the damned souls Severall sorts of punishment agreed on by the Schoolmen and how far Christ was liable to any of them Eternity of punishments how proportioned to the sin of Man Two objections answered The Doctrine of the Church of England still the same it was CHAP. X. Of the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour with a consideration of the circumstances and other points incident to that Article THe Article of Christs resurrection Most proper for St. Thomas and upon what reasons The credibility of the resurrection proposed and proved by the types of Isaac and of Ioseph Ioseph why called Zaphnath-paaneah The types of Daniel and of Ionah and how applyable especially the last to the story of Christ. Examples of a resurrection no strange thing to the Iews themselves The Resurrection of Christ foretold by the holy Prophets the time and place thereof sufficient to convince the Iews of their incredulity The allegation of the Souldiers touching the stealing of Christs body examined and derided The Doctrine of the Resurrection of how swift a growth Arguments for the resurrection to convince the Gentiles How Christ may be said to lie in the grave three dayes and three nights Severall ways to salve the doubt and which most probable The strange conceits of Gregory Nyssen and of Dr. Alabaster with the learned and judicious Solution made in the case by Paulus Semproniensis an Italian Bishop An accord made between the four Evangelists about the time and hour of the resurrection The first day of the week why chosen for the day of the resurrection why and by whom celebrated as a weekly Festivall why Christ was raised from the dead in a terrible earthquake why he appeared first to women and why first of all to Mary Magdalen How Christ is said to be the first fruits of the dead The resurrection of Christs body a sure pledge of ours Some reasons for the resurrection in respect of Christ and the necessity thereof in respect of man The Institution and antiquity of the feast of Easter the high esteem it had in the Primitive times and antiently in the Isle of Britain the extreme follies of some men on the other side CHAP. XI Of the Ascension of our Saviour with a discussion of the points and other circumstances which are most considerable in the same THe connexion between the Ascension of Christ and the coming down of the holy Ghost foresignifyed by the Prophet David The antiquity of the feast of holy Thursday Some doubts resolved about the time and place of the Ascension the Creed reconciled with the Gospell Enoch and Elijah types of Christs Ascension and in what particulars The Prophecies in holy Scripture touching Christs ascension as also touching the time place and manner of it with observations upon each A parallel between the old Roman triumphs and the Lords ascension Probable conjectures of the disposing of those bodies which were raised with Christ. The Captives what they were which Christ led in triumph The benefits redounding unto mankind by Christs ascension A dissertation of the probleme whether Christ merited for himself or â—or mankinde only The inconsequence of Maldonates illation touching the worshipping of Christ after his ascension That the body of Christ after his Ascension doth still remain a natural body proved by the Scriptures and the Fathers The Doctrine of Transubstantiation destructive of Christs natural body and of the monstrous Paradoxes which do thence arise CHAP. XII Of sitting at the right hand of God the proper meaning of the Phrase and of the Priviledges which accrew thereby to our Lord and Saviour THe meaning of the phrase sedere ad dextram Dei Sitting at the right hand of Kings and Princes accounted for the greatest honour that could be done unto a subject not alwayes so though so in ordinary use amongst common persons The middle the most honourable place amongst the Romans and Numidians The right hand of God what it signifyed in holy Scripture The right hand a hand of power and love as also of friendship and fidelity What the word sitting meaneth in the present Article Sitting and standing words of repose and ease and how both Postures do agree with Christ in his severall offices The ill construction made by Maldonate touching Christs sitting at the right hand of God the Father the faultinesse of his Rule and instance upon that occasion his aime therein discovered canvassed and confuted That Christ by sitting at the right hand of God obtaineth not an equality with God the Father contrary to the common opinion of the Protestant Schools Severall Preheminences given to Christ by sitting at the right hand of God above all the Angels That sitting at the right hand of God may piously be taken in a literall and Grammaticall sense Considerations to that purpose to make it percepitble and intelligible to a rationall man Moderation in matters of opinion practised by the Antients and approved by the Authour CHAP. XIII Of the Priesthood of our Lord and Saviour which he executeth sitting at the right hand of God wherein it was foresignifyed by that of Melchisedech in what particulars it consisteth and of Melchisedech himself THe Regall and Sacerdotal offices exercised by Christ as he sitteth at the right hand of God The difference between the calling of Christ and that of Aaron the Parallel and differences between the consecration of Christ and the consecration of Aaron seven dayes designed unto the consecration of Christ how employed and spent the Priesthood of Christ when it took beginning Melchisedech what he was and from whom descended In what