A THIRD LETTER TO F. LEWIS SABRAN Jesuit WHEREIN The DEFENCE of his CHALLENGE CONCERNING Invocation of Saints Is Examined and Confuted IMPRIMATUR April 10. 1688. GVIL. NEEDHAM LONDON Printed for Ric. Chiswell at the Rose and Crown in St. Paul's Church-Yard MDCLXXXVIII A Third Letter to F. Lewis Sabran Jesuit Wherein the Defence of his Challenge concerning Invocation of Saints is Examined and Confuted SIR THO you are resolved to break off our Controversial Correspondence by Letters yet I am for keeping to my former method and for directing this Answer to you since you are so much concerned in it and it is wholly intended to convince you of your further mistakes and those gross Errors you have been guilty of in your pretended Defence of your Challenge about Invocation of Saints You begin the Defence with two heavy Complaints one of which is That my Answer to your Challenge was so tedious in coming out The other is That I have abused you in it The first of these Complaints is a very pleasant one In my last Letter to you I told you that I would undertake the businâ—ss of Invocation as soon as the Controversy about St. Austin was either ended or dropt and not sooner Upon this I expected when I should hear from you about it but to no purpose for it seems there was nothing further to be said and you had had enough of that Controversy So that after I had waited Six Weeks for your Answer but heard of none I had reason to conclude That Controversy was ended and therefore in my Answer to the Vindication of the Nubes Testium resolved to give an Answer also to your Challenge This is the true state of that business and yet with an Air of Confidence becoming your self the World must be told of a tedious expectation of my Answer which had worn out Three Months whereas the Answer to your Challenge should not have been waited for three days could I but have guessed that my second Letter had done your business so effectually as I since find it hath But to pass this impertinent Preface you next charge me with abusing you and slandering you in my Answer I am not able to find where this Abuse and Slanders are nor can I guess what it is there which deserves this imputation unless it be that to prove a Jesuit to be ignorant is to slander him If this be the thing as it must be for I can find nothing else to fix it upon I do plead guilty and since you have again compell'd me to animadvert upon you I am resolv'd to be very free with you and to speak my mind plainly tho I find I shall quickly fall into the very same slandering humour for you have made me a large Provision for that purpose and I will not let any piece of it escape me Well now we are come to the business of Invocation it self and you have mâ—de such Tragical Work about it as if Invocation of Saints and Christianity were to stand and fall together as if we that oppose Invocation of Saints were enemies to the Saints in Glory had denied the Christians common Creed were contrary to the Catholick Militant Church and which is worst of all had called God's Veracity into question This is terrible stuff and I question not but that it takes mightily among the Women of your Party but I am afraid is quite lost upon our people who will certainly laugh at such wretched stuff as knowing very well that the true Church of God did never practice Invocation of Saints and that the Creed did no more teach it than the Worshipping of Idols or Transubstantiation but you are one of those that so you may but gain your end of frighting people to continue with or come over to you never boggle at the most unjust and the most absurd means of doing it I do not in the least wonder at your talking at this extravagant rate I cannot but remember that you appeared with the same confident blustering in the defence of the forged 35th Sermon of St. Austin that you made as much noise and talked to the Protestant Peer with as much assurance as if it had been the certainest thing in the World that the Sermon was St. Austins and that I was an impudent ignorant fellow for offering to deny it But after all that storm the World remembers and I hope that Lord was satisfied too That it was the most Impudent Controversy that ever was attempted by any Man to defend that Sermon and that it was defended with Arguments and Authorities that every Scholar would have been ashamed of What ado had we with S. Hierom Hâ—phonsus Mallion's Sermon with Necephâ—rus's Juvenal every one of which were the most wretched Forgeries that could have been pickt up What a pass were things brought to in the Reply when you were for denying your own words about S. Bernard for eating up those about the Assumption signifying the day of the Saints Death and for asserting that the Louvain Divines had not left the 18th Sermon de Sancth as doubtful Never was Cause managed with more Impudence and more Forgeries and yet after all your confidence at first and blustering throughout it was dropt as quietly as if no such thing had ever been and in your new Defence not a syllable of it or in Answer to my Second Letter which it seems now must never have one I must tell you Sir that the Management of that Controversie about St. Austins Sermon hath prepared me to expect just such stuff at your hands whensoever you should set up for Writer again and you have not deceived my expectation for you begin this Controversie about Invocation with the very same assurance that you did the other and you manage it with downright Forgeries altogether as bad as the other were as I will quickly shew you It was so trifling a Concern to answer your Cavilling demands in â—our Letter to the Protestant Peer about Invocation that had I not had the opportunity of tacking it to my Defence of the Answer to the Nubes Testium I should never have troubled the world or my self with it And when I had perswaded my self to answer that Challenge it was my next care to makâ— it as useful to the Reader as the thing was capable of To this purpose as well as to have stopt your Cavilling for the future I did enlarge my design and shewed through the first Centuries down to St. Austin that the Doctrine as well as the Practice of the Primitive Fathers were directly against your Invocation after this I answered all your Objections and then assigned the Differences betwixt what is now practised and taught in the Church of Rome and what was beginning to be practised in the end of the Fourth Century as to Invocation to the Saints It was but reasonable for me who had particularly answered every one of your Authorities and Objections to have expected the same favour at your
