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A43661 A letter sent from beyond the seas to one of the chief ministers of the non-conforming party by way of reply to many particulars which he sent to the author in a letter of news / by a lover of the established government both of church and state. Hickes, George, 1642-1715.; Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 1609-1674. 1674 (1674) Wing H1855; ESTC R12608 16,745 38

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A LETTER Sent from beyond the SEAS To One of the CHIEF MINISTERS OF THE NON-CONFORMING PARTY By way of Reply to many Particulars which He sent to the Author in a Letter of News Useful for these Distempered Times By a Lover of the Established Government both of Church and State ANNO DOMINI M. DC LXXIV A Letter sent from beyond the Seas to one of the Chief Ministers of the Non-conforming Party Dear Cousin I Was very glad to receive your Letter but very far from being glad to find you still so extreamly desirous of Innovations in a Government so well established as that is under which you live I perceive you are more zealous than it becomes a good Subject or a good Christian to be for carrying on a Project of my Lord Choses's as Unreasonable as New viz. That of Disabling a Papist to Inherit the Crown For doubtless that proposal was first made and afterwards promoted by him the last Sessions of Parliament not out of true Love to the Reformed Religion but out of Spite or Revenge to the D. of Y Who were he not only Papist but Heathen or Mahumetan which I think is not much worse would certainly have as good a Title to his Crown and all his Temporal Rights as if he were the most Orthodox and Holy Christian in the World And I am perswaded that my zealous Lord Chose would not be willing that the King and Parliament should make a particular Act to disable his own Posterity to Inherit the great Estate he hath got if they should turn Papists or Atheists as others have done before them We all know what mischief in the World that Damnable Doctrine has made That Temporal Rights and Inheritances depend upon Saintship and Grace And if it be clear from Scripture as nothing is more clear that a King ought not to lose his Crown or any other Person for feit his Temporal Rights for not being Christians or for renouncing the Christian Religion then it is plain that neither the D nor any other Person ought to be deprived of their Temporal Rights especially Crowns of all Temporal Rights the greatest for not being Protestants or which is more for renouncing the Christian Religion And I am heartily glad that God gave the Fathers of the English Church the grace to defend her Doctrine in opposing that Unreasonable and truly Romish Proposal of my Lord Chose which if they had approved and defended after it was proposed they had truly acted in that like men Popishly affected and shewed themselves to be what their Adversaries would fain perswade the World they are For 't is the Romish Church and her Doctors which maintain That Kings Excommunicated or Heretick Kings or which is all one that Kings that renounce the Apostolick Faith ought to be Deprived and Deposed But 't is the Church of England that maintains the contradiction of that Unscriptural Unevangelical Principle and thinks her self as much obliged to submit her self to a Heathen Atheistical Heretical or Popish Prince where she can as to an Orthodox King and where she cannot she thinks her self obliged to suffer as her Saviour like a Lamb brought to the slaughter and dares pretend to take up no Arms but those of the Primitive Christians whose true Copy she is Tears Arguments and Prayers I say it is the Church of England that is of this judgment and neither the Church of Rome nor the Church of Scotland both of which have actually Excommunicated and Deposed Lawful and Rightful Princes under the Notion of being Hereticks and Enemies to Christ's Kingdom forgetting both alike the Precepts and Examples of our Saviour and his Apostles on which the Church of England hath grounded the contrary Doctrine as well as on right reason Our Saviour though God rendred unto the Heathen Caesar the things that were Caesar's he owned his right to the Empire both by word and deed although he were but the adopted Successor of the greatest Usurper that ever was in the World Nay furthermore he owned and submitted to the Procuratory Power of Pilate who acted but by Commission from the Emperour Tiberius who if there be any truth in the Character of Tacitus was the greatest Tyrant and the most wicked man that ever the World saw And as for St. Paul there is no Article of our Religion not even that that Jesus Christ is the Son of God more clear in his Epistles than that Every Soul should be subject to the Higher Powers That we should Obey not only for Wrath but Conscience sake That whosoever resisieth receiveth to himself Damnation and lastly that all the Powers and when he wrote there were none but Heathen Powers were Ordained of God I might here insist upon the Practice of the Apostles as it is represented in their Acts and the constant Submission and Sufferings of the Primitive Christians as they are reported by the Ecclesiastical Fathers and Historians but the Scripture it self is sufficient to demonstrate the truth of this Argument which the Church of England has not only established in her Doctrine but her Fathers and Sons of late maintained in their Practices and which the Church of Scotland agreeing in this and many other Points with that of Rome did ever oppose both in Word and Deed. And since that Kirk and Nation have been of this Opinion we need not wonder that the English Disciples of their Buchanan and Knox have practised those rebellious Principles which have so debauched and corrupted the Subjects of the Kings of England as to make them be proverbially called The Kings of Devils And which the Anabaptists in Germany improved into this Maxim That Saintship was the Foundation of Soveraignty and that the Righteous ought to Inherit the Earth And furthermore if Crowns ought to be Entailed upon Protestants only then it is but just that the Estates of all Subjects whatsoever should be so Entailed And if for example the D of Y must be cut off from his Rights for being a Roman Catholick then let the rest of the Papists lose theirs they are all alike Idolaters and let them all alike suffer And to bring the Case to your own House can you imagine that you your self ought to lose your Right to the Estate you have or may have hereafter upon that supposition that you should turn Papist which men as firmly resolved against it as you have certainly done These Practises and Proposals are such that they have left a blot on the memories of some men that seem more zealous than their Brethren And I am glad at present that the Religious Lord Chose is the Chief Patron and Promoter of such an Unreasonable and Romish Design I have more than ordinary reason to call it Romish because I have heard it maintained here among all the Priests I converse with It is a Doctrine dearly beloved by the Romanists And put but the name of Heretick to a Prince here and it is just the same case as when you call a