the Priesthood of Melchisedech did consist especially with the errour of the Papists in that particular Resemblances between Melchisedech and Christ in their name and titles and in performance of the office of the holy Priesthood Christ made the Mediator between God and man and upon what reasons the Mediator not of redemption only as the Papists say but of intercession A story of Themistocles how applyed to Christ. How necessary it was in reference to the Priestly office that Christ should have humane infirmities about him The ingenious conceit of Mat. Corvinus K. of Hungary No sacrifice for sin but that of Christ upon the crosse The Heterodoxies of the Church of Rome and Orthodoxie of the Church of England in that particular The smart but true censure of Averroes the Moore upon the Christians of his time The sacrifice of Christ though not to be reiterated by man yet dayly to be represented by Christ himself unto God the Father The manner how Christ made his entrance into the sanctum Sanctorum compared with that of the high Priest in the Iewish Church A right of titles inherent in the Priesthood of our Lord and Saviour and consequently in the Ministers of the Gospell also CHAP. XIV Of the Regall or Kingly office of our Lord as far as it is executed before his coming unto judgement Of his Vicegerents on the earth and of the severall
it denotes the first person in the Oeconomie of the glorious Trinity There are three that bear record in heaven as St. Iohn hath it the Father the Word and the holy Ghost and these three are one And in this notion or acception of the word GOD is the father of our Lord and Saviour IESVS CHRIST whom he hath begotten to himself before all worlds generatione 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 by such a kind of generation as neither the tongue of Men nor Angels can expresse aright In this respect our Saviour saith of GOD the first person I and my Father are one and in another place which we saw before on another occasion I work and my Father also worketh In this sense God the Father saith of the second person This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased And finally in this as no man living no not any of the host of Heaven is to be called the Son of God but the second Person so none of the three Persons takes the name of Father but the first alone Though GGD hath severall sons and by severall means as shall be shewed anone in the place fit for it yet only CHRIST is called his begotten son and therefore God a naturall Father if I may so say unto none but him And this is that which Gregory Thaumaturgus hath told us saying 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 God hath no other son by nature but thee my Saviour The name of this generation I forbear to speak of It is a point I waived from the very first when first I undertook to expound this Creed as being of too sublime and transcendent nature for the shallowness of my capacity to inquire into It is enough that I acknowledge God to be the Father of our Lord IESVS CHRIST by an eternall generation though I professe my self unable to discourse thereof with any satisfaction to my self or others And for the generation of our Saviour in the fulnesse of time by which he was conceived of the Virgin Mary I shall have opportunity to speak in a place more proper So that not having more to speak of the name of Father as it is personall and hypostaticall in the first Person only I shall proceed to that acception of the word wherein it is taken 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or essentially and so given to GOD that every person of the Trinity doth partake thereof But first I cannot choose but note that even in that equality or unity which is said to be between the Persons of the blessed Trinity the Father seems to me to have some preheminency above the others For not only the Greek Church doth acknowledge him to be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the root and fountain of the God-head but it is generally agreed on by all Orthodox writers that the Father is first in order though not in time Pater est prior ordine non tempore as Alstedius states it and by Aquinas amongst those of the Church of Rome that the Son or second person is Principiatus non essentiatus that is to say if I rightly understand his meaning that there was a beginning of his existence though not of his essence or a beginning of his Filiation but not of his God-head And yet I dare not say that I hit his meaning for I professe my self uncapable of these Schoole-niceties because I finde it generally agreed on by most learned men that CHRIST receiveth the being and essence which he hath from the Father although not in the way of production of an other essence which was condemned as an impious heresie in Valentinus Gentilis but by communication of the same Add here that those who have most constantly stood up in the defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against some Hereticks of this Age doe notwithstanding say and declare in publick that CHRIST though looked upon as the Son of God in his eternall generation cannot be said to be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or self-essentiate And that both Genebrard Lindanus and some others of the Romish Doctors have quarrelled Calvin whom Beza laboureth to excuse in that particular for saying that he is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and hath his God-head from himself wherein he is deserted by Arminius also and those of the Remonstrant party in the Belgick Countries