Men as well as in a religious respect to God and hath not this very Father fully secur'd us from taking it as to men in a religious Sense when in his Book De Civit. Dei he tells us That the Martyrs names indeed were recited during the Divine Service but that they were not INVOCATED by the Priest who did officiate But notwithanding the Vanity of your Attempt here you prefac't it with a lusty Bravado That you could cite me all the HOLY FATHERS ALPHABETICALLY practicing and recommending Invocations of Saints in the very term And are not you a pleasant Man Sir does not your own Conscience tell you That this is the most extravagant and most impossible Attempt that ever man undertook if it do not I will then assure you and prove it when you please that-this absurd Brag did proceed from an Ignorance so great that it can be matched with nothing but the Confidence with which you have so vainly undertaken an impossible thing But since you have such an Assurance and dare venture upon such promises of an Alphabetical Catalogue of all the Fathers practising and recommending it in the very term I challenge you to produce that Catalogue in the next Sheet you threaten I Challenge you to shew me but one of that Catalogue that is genuine for the three first Ages so certain I am that you have undertaken a thing that you know nothing of You are next for answering St. Paul's Authority against Invocation of Saints How shall they invocate or call upon him in whom they have not believed And tell us you are ashamed to suggest an Answer to the meanest of your Readers Ashamed do you say This I am mighty glad to meet with and cannot but congratulate the very hopes of Modesty in you Well but you say Tho no one can invocate God as God who believes not in him yet is every one that is invocated believed to be God No God forbid but this we say That no one ought to be invocated but he that is believed to be God and that is not only S. Paul's Sense here but was the Sense of all the Fathers against the Jews and Arians who always insisted upon it as a certain Argument of Christ's being God in that he was invocated which no Creature was capable of This I have abundantly shewn in my Answer to your Challenge from Origen who makes Invocation and Adoration the same from S. Athanasius and Epiphanius and others that Christ could not have been invocated except he were God but all this it seems is lost upon you as much as those Arguments of the Fathers would have been then had Saints been invocated as well as Christ But to pass such trifling arguing and your parallel betwixt the Love of God and this Invocation I will now pass with you to the second Difference assigned which was That those Requests were made at the Memories of those Martyrs to whom they were presented and who were believed to be present tho invisible at the same time but the Invocations of Saints in the Church of Rome in every place to a particular Saint in ten thousand distant places at the same time Which I then said and say here again is to ascribe to the Saints an Omnipresence an Attribute that none of them is capable of The practice of your own Church herein you dare not deny that they are thus seperstitiously guilty of praying to any Saint in such distant places at the same time your care is to make the Fathers of the end of the 4th and 5th Century as guilty by disproving what I had laid down of their putting up those Requests at the Memories of the Martyrs but how I pray In proving it unanswerably most false what I there assert this is great and like your self And you began with S. Austin who having in the 15th Chapter of the Book you quote asserted That the Dead know nothing of what is done below on Earth was put to it how to solve the Objection of the Martyrs helping those that Addressed to them at their Memories and concludes it past his understanding to solve it how they could do it whether or no they be present in so different places at once If it was past his understanding to solve it it had certainly been his best way not to have medled with a thing which had no certainty and which no finite Nature was capable of You quote next Gregory Nazianzen in his Sermon before Fifty Bishops It was before 150 Bishops and tho' I have not time to read over that long Sermon yet I have good reason by the casting of my eye upon it to believe that your quotation is not there but suppose it is How is it against me when it only says That where the Martyrs Bodies only are the same effect is had as from their Souls This is directly for me but your ignorance is too great to let you see it S. Ambrose is next quoted in Natali S. Naz. Celsi but there is no such thing in his Works in the Edition of Froben which I use nor does Bellarmin in his de Scriptoribus mention any such Tract so that I have great reason to give you thanks for the great civility of making me turn over Five Tomes to look for a wretched Forgery which could find no place there To finish your doughty proofs unanswerably you last bring Gregory's Dialogues but he is too far off to be concerned here and was Two hundred years after S. Austin But here as tho conscious that these unanswerable proofs would be found trifles you begin again and will prove it further against me from Gregory Naz. Jambic de