nothing at all to the dishonour of the Church of England to change or take away those few Ceremonies which her self in the 34th Article confesseth may be altered or removed according to the exigency of times Neither if this were done could the Romish Church have the least apparent reason to reproach us for such a slight alteration seeing her own Missals and Breviaries have been so diverse and different in several times and places and have undergone so many Emendations or rather Corruptions before they were established in the present form by the Authority of Pius V. and the Decree of the Council of Trent But in the mean time I would have all good Christians wait in Peace and Patience till it shall lawfully be done and by that means our Breach would be perfectly made up So that a poor English Traveller would not be tauntingly asked by every Impertinent Priest here Whether he were a true Son of the Church or Presbyterian or Independent or Anabaptist or Quaker And I assure you when they meet with a man that owns himself a true Son of the Church of England they will seem to pity him more than any other but yet they will hardly attempt to convert him But when they meet with one that will own himself of any other sort they will be pleased smile in their sleeves and set upon him as a person not far from their Kingdom of God And I am perswaded had you seen or heard as much of their Idolatries Blasphemies and Superstitons as I have done in one Christmass one Lent and one Easter you would be so far from doing the Church of England any ill office that you would rather like St. Paul after his conversion preach against your own Partizans and thank God that you lived in a Church reformed from Romish Idolatry and Superstition And I cannot but freely confess that I am since my Travels become ten times a greater lover of our own Church and as many times a greater hater and detester of the Romish Church than I was before And therefore I cannot here dissemble the hearty grief I have conceived for the great hopes you have that the Licenses as you express it will be once more authorized by his Majesty or the Declaration revived For as it is that which at first was hammered out by that late Patron and Idol of the Presbyterians the Popish Lord Clifford so 't is that which the Roman Catholicks here especially the Priests do hope and wish for as well as you They desire nothing more than such a Toleration as that was knowing that it must needs tend to the Ruine of the Church of England which is the principal Butt of all their Envy and Malice as being the main support and credit of the Reformed Religion every where and the only Hedg against Popery it self in our unfortunate British Isles We meet with not a few Priests of several Orders that have the confidence in our most familiar conferences to tell us that by the just Judgment of God upon our Church the time of her ruine is at hand the Nation it self being over-spread with Schism and Atheism and the hearts of the faithful being disposed by the Spirit and Providence of God to re-embrace the holy Catholick Truth And therefore they freely confess that this time of Distraction is their Harvest and withal express their intentions and zeal to transport themselves into England at the critical time of Toleration that they may be Fellow-laborers with your selves in that Harvest They seem to lament as much and complain as fast of the prodigious increase of Schism and Atheism among us as you are wont to do of the daily growth of Atheism and Popery And whilst you both complain alike and in the formality of your complaints both alike reflect upon the Church of England it is she only that is the sufferer and she only that truly laments the growth and at the same time sets up banks to hinder the perfect Inundation of all the three among us As for Schism among Protestants you were the first Fathers and continue the chief Fautors thereof all the inferior Sects having sprung from you and dividing both from you and one another under pretence of the same Reasons for which you profess to divide from the Church And 't is from you that even the Quakering Sect it self the dregs of Schism have learned to talk of Illumination and the Spirit and the rest of the Sectaries in what number soever they be differ from you no more than the second third or fourth c. from the first Book of Euclid Not that by this comparison I intend that you have any such Principles or Data among your selves as there are among Mathematicians for I am very well assured that take but any four of the Presbyterian Demagogues and they can scarce agree amongst themselves in any four particulars wherein they differ from the Church of England And therefore if you be not Schismaticks then the Church of England from which you separate and out of which you have gathered Congregations and Preach and Administer the Sacraments unto them I say if you be not Schismaticks then our Church must be the Schismatick in the Controversie between us and be justly chargeable with the same Indictment which she hath drawn up against the Church of Rome An Assertion Cousin which I never knew any other Person except one or two besides your self have the confidence to aver and an Assertion which no Protestant here in France could hear us yet relate without Horror Impatience and Disdain And therefore if the Reformed Church of England from which you wilfully divide and to which by your Divisions you cause so much Scandal abroad and Evil at home be not a Schismatical Church that is a Church which requires some sinful conditions of Communion in what a woful condition will your unpeaceable seditious spirits appear before the God of Peace And how will you answer that at the Tribunal of his Wisdom and Justice which neither your Fathers nor you could ever yet answer to those Instruments of His Glory Judicious Hooker and the Venerable Sanderson But whether you are Schismaticks or whether you are not the Separations which you and your Brood have made from the Church are the apparent Causes of the growth of Popery and both your Separations and your Superstitious Enthusiastical way of Worshipping that God whose People you Emphatically pretend to be are the true Causes of that abundant Atheism which at present makes England an Astonishment and a Scandal to Foreign Nations And if you or any other of the Brother-hood think it strange that I charge yours which is the Capital Sect with Enthusiasm or make Superstition which seemeth diametrically opposite to Atheism the Mother thereof I offer upon the Challenge to make good the Charge in both particulars But in the mean time to shew you how unsafe it will be to provoke me to that trouble I advise you to read