But that the Father Almighty mentioned in my Creed was not and is not both 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 too hath never been affirmed nor so much as doubted of by any Christian writer of what times soever Next look we on the name of Father as it is taken 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 essentially in the holy Scriptures and then it is appliable to every person of the blessed Trinity each of which in his severall person or subsistence may be called our Father Thus read we of the second person for of the first there is no question to be made in the 9. of Esay that unto us a Son is born and that he shall be called wonderfull the mighty God the everlasting Father Vers. 6. Thus in St. Iames we finde that the holy Ghost is called Pater luminum the Father of lights it being his office to illuminate every soul which is admitted for a member of the Church of CHRIST in which respect the Sacrament of Baptisme in which men are regenerated and born again of water and the holy Spirit was antiently called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or illumination The reason why the name Father doth in this sense belong respectively to each is because they equally concur as in the work of Creation God the Father creating the world in the Son by the holy Ghost so in those also of Redemption and Sanctification From whence that maxim of the Schools Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa that is to say the outward or externall actions of the Trinity are severally communicable to the whole essence of GOD and not appropriated unto any particular person And yet the name of Father even in this acception is generally 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and in the common course of speech referred to the first Person only as he that is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the root and fountain of the God-head as before was said For thus hath CHRIST himself instructed us to pray and say Our Father which art in heaven And the Church following his command who hath willed us to pray after that manner beginneth many of her prayers in the publick Liturgy with this solemn form of compellation Almighty and most mercifull Father Not that we do exclude the Son or the holy Ghost in our devotions but include them in him In Patre invocantur filius et spiritus sanctus as Bellarmine hath most truly noted And therefore though we commonly begin our prayers with a particular address to God the Father yet we conclude them all with this through Christ Iesus our Lord and sometimes add to
the Spirit of prophesie as Minutius Felix well observeth Nay being spirits as they are of an excellent knowledge and either by a foresight which they have of some things in future or by conjecturing at events out of natural causes or coming by some other means to be made acquainted with the will of God they took upon them to effect what they knew would follow and to be the Authors of those publick blessings which were hard at hand so that indeed it was no wonder Si sibi Templa si honores si sacrificia tribuuntur if thereupon the people would erect them Temples and offer sacrifice unto them and yeild them other Divine honours fit for none but Gods By means whereof they did not only raise themselves into the Throne and Majesty of Almighty God and captivated almost all the world in a blinde obedience to their will and commands Sed veri ac singularis Dei notitiam apud omnes gentes inveteraverunt as the same Lactantius rightly noteth but in a manner had defaced the knowledge of the true one and only God over all the earth And in this blindeness and Idolatry did the world continue till the birth of CHRIST the Idols of Egypt falling down flat before him when he was carryed into that countrey in his Mothers arms as Palladius telleth us and all the Oracles of the Gentiles failing at the time of his death as is collected out of that work of Plutarchs inscribed De defectu Oraculorum Which preparation notwithstanding these Devils or Daemons call them which you will had gotten such possession of the mindes of men that the Apostles and Evangelists found it a far easier matter to cast the Devils out of their bodies then out of their souls and long it was before the rising of the Sun of righteousness was able to dispel those thick clowds of darkness wherewith they had thus overspread the whole face of the Earth Which with their power and influence in the acts of sin occasioned the Apostle to make this expression that he wrestled not against flesh and bloud but against Principalities and Powers against the Rulers not of this world but of the darknesse of this world and against spiritual wickednesses in high places By which words as he means the Devils and infernal spirits against which the man of God is to combate daily so by those words he gives me a just ground to think that the Angels which did fall from the primitive purity and have since laboured noithing more then the ruine of man were chiefly of those Orders of Aâ—gels which are called Principalities and Powers in the holy Scriptures And this I am the rather induced to think because I finde them called by those names in another place where the Apostle speaking of Christs victory over Hell and Satan describes it thus that having spoiled Principalities and Powers he made a shew of them openly and triumphed over them But of this argument enough It is now time that we proceed to the Creation and fall of man as that which more immediately conduceth to the following Articles of the Incarnation