Veritat You accuse me here of citing Fathers I never saw but I believe I shall quickly find that somebody else does it tho I do not for I honestly went to Gregory's Works and do here tell you that the piece you quote here is not in his Works And is not this very becoming you I do not know what name to give such behaviour when a Man shall have the face to accuse another and falsly too of that very thing which he himself is guilty of in this very place But I begin to despair of doing any good upon you and look upon you in the state of those who can be guilty of the worst things without the expence of one blush You are after this for giving me again a piece of Theodoret but this I have answered twice already and therefore will pass it and S. Austin's Story about S. Stephen's Reliques of which had I room I would give the Reader a very diverting account about their being found but neither it nor the passage it self is to our purpose And the next from Bede is far less about S. German's carrying some Reliques about him so that I must take leave of your unanswerable Arguments which were able to prove just nothing but the extravagant Confidence and Ignorance of him that brought them The
Third Difference I offered was That those Requests and Interpellations to the Martyrs begun at the end of the fourth Century were neither commanded by the Primitive Church authorized by her Councils nor used in her Publick Offices but that on the contrary the Prayers to Saints in the Church of Rome are injoined by that Church are authorized by her Council of Trent and used in her publick Offices and in the most solemn part of them Here you are grown very angry and deâ—e me to shew any Canon of the Council of Trent or of any other that commands Prayers to Saints as an obligation of Catholick Faith But why all this Anger and all this Shiâ—ting Is there then any danger or hurt in those Invocations of Saints that you should be so shy of its being believed that your Church commands them Ay But say you where does it command them as an obligation of Catholick Faith This it is to be afraid of ones own shadow and to be so cautious as to run into Nonsense who else would talk of a matter of Practice's being commanded as an obligation of Catholick Faith Cannot your Church enjoyn the Blessing of Bells without making it an obligation of Catholick Faith But to pass this frightful Nonsenâ—â— Does not your Church enjoyn the use of the Breviaries and Offices Upon whose Authority are they used among you Did not the Council of Trent sufficiently authorise them when it appointed the Reforming of the Breviaries You will not say that was to strike out the Prayers to Saints you cannot be so ridiculous and you needed not have been so over-cautious about nothing No one can be married in our Church without the use of the Ring and yet no body looks for or demands a Canon of our Church for the use of it But we have next a very great rarity and it seems my Assertion is very false That no Councils in the Primitive Church did authorise Praying to Saints you could have given us many Proofs but are straitned it seems and so can give us but two or Three I hope these choice ones will prove of the best sort and be very convincing You begin with the General Council of Chalcedon which was not held till after St. Austin had been twenty years in his Grave This Council you tell us authorised Invocation of Saints by practising it And did it so Why then how comes it to pass that the Church of Rome does not authorise Invocation of Saints by practising it How comes the Council of Trent not to authorise the Romish Breviary which was certainly used by them a Thousand times during their Sessions But some men are so fierce and so forgetful that they cannot remember their own Method of Arguing for ten lines together Well but did that great Council practise it You tell us that these were their words and the general voice of all those holy Bishops there assembled Behold the Truth Flavianus lives after Death that the Martyr pray for us I was past wondring at you or else I should admire so much Fraud and Falshood crouded together in so little room It is false that those words were the voice of all the Council or that they did Invocate the Martyr that used them and it is as false that these set down are the words used The true account of the business is this Bassianus who had been ejected out of his Bishoprick of Ephesus put in his appeal to the Council against Stephen then Bishop of that See the matter was heard and whatever both could say for themselves it was urged for Bassianus among other things that Flavianus of Constantinople had communicated with him upon this the Bishops and Clergy that belonged to Constantinople rose up and cried out This is the Truth we all say the same the Memory of Flavian is eternal behold the Truth Flavian lives after Death the Martyr shall entreat you for us Flavian is here Flavian judges with us From all which it is plain that the words so much insisted on plainly refer to Flavian as judging for Bassian and entreating the Council with the rest on Bassian's side not a syllable here of Invocation to him and yet this is the place your side have so often urged and hath been so often answered The Council of Gangrae you next produce but quite mistake the design of it to make your Ignorance more and more notorious All Learned Men own the Council was called against the Disciples of Eustathius who were guilty of that gross Error mentioned by St. Paul of forbidding to marry and were so set against it that they would not Communicate with Married people would not receive the Eucharist at the hands of a Married Priest but despised not only them but the Christian Assemblies the Memories of the Martyrs and the Fasts of the Church and appear to be a people who made it their business to be directly contrary to the rest of Christians The Council was called to condemn this Heresie and in