further adds I am sure it hath been opposed in the Church of England otherwise taught and professed in the Schools when I was an Auditor there It hath been prohibited to be enjoyned and tendred or maintained as the authentical Doctrine of our Church by supreme authority with sharp reproof unto those that went about to have it tendred than when those conclusions or assertions of Lambeth which you mention were upon sending down to the University of Cambridge This is sufficient sure to convince you of your error or if it be not let me add that Bishop Davenant himself who you do but hope reduced Mr. Hoord to a sounder mind for I can prove the contrary in his Lent Sermon before the King and the last I think that he preached declared his opinion to be as for Vniversal Redemption so for Vniversal Grace within the Church Which I doubt the Calvinians will-not allow I am sure those that are called Arminians desire no more You may find this if you please in Dr. Hammond's Letters to Bishop Sanderson concerning Gods Grace and Decrees p. 27. and I hope you will take his word in a matter of Fact for a greater thing than this But if all this will not be regarded yet I presume the Church it self will be allowed to understand its own sense which hath directly and in express words saith the forenamed Bishop Mountague in that Book Licensed by the Kings Authority overthrown the ground of Calvinisme in Teaching thus that a justified man and therefore predestinate in your Doctrine may fall from God and therefore become not the Child of God p. 59. which he repeats again p. 73. The Church holdeth and teacheth punctually and that in the opinion and with the dislike of the Learnedst of your side that Faith true justifying Faith once had may be lost and recovered again that a man endued with Gods Holy Spirit may lose that HOLY SPIRIT have that Light put out become like unto SAVL and JVDAS c. How can the Church of England then be thought even in your own understanding to be Calvinian which teaches things so cross to Mr. Calvins Hypothesis that they utterly overturn it And it had been very happy if they that endeavoured to bend some other Articles of our Church to his sense had rather studied as they ought to have done to frame their sense in all other things to this Article which is directed so expressy against what he teaches This Church then would have been in a better condition than it is being now in danger to be destroyed by those who were never quiet till with the Doctrine they had brought in the Discipline too of Mr. Calvin among us Those are memorable words of Bishop Mountagues whom if he had been yours you would have gone near upon such an occasion to have stiled a Prophet which we meet with in the Fifth Chapter of the First Part of his Appeal where he charges those that informed against him with waving the Doctrine of our Church Preaching against it Teaching contrary to what they had subscribed that so saith he through FORRAIN DOCTRINE being infused secretly and instilled cunningly and pretended craftily to be the Churches at length you may wind in with FORRAIN DISCIPLINE also and so fill Christendom with Popes in every Parish for the Church and with popular Democracies and Democratical Anarchies in the State If you please to reflect upon our late confusions and compare them with this Prediction perhaps you may hereafter love Bishop Mountague better as a person of some judgement and sagacity in other things as well as in this But I list not to trouble the Reader with any unpleasant reflections upon those dismal times I will rather upon this occasion refresh him with a tale as King James called it in the Conference at Hampton Court p. 82. There was a time saith he when Mr. Knox writes to the Queen Regent of Scotland telling her that she was Supream head of the Church and charged her as she would answer it before God's Tribunal to take care of Christs Evangel and of suppressing the Popish Prelates who withstood the same But how long trow ye did this continue even so long till by her authority the Popish Bishops were repressed he himself and his adherents were brought in and well setled and thereby made strong enough to undertake the matters of Reformation themselves Then loe they began to make small account of her Supremacy nor would longer rest on her Authority but took the Cause into their own hand c. I will apply it thus And then putting his Hand to his Hat His Majesty said My Lords the Bishops I may thank you that these Men thus plead for my Supremacy they think they cannot make their party good against you but by appealing to it as if you or some that adhere unto you were not well affected towards it But if once you were out and they in place I know what would become of my Supremacy With the like reason I may apply it again to our present business there are certain men that ring perpetually in our ears the Doctrine of the Church of England the Doctrine of the Church of England as if they were the most afraid of innovations in it and were the most zealous assertors and strongest supporters of it Whereas the truth is they are beat from all other holds and hope to shelter themselves a little by appealing to it as if some among us were not well-affected towards it But if once their opponents were out and they in their places with a power to settle matters among us I know what would become of the Doctrine of the Church of England which they would no more value than an old Almanack quite out of date But I intend not to make a Book of this and therefore have said enough to demonstrate the First part of your assertion is not true that an Episcopal Calvinist is the rightest Son or Father of the Church of England As for the Second That he is if a good man the best Christian I have far more to say than I am willing to Print It is sufficient to tell you that I have known indeed sundry good men of that way who I verily believe would have been much better if they had not been of it And others I have known who have stained their gooodness with such irregular actions and sinister practices and dealings as I believe they would not have been guilty of had not their Principles betrayed them into them And lastly I am apt to think that you your self would have been more charitable in your censures more indifferent in your judgement concerning Men and things more civil and courteous in your treatment of those you oppose less captious less partial and not so peremptory as you are in many places of your Book if you had not been a Calvinian but I will not dispute on which side would to God we could use no such word but as