death and passion of our Lord and Saviour And first for mans Creation it was last in order though first in Gods intention of the six days work it being thought unfit in Gods heavenly wisdome to create man into the world before he was provided of a decent house and whatsoever else was necessary both for life and comfort For it we look unto the end for which God made many of the inferiour creatures reperâ—â—mus eum non necessitati modo sed oblectamento voluisse consulere as Calvin rightly hath observed we shall finde that he not only intended them for the necessities of mans life but also for the convenience and delight in living And whereas all the rest of the six days work were the acts only of his power the creating of man doth seem to be an act both of power and wisdome In all the rest there was nothing but a Dixit Deus he spake the word and they were made saith the Royal Psalmist But in the making of man there was somewhat more a Faciamus hominem a consultation called about it each Person of the Trinity did deliberate on it and every one contributed somewhat to his composition For God the Father as the chief workman or the principal agent gave him form and feature in which he did imprint his own heavenly Image The Son who is the living and eternal Word gave him voyce or speech that so he might be able to set forth Gods praises and the holy Ghost the Lord and giver of life as the Nicene Fathers truly call him did breath into his nosthrils the breath of life Or if we look upon it as one act of all we shall finde man agreeing with many of the creatures in the matter out of which he was made but very different from them all both in form and figure For though God pleased to make him of the dust of Earth to humble him and keep him from aspiring thoughts as oft as he reflected on his first Original yet did he make him of a straight and erected structure advanced his head up towards the Firmament and therein gave him the preheminence over all creatures else which had been made before of the same materials And this is that which Ovid the Poet thus expresseth Pronaque cum spectant animalia caetera terram Os homini sublime dedit coelumque videre Iussit erectos ad sydera tollere vultus That is to say And where all Creatures else with down cast eye Look towards th' Earth he rais'd mans Head on high And with a lofty look did him indue That so he might with ease Heavens glories view A thing of principal moment if considered rightly not only to the beeing but well being of man who is hereby instructed by the Lord his God that in the setling of his desires and affections he should take counsell of his making so to advance his meditations as God doth his head and not by fastning both his looks and thoughts on the things below him to disgrace as much as in him is the dignity of his creation and consequently merit to have had the countenance even of those very beasts whose minde he carryeth For I am verily perswaded that if the worldly minded man and such as are not well instructed in the things of God did but consider of the figure of his body only that very contemplation would promote him in the way of godliness and rectifie such errours and misperswasion wherewith his soul hath been misguided in the way of truth Certain I am that Lactantius whom I have so often cited in this present work examining the Original and growth of Atheism with which the world had been infected in the former times makes this amongst some other causes to be one of the principal that men had formerly neglected to look up
this objection she might make not out of any disbelief of the Angels words for being then as faulty as old Zachary was she had been as punishable since God is no respecter of persons nor that she had vowed chastity as the Papists say and Gregory Nyssen doth report from an unknown Author whose history he doth confess to be Apocryphal 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as his words there are for then she had done very ill to betroth herself unto an husband the vow of Chastity being inconsistent with the state of Matrimony But this she did because the Angel seemed to speak of her Conception as a thing instantly to be done and then in fieri at the least as Logicians phrase it and she though then betrothed to Ioseph was a Virgin still for the Text saith it was before they came together and more then so there was perhaps some part of the time remaining which usually intervened amongst the Iews betwixt the first Espousals and the consummation of the marriage But this bar was easily removed For it followeth that the Angel answered and said The holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee The holy Ghost shall come upon thee 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as the Greek Text hath it that is to say the holy Ghost shall fall upon thee like rain into a fleece of wooll or like the dew of heaven upon a barren and thirstie land where no moisture is and make thee no less fruitful without help of man then was the Virgin Earth in its first integrity when no outward or extrinsecal moysture had yet fallen upon it but that there went up a mist only out of the very bowels thereof and watered the whole face of the ground And the power of the most High shall overshadow thee 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 saith the Greek and cover thee with the wings of his quickning virtue as the Hen doth Egges when she brings forth young To make this matter plainer yet we shall illustrate it by two Texts of holy Scripture equal to this both in the wonder and