their 20th Canon which you quote they condemn any one that through Pride and detesting them should accuse the Assemblies where the Martyrs lye or the Divine Offices which are performed there or the Memories of the Martyrs And what is all this to Invocation of Saints Is it commanded here or is it mentioned here or any thing like it You were forced to help the place a little by adding your wise Note to the beginning of it when having translated it if any one through Pride as believing himself perfect you add that is not needing the Intercession of Saints But there is no need to expose the folly of this addition the very reading of it is sufficient to shew the miserable shifts you are put to when you meddle with these things The Council of Laodicea's 6th and 34th Canon are urged next by you but they are certainly urged by one that never read them except in Caranza or Coccius or some such Writers The 6th Canon orders that Hereticks shall not be permitted to go to God's House as long as they continue in their Heresie And is this a Canon Sir for Invocation of Saints it would have served fully as well to prove that the Council of Trent was held in the last Century and that Innocent the 11th is now Pope at Rome The 34th forbids any Christian to leave the true Martyrs of Christ and to make Assemblies at the Memories of false or Heretical Martyrs Here is no more mention of or command for Invocation of Saints than there is in the first Chapter of Genesis and yet this Council must be drag'd in for the proof and for the Authorizing of Invocation of Saints which in the very next Canon does condemn the INVOCATION OF ANGELS and consequently of Saints for the reason of the Canon holds equally against both as IDOLATRY and a FORSAKING OF CHRIST This is a very bold attempt and this shews that you dare venture upon any the most absurd of things and I am not
able to make any other Apology for you than that this Council was quoted for Invocation of Saints by you out of the abundance of your ignorance But I must recant this excuse since if you read my Book against you that Canon could not escape you I know not what to say for you I look upon you to be the most daring and yet the unhappiest man that ever put Pen to Paper You have still one other Council for us the 5th of Carthage which has not one word to your purpose any more than the rest All it orders is that Christians should not assemble at any Church where there were not some Martyrs Reliques But such proofs as these tho nothing to the purpose we must be content with when a man undertakes a thing for which there is no colour St. Austin's express Testimony that the Martyrs were not Invocated we have had already so that we need not trouble our selves about him and now you have brought us to your last undertaking to shew that the Fathers in the Liturgies had as formal Prayers to Saints as your Church hath You do well to wave the Liturgies of St. Peter James and Mark c. since they are confessed Forgeries but upon the same reason you should not have troubled us with St. Basil's or St. Chrysostom's since they are not genuine but have been interpolated However what you bring from them proves only that they believed that the Virgin Mother interceded for them which is nothing to the purpose of proving that in the Ancient Liturgies solemn Prayers were put up to the Saints such as now are used by your Church The passage from St. Cyril allowing that Catechism to be his proves not one jot further than the belief of the Saints Intercession for those on Earth And St. Austin's does but the very same so that after all this Confidence and bold Undertaking you have not been able to produce one Canon of any Council for Invocation of Saints nor one line of a Prayer to the Saints out of any ancient genuine no nor Interpolated Liturgies You have but another Proof to offer from Pelagius the Second but he comes two hundred years too late and yet all he speaks for or Leo alludes to is that they believed the Saints Intercession for those on earth and is there no difference between the Saints interceding for us and our praying to them You have been often enough told there is Have you neither Memory nor Judgment that these things must be always confounded And when you should prove the Invocation of Saints you fall to proving that the Saints intercede for you I heartily pity you that nothing can do good upon you I pity you the more that you seem in the end of your Paper to believe that you have satisfied all unprepossâ—ssed and unbiassed Readers with such Arguments as had not one grain of reason in them But I pity you most of all for being employed about such things and yet to be no better furnished by those who set you on work but to be left so lamentably to the mercy of him that answers you to be suffered to quote nothing but Forgeries right and the genuine works of the Fathers quite wrong was a very cruel task and I am almost tempted to believe that it was a Penance imposed upon you to help to mortifie some proud stubborn humour Alas Sir now I am pitying you I cannot but give you a little good advice Not to be put upon these things by them to be made a laughing-stock to the world in obedience to them you have done enough already if such things must be done why must the whole burden lye upon you But if all this will not cure you but that I must lose such good Counsel upon you and that you will obstinately continue in your own way let me beg this at last from you That you will look into the Fathers themselves which you quote and give us Edition as well as Book if you will not this I promise you That I will never answer you but that if you trouble the world with such another Paper as this I now have under my hands you shall e'en answer it your self for I know how to employ to better purposes your Christian Friend FINIS * Du Pin Nouvelle Biblioth Tom 2. pa. 117. b Prim. Fathers no Papists p. 56. †Aug. de Civ d. l. 22. c. 10.