Christ hath done and suffered for us whose righteousness in both regards was so pure and perfect that God in consideration of it or for its merits was pleased Graciously to grant us forgiveness of sins and him a power to bestow it on all those that believe on his name which is as much as to say that we are accounted righteous for the sake of Christs merits or for the merits if you will of Christs righteousness the effects and fruits of which we are made partakers of by Faith So the Church teaches us to understand Christ's imputed righteousness which all good Christians rejoyce in For righteousness imputed is our being accounted righteous before God though we are not so in our selves and we are accounted righteous before God saith the 11 Artic. only for the merits of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works and deserving If you will trouble your self with notions beyond this you may but do not trouble others with them who profess they cannot understand how the Righteousness of Christ can be so accounted ours which is the modern notion of it as if in him we had performed perfect obedience to God He performed perfect Obedience for us that we believe and hope to be saved by the merit of it but we did not perform perfect obedience in him that is contrary I have been taught to the very principles of Christianity For if we did then by that perfect obedience performed in him we become perfectly righteous free that is not only from all punishment but from fault and then we have no need of pardon nor of any inherent righteousness and we have merited a reward For my part I believe the honest people of the Church of England who devoutly say the Litanie never think of any such thing but humbly address themselves to God for mercy through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ who hath purchased pardon for penitent sinners by the intire righteousness of his life and death They mean no more when they pray to be delivered by his wonderful condescension in being incarnate for our sake which was the beginning of his humiliation and by his bloudy death and burial in which it was finished but that they may be freed from the guilt of their sins and the punishment due to them by the merits of these and all other parts of his humiliation which they know by his exaltation into the heavens and the coming of the Holy Ghost was highly acceptable to God being the fulsilling of all his Will in what he required for our redemption and having obtained for our Saviour all power in Heaven and Earth to dispense the Blessings which he purchased And thus other Churches understand this business the French for instance who say We believe that our righteousness consists in remission of sins c. and therefore casting away all opinion of our own vertues and merits we rest only in the obedience of Christ Jesus which is imputed to us both that all our sins may be covered and also that we may obtain Grace before God Here they plainly tell us that their righteousness which is procured by Christs obedience consists in remission of sins and therefore that obedience of his is imputed only in this sense that for its sake we may obtain remission of sins and be accepted with God I beseech you Sir do not accuse me of Heterodoxy if I do not jump with your thoughts in these matters for I protest I have no inclinations to fasten a sense upon the Churches words out of my own head but would most gladly receive it from those that can inform me better about it And I have a great respect also for all good men that are of a different mind in these matters and reverence Mr. Calvin very much though I do not think my self bound to follow his opinions All I desire is that neither you nor any body else would keep a pudder and a stirr as if Christianity were in danger to be lost by I know not what new notions when Mr. Bull and all that I have heard of his way preach the Grace of God in such a manner as I have declared which makes me confident our Religion and the Church is safe if they have no worse enemies than he But I much fear they are none of the Churches friends though they may design its good who make such a noise as if all our antient most fundamental Doctrines were subverted For the love of God Sir Let as hear no more of this from your hand if you bear any good will to it Let us have no more discourses of innovations in our Doctrines no more Truths unveiled though you think your self never so well acquainted with them no more Vindications nor mention of Mr. Standish who being the only person concerned hath as became an honest and good man acknowledged his error by silence I pray Sir do not you therefore revive that which he thinks fit should dye and be no more heard of I dare say for him he will give you no thanks for your kind intentions to serve him and therefore do not study how to oblige him any further in this matter He honours several of those persons I make no doubt as true Sons of the Church of England whom you have loaded with the reproach of departing from its Doctrine You have done him a great deal of injury in endeavouring to make the world believe that he struck at Dr. Hammond Bishop Taylor or Bishop Mountague either Nothing I am confident was further from his thoughts and he wishes I am of opinion that he had been as far out of yours For it was untowardly done to bring him upon the stage again right or wrong when he had no mind to persist in making a breach among us as he had in an heat begun to do But he will take it kindly I am apt to think if you will not seek to make him any reparation for this wrong but leave him to justify himself his own way He may well forgive you all that is past for one considerable service you have done him and the only one that I can find which is that I hope you have opened his eyes to see that I was in the right when I told him in my request to him what sort of men he would gratify by those passages in his Sermon Even such as accuse our late great Archbishop of Canterbury for being an incourager of the Romish Faction as you do in express terms p. 28. i. e. betraying his Trust and this Church which he so affectionately served that it cost him his life It was not enough it seems that they brought him in his life time under the Prophets affliction as he complains to our late Martyred Soveraign in his Epistle before his admirable Book against Fisher between the mouth that speaks wickedness and the tongue that sets forth deceit and slandered him as thick as if he were