the agent In the beginning saith the Text God created the Heaven and the Earth and the Earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep And in the second of the same Book we read that God created man out of the dust of the earth vers 7. In each of these there is a subject some matter such as it was to be wrought upon that confused mixture of Earth and waters to be disposed into a world the dust and Atoms of that world to be contrived into a man The fashioning and accomplishment of which great works both of them seeming as impossible to sense and reason as the Conception of our Saviour in a Virgins Womb is in the Scripture attributed to the holy Ghost The Spirit of God saith Moses moved upon the face of the waters Hence the digestion of that matter fashioned into that goodly fabrick of Heaven and Earth which we so visibly behold with such admiration God breathed into his nostrils the breath or spirit of life inspiravit in faciem ejus spiraculum vitae from whence the Animation and soul of man This action then ascribed unto the holy Ghost which St. Luke calleth a supervenience or a coming upon and an obumbration or over-shadowing is likely to have been much of the same nature with that of moving in the first and that of breathing in the 2. of Genesis Gods Spirit as it breatheth where it listeth so can it quicken where it pleaseth Some there have been if Maldonate do report them rightly Qui turpe aliquid hoc loco somniant who have made some impure construction of this holy Text most impudently affirming Spiritum sanctum ad modum viri cum Maria concubuisse I abhor to English it but who they were he either was afraid or ashamed to tell us No doubt but they were some of the Romish party For had such a blasphemous and ungodly saying dropped from the mouth or pen of a Protestant all Christendome had been told of his name and Nation And therefore certainly this quidam whom he spares to name must be some such good fellow of the Catholick faction as Fryer Albert of the frock as they use to call him Of whom I remember I have read in some of their Authors that being a great Votary of the blessed Virgins she appeared nightly to him in her bodily shape espoused her self to him by a ring and suffered himself to converse with her in familiar manner Insomuch as he might say in the Poets language Contrectatque sinus forsitan oseula jungit He dallied with her Paps And kissed her too perhaps But I do ill to mingle these impurities with this sacred argument if the unmasking of the obscoenities of those great Professors of vowed chastity do not plead my pardon And yet I cannot choose but adde that these lazy lives of some of the Monks and Fryers have carryed them so far into spiritual fornications or rather into contemplative lusts that many of them have fancied to themselves such unclean commixtures as that of Fryer Albert with the blessed Virgin To what end else served those large Faculties which were given unto Tekelius a Dominican Fryer when he was sent to publish the pardons or Indulgences of Pope Leo the tenth in the upper Germany Who spared not to affirm even in common Alehouses that by his Buls he had authority to absolve any man whatsoever Etiamsi Virginem matrem vitiaverit though he had vitiated or deflowred the Virgin Mother as Sleidan tels the storie in his book of Commentaries I know that in the later Editions of this Author as in that of Colen printed An. .... the words are changed to Virginem aut matrein a maid or a mother and so to mend the matter they have marred the sense For what need such large faculties as Tekelius bragged of for pardoning fornication or Adultery for the deflowring of a Virgin or lying with another mans wife which every ordinary Priest can absolve of course Besides in the first Edition of that Author printed at ..... An. .... it is plainly Virginem Matrem the Virgin Mother And so 't is in an old English Translation of him printed at London and la Veirge Mere as plainly in a French Translation printed at Geneva An. 1574. Marvail it is that Maldonate hath not undergone the like castigation whose Quidam whatsoever he was offended more against the Majesty of the holy Ghost then Tekel did save that the Popes authority was concerned in it against the modesty and piety of the Virgin Mary To return therefore where I left as I abominate the impieties of these Romish Votaries so neither can I approve the conceit of Estius though otherwise a very learned and sound Expositor of holy Scripture where the interest of the Church of Rome
body CHAP. VII Of the crucifying death and burial of the Lord JESUS CHRIST with the diquisition of all particulars incident thereunto THe death of Christ prefigured both in that of Abel and of Abels lamb The definition of a Sacrifice how abused by Bellarmine and on what design The Sacrifices of the Law how accounted expiatory Several resemblances between the Sacrifices of Christ and the legal sacrifices A parallel beawixt Christ and Isaac and betwixt Christ and the Brazen Serpent Calvins interpretation and the practise of the Papists much alike unsound How Christ is said to be made a curse The cruel intention of the Iews to prolong Christs miseries under the false disguise of pity Several sorts of Dereliction and in what sort our Saviour Christ complained that he was forsaken Whether Christ spake those words in his own Person or in the person of his members the Schoolmen in this point very sound and solid Why vinegar was given to Christ at the time of his passion The meaning of those words Consummatum est That the death of Christ is rather to be counted voluntary then either violent or natural and upon what reasons The death of Christ upon the Cross a full Propitiation for the sins of man both in the judgement of Scriptures and the Antient Fathers That Christ suffered not the death of the soul as impiously is affirmed by some The Eucharist ordained for a Sacrifice by our Lord and Saviour The Sacrifice or Oblation of Bread and Wine used antiently by that very name in the Church of Christ why called Commemorative and why an Eucharistical sacrifice and why the Sacrament of the Altar The Sacrifice asserted by the Antient Writers corrupted by the Church of Rome and piously restored by the Church of England St. Cyprian wrested by the Papists to defend their Mass. A parallel between the Peace-offerings and the blessed Eucharist The renting of the Vail at our Saviours passion what it might portend The Earthquake and Eclipse then happening testified out of Heathen writers The reconciliation of St. Mark and St. Iohn about the time and hour of our Saviours suffering Various opinions in that point and which most improbable Vniversality of redemption defended by the Church of England Both Sacraments how said to issue from our Saviours side The breaking of our Saviours body in the holy Eucharist how it agreeth with the not breaking of his bones The true and proper meaning of the Greek word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Certain considerations on our Saviours buriall and of the weekly fasting dayes thereupon occasioned That Iudas hanged himself made good from the antient Fathers against the new devise of Daniel Heinsius The fearfull and calamitous ends of Pontius Pilate Annas Cajaphas and the whole nation of the Iews CHAP. VIII Of the locall descent of Christ into hell Hades and inferi what they signifie in the best Greek and Latine authors and in the text of holy Scripture an examination and confutation of the contrary opinions CHrists descent into hell the first degree of his Exaltation and so esteemed by many of the antient Fathers The drift and project of this Chapter Severall Etymologies of the Greek word HADES The Greek word HADES used most commonly by the old Greek writers to signifie hell the place of torments sometimes to signifie Pluto the King of hell the word so used also by the sacred Penmen of the new Testament The faultinesse of our last translators in rendring the Greek HADES by the English grave 1 Cor. 15.55 c. contrary to the exposition of the best interpreters By HADES in the Ecclesiasticall notion of it is meant only hell in the opinion of all Greek writers of the elder and middle times The Latine word inferi whence derived and what it signifyeth Inferi generally used by the Antient writers for the place of torments not for the receptacles or repositories of the righteous souls The Greek word Hades generally rendered in the new Testament by the Latine inferi The meaning of these words viz. He descended into hell Grammatically gathered from the Premises Arguments for the locall descent of Christ into hell from St. Pauls words Rom. 10.6 7. and Ephes. 4.8 9 c. with the explication of both places The leading of captivity captive Ephes. 4. and the spoiling of principalities and powers Col. 2.15 used by the antients as arguments for Christs descent into hell the like proved by St Peters argument Act. 2.27 c. the pains of death mentioned vers 2.24 in the latter editions of that book the very same with the pains of hell in some antient copies The Locall descent of Christ into hell proved by the constant and successive testimonies of the old Greek Fathers and by the general current of the Latine writers together with the reasons which induced him to it Considerations on this point viz. whether Christ by his descent into hell delivered thence the souls of such holy men as either dyed under or before the Law Bullengers moderation in it CHAP. IX The Doctrine of the Church of England touching Christs descent into Hell asserted from all contrary opinions which are here examined and disproved THe Doctrine of the Church of England touching the local descent of Christ into Hell delivered in the book of Articles in the book of Homilies and Catechismes publickly allowed The errour of Mr. Rogers in that point charged upon the Church The Doctrine of a locall descent defended by the most eminent writers in the Protestant Churches and of some of the Reformed also The first objection against the locall descent viz. that there was no such clause in the old Creed or Symbol of the Church of Rome The second objection that our Saviour went on the day of his passion with the Theef to Paradise The third objection that Christ at the instant of his death commended his soul into the hands of God the Father The pertinency and profitablenesse of the locall descent declared and stated and freed from all the Cavils which are made against it The false construction of this Article by our Masters in the Church of Rome Brentius and Calvin falsly charged by Bellarmine The Article of Christs descent by whom first made the same with his burial the inconvenience of that sense and the absurdities of Beza in indevoring to make it good The new devise which makes the descent into hell to be nothing else but a continuance for three days in the state of death proposed and answered A Theologicall Dictionary necessary for young Divines The Author and progresse of the new opinion touching the suffering of hell paines in our Saviours soul. A particular of the torments in hell that is to say remorse of conscience 2. rejection from the favour of God 3. despaire of Gods mercy 4. the fiery flames there being That none of all these could finde place in our Saviours soul. The blasphemy of some who teach that Christ descended into hell to suffer there the torments of
