wisest of them worshipping God Almighty and some embracing the Faith of Christ at first without the help of a Priesthood and minding to choose a Bishop among themselves without sending out of their own Country for the Order of Priesthood and makes them affrighting none to or from the Christian Religion And that that Book of his may rather be thought an Original of his Mind than a mere Copy of his Countenance we have the Suffrage of Dr. Danne in his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 where having said That Sir Thomas Moor was a man of the most tender and delicate Conscience that the World hath seen since St. Austin and citing of his Vtopia l 2. c. de servis he saith He was not likely to write there any thing in jest mischievously interpretable And if a man would quote things of Erasmus his great Humanity to all humane kind he must quote almost his whole Works But how far his Genius led him from any brutal ferity toward Heretics your Lordship will see by this passage in his Supput error Bedae Dic ecclesiae quod si non audierit sit tibi velut ethnicus publicanus quasi hic ulla sit incendii mentio Rursus Apostolum Post unam alteram correptionem devita An devitare est in ignem conjicere Iterum Auferte malum ex vobis ipsis Num auferte valet idem quod occidere He had said before Quas autem mihi narrat ecclesiae leges An leges ecclesiae sunt quenquam ultricibus tradere flammis And afterward at episcoporum est quod quidem in ipsis est docere corrigere mederi Qualis autem est episcopus qui nihil aliud possit quam vincire torquere flammis tradere Quod si qui tractant hoc negotium tales essent qualem se declarat in hoc libello Beda hoc est si tantum spirarent odii si tantum haberent impudentiae tam impotens calumniandi studium tam corruptum judicium ut videatur citius decem propulsurus in haeresim quam unum revocaturus nonne belle ageretur cum delatis Nisi fallor primum designare cui male vellet eum curaret clam rapiendum in carcerem ibi quaererentur articuli tales quales plurimos objicit mihi partim falsos partim depravatos Disputatio si qua fieret perageretur in carcere si quidhisceret contrà mox accersitis tribus dilectis monachis pronunciaretur sententia diffinitiva Quod reliquum est perageret carnifex Vbi theologus defert rapit in carcerem urget accusationem damnatum tradit judici profano Iudex non ex suâ cognitione sed ex theologi praejudicio tradit flammis Our Martyrologist Mr. Fox could not have expressed more anger against a Bishop Bonner than Erasmus a Papist hath here against Popish Persecuting Prelates Had Erasmus then known of one practice enjoyn'd constantly by the Canons to Popish Bishops at their Condemning of Heretics to salve the Phoenomena of their irregularity by intermedling in Causâ sanguinis and about which your Lordship shewed me once some remarkable quotations in a Letter writ to you by the Lord Bishop of Lincoln and of which quotations I beg a Copy from you by the first opportunity namely efficaciter excorde to intercede with the secular Judge to whom they deliver the Heretic over to bring no pain of death or mutilation of member to him I believe the great Wit of Erasmus would after his ingenious account aforesaid of the Tragedy of the Condemned Heretic pleasantly entertained himself and Posterity with the wanton cruelty of that Farce that ensued it and let us see how the Popish Bishop then using the Speech familiar to some Tooth drawers just before their operation I will do you no harm and put you to little or no pain did at the same time make use of the power of the secular Magistrate but as the Linnen Clout or Silk to wrap and hide the tormenting Pincers of Holy-Church in But to return to my observation of all Popish Canonists themselves not allowing that wanton mode of the cruel usage and interceding with the Magistrate Efficaciter ex corde to do the Condemned Heretic no harm I think the same quotations mention how the famous Panormitan did brand the Hypocrisie of that Practice and the truth is 't is very abominable that Heretics neither living nor dying can be free from suffering Shammes by some Papists But again on the other hand 't is with Justice to be said that
Moravia and all the heritable Lands of the House of Austria Franconia Bavaria and the upper Palatinate no Protestants are permitted to have the publick Exercise of their Religion and the Effects of the Emperor's Persecuting the Protestants of Hungary the World knows and feels and have with horror gazed on the Protestants of Transylvania putting themselves under the Protection of the Turk that they might enjoy their Profession of Christianity And how the Bohemians were treated by a Jesuited Emperor twenty years after 1579 I have spoken when I gave an account of the Jesuites Emblem painted on the Arms of Austria viz. I have practiced That the Duke of Savoy practiced nothing of Cruelty to his Heretical Subjects in the Valleys about the time 1597 those poor Protestants may under God thank their old friend Harry the 4th who in the year 1600 took almost his whole Country after his having been before in a Contest with him by way of demand for the Marquisat of Salusses