not their own Mothers Son but he must still be persecuted with the same calumnies now that he is laid in his Grave But it is no wonder that Pen should do it which bestows such commendations on him who reproaches not only our Bishops but the most famous persons of that Order which have been known in the Christian world I mean the facetious and candid Marvel as you praise him p. 34. with whom honest Mr. Standish as you there truly term him will not take it well to be joyned in the very same breath as if he carried on the same design with that Gentleman He is an honester man I dare say than you would have him and hates that which you applaud with all his heart What do you really think a Son of the Church of England can be in love with him that laughs at the primitive times and makes a jest of the venerable Council of Nice and drolls upon the Bishops assembled there as if they were a company of pitiful Dunces whose understandings were sequestred and knew not what to believe but as they were every day instructed by their Chaplains p. 58. Call you this Facetiousness And is it Candor too when he tells us in his Rehearsal Transpros'd that the highest pinnacle of Ecclesiastical Felicity for the Clergy still have most of his kindness is to asswage their lust and wrack their malice p. 10. And when in the conclusion of his last work we read that the Bishops have induced His Majesty to more severity than all the Reigns since the Conquests will contain if summ'd up together What Not Queen Maries Reign excepted No nor the late Reign of the Presbyterians and Independents Were the flames in Smithfield and all the Sequestration I am loth to mention all the rest of the dreadful sufferings which our times have known mere gentleness in comparison with the present rigors When with so much lenity also as was never known in any Reign such Books as these are suffered to confute their own accusations Good God! how partial are the best sort of Christians grown if you may be believed who can swallow all this glibly and merrily with a great deal of smuttiness to boot which I have observed in the Rehearsal Transpros'd but keck at Dr. Hammond and the Whole Duty of Man c. which will by no means down with them What an odd kind of Conscience is this which cryes out How long O Lord how long p. 35. as if you wondred at his forbearance because some men speak of justifying Faith in other terms than you would have them and can not only suffer but countenance him who directly strikes at a main Principle of Christianity viz. That our Saviour is the Eternal Son of God begotten before all worlds of one substance with the Father For he saith the Council of Nice imposed a NEW ARTICLE or Creed upon the Christian world when this was the very thing they stood upon that they only declared the antient belief which had always been from the beginning concerning the Son of God What outcries would you have made had any person of our Church been guilty of such a fact How prophane how impious would you have thought it to call that explication which they made of the antient Faith a gibberish of their own imposing a Cant wherein they forced others to follow them How oft would you have repeated your facinus ante hoc inauditum p. 35. and reiterated your Hen in the next pages whereas you can read this in him and be as calm as a Lamb nay entertain him with the friendly complement of the facetious and candid Marvel Well I see by this what the care is which some most zealously pretend to have least there should be the smallest innovation in the Doctrine of the Church of England which expresly declares in the 8 Article that the Nicene Creed together with that of Athanasius and the Apostles ought to be thorowly received and believed for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture And in the Second Article it asserts in plain words the Son to be the very Eternal God of one substance with the Father c. Such is the gibberish of the Church of England as he and you too in effect call it for which if you were indeed as much concerned as you imagine and did not deceive your self with an unequal zeal you would so reason upon this occasion as you fancy you do upon another to beblur your paper with Tears more than Ink. For you cannot pretend that any of those whom you trouble your self so much withal have affronted her Doctrine in so audacious a manner as this Writer hath done whom you can read not only with dry Eyes but with a merry Heart There would have been no end of your complaints could you have found any thing so black in our Books we should have had our ears filled with clamours from all parts of the Kingdom and nothing sounded in them but that Christianity was betrayed the name of our Lord blasphemed c. by an impious Innovator You your self though now you be silent would have joyned with them and said that he had out-done all others in scurrility calumny and prophaneness as you accuse others that deserve a better character you would have sobb'd and sigh'd and sate down full of Marvel you must give me leave to fancy how you would have spoken and in deep astonishment that such a thing such an inauditum facinus should be committed in our Israel And truly I am so astonished at it and at your partiality that I am able to go no further but must here break oft abruptly After I have told you that I am notwithstanding so charitable looking upon you in an ill fit when you writ this Book that as you take me for an honest Countrey Gentleman so I take you for no less which of us is mistaken let the world judge without giving it any further trouble by either of our scriblings about this business It had not been troubled with mine I assure you but that I thought it was necessary you should see your Zeal cannot be so great for one way but there are men in the Church of England who will equal it and are as much concern'd and can say as much for the other way And now that this is done let us betake our selves to our Prayers which is the best employment That God would enlighten all our Eyes to see the way of Truth and Righteousness Amen Octob. 20. 1676. FINIS