and his having applied to the Pope to interpose therein the Emperor having likewise demanded that Marquisat in Right of the Empire and while that Duke was in fear of being fleeced by the Pope and Emperor and Harry the 4th 't is no wonder if he suffered his Heretical Subjects to graze or sleep in whole Skins in the Neighbouring Valleys of Piemont but in the year 1655 there ran in those Valleys such a torrent of Protestant blood as did bear away all the dire Examples of Cruelty before it that History could shew as appears out of Sir Samuel Morelands History of the Churches in those Valleys and Book 4th and Chap. 4. where in his Audience Speech as Envoy to the Duke of Savoy in the behalf of the Protestants in those Valleys on that sad occasion he saith Si reviviscant omnes omnium temporum aetatum Nerones quod sine ullâ celsitudinis vestrae offensione dictum velim quemadmodum nullà ejus culpâ quicquam factum esse crediâ—us puderet prefecto eos ut qui nihil non mite ac humanum ad haec facinâ—ra si spectas excogitasse se reperirent interim exhorrescunt Angeli Mortales obstupescunt Ipsum coelum morientium clamoribus attonitum esse videtur ipsaque terra diffuso tot hominum innocuorum cruore erubescere And as for the Kingdom of Poland the fear of the Turkish Power then gave the Prince there no leisure to attend squabbles about Heresy and Heretics and as for the interest he had in Sweden which too in the year 1599 had a Popish King as Sandys saith in his Europae Speculum that year writ yet were the Papists there then as he saith few and consequently the Heretics too many to be persecuted The very Interim spoke of by D' Ossat or Formula inter-Religionis as 't was called was a double bottom of Popery and Protestancy and nothing was expected to be its Fate but Divulsion Alsted in his Chronology mentions its Date with the words of Infaelix partus and the Protestants in Constance rather than they would embark in that double bottom threw themselves overboard into the Sea of the Power of Ferdinand King of the Romans and Brother of Charles who soon used them not as their Protector but their Conqueror and 't is notorious that the Interim was professedly designed to continue only till the Council of Trents determinations were ended and 't is likewise as notorious that that Council was called designedly and reverâ for the exterminium of Heretics and its being called ad restituendos collapsos eclesiae mores was but umbrage and shamme And what Quarter Heretics were to expect from the Tridentine Spirit Father Paul hath told us in his History p. 693 and that as to the year 1563. Advice came to Rome that the King of France had made a Peace with the Hugonots the particular Conditions being not known of yet And the Pope thinking it proceeded from some Prelates who tho they did not openly declare themselves to be Protestants yet did follow that Party he resolved to discover them and was wont to say he was wronged more by the Masqued Heretics then by the bare-faced Whereupon the last of March he gave order that the Cardinals who governed the Inquisition should proceed against them The Cardinal of Pisa answering that there was need of proper and special Authority the Pope ordain'd that a new Bull should be made which was dated the 7th of April and contained in Substance that the Pope being Vicar of Christ to whom he hath recommended the feeding of his Sheep and to reduce those that wander and to bridle with temporal Penalties those who cannot be gain'd by Admonitions he hath not since the beginning of his Assumption omitted to execute this Charge notwithstanding some Bishops are not only fallen into Heretical Errors but do also favour other Heretics opposing the faith For Provision wherein he commands the general Inquisitors of Rome to whom he hath formerly commended this business to proceed against such tho Bishops and Cardinals inhabiting in places where the Lutheran Sect is Potent with Power to cite them to Rome by Edict or to the Confines of the Church to appear personally or if they will not appear to proceed to Sentence which he will pronounce in private Consistory The Cardinals in Conformity to the Popes Commands cited by Edict to appear personally at Rome to purge themselves from imputation of Heresie and of being favourers of Heretics the Cardinal of Chastillon the Arch-Bishop of Aix the Bishop of Chartres and other Bishops in France His Holyness it seems thought that Cardinal and the Arch-Bishop and the Bishops to be Protestants in Masquerade and has given an example to some Furiosi among Protestants thus to miscal some of the better sort of them In fine that which I aim at by referring to these Historical Passages is this to shew that some of the very Grandees of the Church of Rome hold Principles in Religion that allow indulgence to the persons of Heretics I have instanced how D' Ossat in the Popes presence was a Confessor for moderation in this kind and spake like a skillful Divine when he said That Christ hath taught us in his Gospel to tolerate the Chaff in our Fields when there was danger of plucking up with it and spoyling the good Corn and Theophylact on that place tells us that by Tares are meant Heretics Nor can it be unknown to men of great thought among the Papists that the sanguinary usage of Heretics hath much encreased their number not perhaps will it be denyed by the Critical Judges of things in the Papal World what was by one of our beaus esprits and great States-men I mean the Lord Viscount Falkland observed in Print That the Massacre in France made more Protestants in one night than all Calvins Works have done since their first publication According to that Observation That nothing surfeits soner than man's flesh 't is but natural to suppose that the
same purpose That internal Communion is due always from all Christians to all Christians even to those with whom we cannot communicate externally in many things whether Opinions or Practices But external Communion may sometimes be suspended more or less c. and he doth afterward in p. 18 assert That Christian Communion implies not an Vnity in all Opinions and shews That the Roman and African Churches held good Communion one with another while they differ'd both in Iudgment and Practice about Rebaptisation As for any projected Universal Vnity of Opinions I look on it to be as impracticable as our levelling Republicans EQVAL Division of Lands in the late times by their wild Agrarian Laws for the Birth of the next Child would necessarily break that their Model and the same fate might be expected to happen the same way to this Model of Vnity of Opinions or perhaps by the birth of the next hour But this Internal Communion is a thing most possible and our Duty tho without hope of Unity in all Religionary Opinions to ensue thereby according to the Doctrine of this Great Primate If then we are Morally bound to have this Internal Communion with all Foreign Roman Catholick Princes and their Subjects as before described how can we without horror think of the excluding any Heir to the Crown for fear of his believing the same Religionary Notions that they do from the Catholick Communion and of excluding him from his Birth-right on such an account whom we must always have this Internal Communion with and rejoyce in his good successes and condole with him in his ill and to hold an external Communion with him and any Church he is of in votis in our desires and to endeavour it by all means that are in our Power Did any endeavour it who would by depriving him of his Birth-right on that account and holding the same Tenet with Papists of Dominium fundatur in gratiâ gave him such a just Cause of Scandal as without the Divine Spirit assisting him might endanger his withdrawing from the whole Christian Communion And tho the honest Heathen could tell us That Cavendum est ne poena major sit quam culpa and all Casuists agree That Poena non debet excedere delictum and tho Magna Charta tell us That Ex quantitate poenae cognoscitur quantitas delicti quia poena debet esse commensurabilis delicto yet attempted to punish him by the loss of his Birth-right of the Crown when it could not be certain to us that he had committed any fault at all and when by the judgment of Charity we were bound to believe that he had committed none To many of our Nominal Protestants whose thoughts and Ideas of Christian Communion are too narrow to extend not only to a National Church but to a Parochial one this Notion of the incomparable Primate for whose august Charity one Christian World of Religionary differences was not enough to overcome about internal Communion will I believe seem new Doctrine and Duras Sermo but if they would be true Christians instead of being called true Protestants this Duty of Internal Communion from all Christians to all Christians must be practised by them and if this Duty hath a Divine Right for it as to the Persons of Papists abroad it must be operative as to those here at home He who loveth not his Brother whom he hath seen I may ask how can he love either his God or his Brother that he hath not seen The sham-war among any Protestants and Papists must not only be lest off but they must honour the Persons of one another and Protestants are not only to forbear robbing Papists of their Goods on pretence of carrying away their Images and Pictures but are to honour the Image of God shining in the lives of or the Gifts of God dispensed to any Papists Mr. Burroughs in his Irenicum p. 38. saith We accounted it Tyranny and Persecution in the Bishops when they would not suffer such as could not conform to their Church Discipline and Ceremonies to teach Grammar or practise Physick and saith That there was no dependance between their Errors if you will call them so and these things To deny the Church and Commonwealth the benefit of the Gifts and Graces of Men on such a pretence that they will abuse their Liberty we thought it was hard dealing yea no less than a Persecution Suppose a man differs from his Brethren in point of Church Discipline must not this man have a place in an Army therefore Tho he sees not the reason of such a Discipline in the Church yet God hath endued him with a Spirit of Valour and he understands what Military Discipline means c. Ought not then Persons of his Principles to revere the Heroical Endowments of an Heir to the Crown which do much preponderate as to the continuance of the being and well-being of the Kingdom to supposed Orthodoxy in some Mysteries of the Gospel as was shewn out of Mr. Ny King Iames had great Talents in Polemical Divinity to prove by words that the Pope was Anti-Christ but will not these latter Endowments necessarily prevent the Pope's being Anti-Christ in Deeds if he were inclined to hurt us by shewing himself such Ames in his Puritanismus Anglicanus giveth this as the chief Reason why the Puritans hold the Bishop of Rome to be THE Anti-Christ viz. For that he being an Ecclesiastical Ruler doth arrogate and exercise the chief Power over Kings and Princes And doth any one fear that he can exercise such Power over a Prince of these Endowments And I may add have not many Factious and Republican Nominal Protestants here compleated that Figure of Anti-Christ How many Vertues must any indifferent man overlook in this Pope who thinks he would outrage our Civil Government and how many Vices must he wink at in such Persons who thinks they would not do it And by Virtue of our blessed Lords having decided it that he was the better Son who said he would not do the Will of his Father and did it may it not be said That those Papists who say they will not take these Oaths and yet perform their Natural Allegiance are more loyal than such Nominal Protestants who have took the Oaths and observe them not As much an Abhorrer as I am of the Principles of the Iesuites Condemned by this Pope I shall yet think my self bound by the Moral Offices beforementioned out of Ames not to charge the belief or practice of them on all Persons in that Order For when I consider the Devotional Books of some Iesuites writ with such strong and lively expressions of the Practick part of Religion as any Person of Candor will think to be founded on a real deep sense of all Moral Offices lying warm at their hearts I account it impossible for them to have believed some of those Tenets and as I once observing at the Anatomy of a poor Malefactor that his Stomach
Acquaintance as to judge them free from any Complication of the belief and practice of any irreligious Principles with the Principles of their Religion and particularly from the owning any Principle of Disloyalty or the Iesuites Doctrine of Calumny or the Obligatoriness of the Lateran Council will not rashly pronounce any other particular Papist guilty of the belief or practice of such Principles Nor is it any great honour that I have done to any men of extraordinary Vertue in thus judging that they cannot believe or practise such Principles for that it being true in the Course of Nature what Machiavel said that next to the being perfectly good 't is the most difficult thing to be perfectly bad the World hath had thereby some Garranty against the belief and practice of such Principles and by necessity of Nature must still have But since Mankind in general may expect to find in our esteem the benefit of the presumption of Law viz. That every man is presumed to be good and that the high Births and Educations of Princes and the great Examples of their Magnanimous Ancestors may well pass as strong presumptions of Nature against their doing any low ungenerous Acts of Cruelty and since in Gods great Ordinance of Magistracy an especial Divine presence may by Virtue of Holy Writ be presumed to accompany the very Magistrates appointed by Sovereign Prinâ—es according to that in 2 Chron. 19. 6. where after it was said to the Judges Take heed what you do for yee judge not for man but for the Lord the following words are Who is with you in the Iudgment and that therefore as Christ is said to be present with those Officers he appointed in the Church because there is a special Virtue and Efficacy of Christ manifest in their Ministry there may likewise be expected a special presence Divine in the Administration of Magistracy from the like manifestation of God in his Wisdom Power Goodness c. for the Well-fare of Societies as Mr. Ny observes and since Kings and Princes are an Oâ—dinance of God or Medium by which in a more special and peculiar way he communicates his Goodness to Christians according to the Style of the 13th of the Romans the great Sedes materâ—ae of Loyalty for he is the Minister of God to THEE for good it may well be thought profaneness and Sacrilege for men to bode and presume ill of the future Acting of any Heirs to Crowns and particularly as to their believing or practising any thing pernicious to their Realms What Roman Catholick Prince doth not deride Innocent the 3d under whom the Lateran Council was held for telling it in the Canon Law that the Papal Power is as much greater than the Imperial as the Sun is greater than the Moon and at the Marginal Note there for saying That the Papal Power exceeds the Imperial no less than 7744 There is a Prince whose Emblem is the Suâ— and whose Power exceeds the Papal in every ones account to more than that Proportion And is it not therefore but according to reason and common sense that we should believe that of all men in any Realm the Prince will be the latest brought to the belief of that Papal Power so categorically asserted by that Council That Kings may be Excommunicated by their own Bishops for not obeying the Pope and their Subjects in such Case be absolved from their Oaths of Allegiance Do not all the French Kings notwithstanding that Council claim the liberty of so much freedom from the Papal Power that Popes can neither directly nor indirectly command or ordain any thing concerning Temporal Matters within their Dominions and that neither the French King nor his Realm nor his Officers can be Excommunicated or interdicted by the Pope nor his Subjects absolved from their Oath of Allegiance As I have therefore in my Writing to a Noble Lord one of his Majesty's Ministers who was barbarously accused by one of the Plot-Witnesses for being a Papist and designing to advance the Papal Power said that I would be the last man in England who would believe he could be a Papist meaning it as impossible that he could believe or practise any irreligionary Tenet of Popery I will account it more impossible that any Roman Catholick Prince now living in the World should favour the Usurpation of the Papal Power however any of the Popish Clergy or Layety in his Realms might perhaps be addicted to favour the same That great Affair of the Munster Pâ—ace wherein so many great Roman Catholick Crown'd Heads agreeing perhaps in the Lateran Council being a General one did yet certainly agree together in the Year 1648 for Lutheran and Calvinistick Princes and States and their Subjects quietly possessing forever their Properties both in their Religions and Estates hath afforded the World an important Instance of Heavens so far influencing the understandings of those Crown'd Heads that they thought not themselves obliged to put the Decree of that Council in practice by exterminating Hereticks but to the contrary And because the Affair of that Peace and the great Pacta Conventa therein for the effect aforesaid have been scarce more taken Notice of here than the Transactions in China and that the notification of the same may advance the measures of our Duty by Internal Communion and help to un-blunder some of our Nominal Protestants in their fancying it so necessary for the quiet of Christendom that Christian Princes and their Subjects should agree in the belief of the Speculative points of Religion I intend to take an opportunity to publish some Account of the same I account my having thus largely dilated on the Moral Offices as aforesaid hath tended to corroborate this my 8th Conclusion I am here conversants in the great Court of Conscience the Court whose Seat is in the Practical and not Speculative intellect and the great things of which it holds Plea are as Sanderson tells us Actus morales particulares proprii and therefore particular urging of Records against which lies no averment is not more pertinent in Courts of Law than of Moral Offices in this And moreover I observing in this Conjuncture when many mens zeal hath been so hot against the Speculative points of Popery which disturb not Civil Society that yet they have believed the more pernicious Tenet of it and would have practised the same viz. The founding Dominion in Grace and that tho they have been altogether neglectâ—ul of their Actus morales particulares proprii they have both presumed to judge dishonourably and rashly of the Actings of others and to trouble the World not only with their Anxiety about the Acts of Kings and Princes but the Actus Dei and his illuminating Princes understandings with the Heavenly Mysteries I have thought this discoursing of our Moral Offices as aforesaid the more a Propos and seasonable as tending to fortify the rationality of this 8th Conclusion by exposing the absurdity of a respective or conditional Loyalty a
fear of us and our obtaining power as are the States of the Vnited Provinces from those of our persuasion in Religion among them We are willing to let you see that the same Basis that shall be your security shall likewise be ours A great part of our number has we fear given too much cause of jealousie to the Kingdom of their affecting pre-eminence therein we are sorry for it and hope it will be so no more I say such Papists as these are the bruised reeds I would not trample on and would make no noise to interrupt their being heard to the effect above mention'd And since what has been done may be and Sir William Temple in his Impartial Observations on the Vnited Provinces of the Netherlands chap. 5. saith of the Roman Catholicks there that tho they are very numerous in the Country among the Pesants and considerable in the Cities yet they seem to be a sound piece of the State and fast jointed in with the rest and have neither given any disturbance to the Government Nor expres'd any inclinations to a Change or to any forreign power either upon the former Wars with Spain or the latter Invasions of the Bishop of Munster 't is I say possible therefore for them to become sound pieces of the state there And if the end of all their shamme Plots be what is usually that of Comedies and Romances plots a Marriage I mean their espousing the true Interest of the Kingdom I for my part shall never forbid the bannes of the Matrimony nor enter any Caveat against the license for it granted by lawful authority provided they give due security as in that case against such a precontract with Rome that may null their contract with us 'T is an old Common Observation That whelps without any care bestowed on them will see at the end of nine days tho born blind and that if they are much tamper'd with by art to be forced to see sooner they are blind for ever and therefore I hope that the forbearance of our Church in this latter Age to tamper with them by disputes or Catechising or Compelling them to be present at the publick worship will with the help of Time and Nature and their experience of their inability by all their shamme Plots to put out our Eyes conduce to the opening of theirs Alas what advantage is it by all their artifices that they can hope both to gain and keep here I mean for any considerable time A trick of art is like a Monster in Nature ill-lookt and short lifed and 't is obvious to every Eye that the higher Scale got up by accident is more ready to pop down again then it was before while it hung in its due poise And while they do by art and contrary to Nature in any Conjuncture hoist up their Interest high in the Air the artificial motion endures not there long to be gazed at and while it is there visible 't is beheld by thousands of vigilant Marksmen who know 't is easier to hit the mark shooting upward then downward We find 't is notorious out of the present Pope 's said Decree of the Second of March last That the Iesuits and other Casuists were Encouragers and Patrons of Calumny by those Principles of theirs he therein Condemns and namely That Probabile est non peccare mortaliter qui imponit falsum crimen alteri ut suam justitiam honorem defendat si hoc non sit probabile vix ulla erit opinio probabilis in Theologia i. e. It is probable that he doth not Sin Mortally who fastens a false Crime on another that he may defend his own Iustice and Honour and if this is not probable there is scarce any Opinion probable in Divinity The Iesuits have by this Opinion given us the alarm that they make Calumny not contrary to the Law of God but only beside it for that is the Popish account of a Venial Sin and moreover that it is a small and very pardonable Offence against God or our Neighbour and no more than an Idle word and that it Robs not the Soul of life and that it may be remitted without hearty Pennance and Contrition and only with the Sacraments Holy Water and the like these being the Popish Received Doctrines of the Nature of Venial Sin. And thus they may be false Imputations and Testimonies rob the Bodies of Protestants of life without bereaving their own Souls thereof and this is own'd by them as a first Rate probable Opinion in that Great Science call'd Divinity that Great first Rate of all Sciences as relating to the honour of God but most certainly we have very great Reason to pity the Persons of those who have such low and groveling and ridiculous Conceptions of the Supreme Being as to think to add any thing to the brightness of his Perfection by that Sacrifice with whose smoke they endeavour to blind the eyes of some of their Brethren while they are with its flames consuming the Bodies of others and to think to tickle him with the straw of Praise while they rob Men and that the using of Fraud can be worthy of God which is scorn'd not only by Gentlemen but even generous Beasts it being proper to Foxes and not to Lions to practise it and that tho the Dice of the Gods always fall luckily according to the old Adage that false ones are to be used for their Honour or that any one is to be a falsarius for the Glory of the true God and that since the Roman Heathens thought it Essential to the Justice of their Laws and the honour of Human Nature to term him a falsarius who but conceal'd Truth in the Case of Men it can be worthy of the Divine Nature to encourage false asseverations in Ordine ad Deum and that it can be any Honour to infinit Wisdom to out-wit silly Mortals or to infinit Goodness to set it self off by the putative or real faults of any one and that since as the Philosopher said long ago 't is the greatest Scandal to a Governor imaginable 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to lay snares for those that he Governs to think that the Great Governor of the World can have honour from the laying of Nets and Springes by Man Catchers In fine to think that after the Divine Compassion to Men had under the Mosaic Dispensation so long signaliz'd it self against Idolatry because 't was a Cheat and for that an Idol is nothing it can be consistent with the Divine goodness now under the Oeconomy of the Gospel of which the Restoring of Humane Nature was the Great intent to encourage inhumane Arts and Artifices to make it degenerate to the old Cheat of Idolatry again and which was the worst extremity of it the immolation of Men under the pretext of Religion a Cheat of Idolatry that the Blessed Iesus design'd by the offring of himself to exterminate out of the World as an unnecessary thing and