everlasting and after preached by the Apostles both to Iew and Gentile was finally committed unto writing to this end and purpose that by reading it or hearing it read and declared by others we may believe that IESVS is the CHRIST the Son of God and that believing we may have life through his name as St. Iohn assures us And though this be affirmed by him of his Gospel only I mean that written by himself yet we may safely say the same of all the rest of the Apostolical and Evangelical writings as being dictated by the same Spirit writ by men equally inspired and all conducing to this end to teach us to know IESVS CHRIST and him crucifyed and to enable us to give a reason to all that aske of the faith that is in us But being the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles were of too great a bulk to be committed unto memory and that there were some things in them so obscure and difficult that many ignorant and unstable but well meaning men both might and did wrest them to their own destruction other things which related rather unto moral duties then to points faith it was thought fit by the Apostles to draw the points of saving faith such as were necessarily to be believed of all Christian people into a briefe and narrower compasse It was not for the ordinary sort of men to trouble themselves with doubtful disputations as St. Paul calleth them whereof many do occurre in his Epistles disputes of too great difficulty and sublime a nature for every man especially the weak in faith either to understand or conceive aright Nor was it possible that men of mean parts and laborious callings of which the Church consisted for the most part in the first beginning should either have so much leasure as to read over their writings or so much judgment as to gather and collect from thence what of necessity was to be believed that they might be saved what not or so much memory as to treasure up and repeat by heart the infinite treasures of divine knowledge which are comprehended in the same And if it were so as no doubt it was when the Apostles and Evangelists had left those excellent Monuments of themselves in writing which the Church hath ever since enjoyed to which men might resort as occasion was for their information and instruction how necessary then must we think it was for some such Summarie and Abstract of the Christian faith to be resolved upon amongst them which men of weak memories might repeat by heart and men of shallow comprehensions righly understand Those blessed souls knew well none better how to apply themselves to the capacities of the weakest men that there were many Babes in Christ who were to be fed with milk and not with meats and that if they became not all things unto all men they must resolve amongst themselves to save but few Upon this ground then which what juster could there be to induce them to it it is conceived they drew up that brief abstract of the Christian faith which we call the CREED and couched therein whatever point was necessary for all sorts of men in all times and all places of the world both to believe in their hearts as also to professe and confesse upon all occasions though to the apparent hazard of their lives and fortunes And why this might not be that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that form of sound words whereof St. Paul saith to Timothy Hold fast that form of sound words thou hast heard of me I must confesse that I could never yet see a convincing reason Certain I am that Irenaeus who lived very near the Apostles times hath said of this confession of the faith this Creed which hath so generally and unanimously been received over all the world Ecclesia per universum orbem usque ad fines terrae c. The Church saith he throughout the world even to the ends of the earth received from the Apostles and their Disciples that faith which believeth in one God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth c. and in IESVS CHRIST the Son of God incarnate for our salvation and in the holy Spirit which preached by the Prophets the dispensation and coming of God and the birth of CHRIST our Lord by the Virgin his passion resurrection and ascension with his flesh into heaven and his coming from heaven in the glory of his Father to raise up all flesh and to give just judgement unto all Which words lest possibly we might interpret of the doctrine of faith which questionlesse was alwayes one and the same over all the world and not of any summary or abstract which they had digested for the use and benefit of Gods people or think that they relate rather to the substance of faith then to any set and determinate form of words in which that substance was delivered let us behold what the same Father hath delivered in another place This faith saith he which the Church though dispersed through the world received from the Apostles and their Disciples yet notwithstanding doth it keep it as safe as if it dwelt within the wals of one house and as uniformly hold N. B. as if it had but one only heart and soul and this as consonantly it preacheth teacheth and delivereth as if but one tongue did speak for all He addes which makes the point more plain that though there be different languages in the world 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 yet the effect and summe of the tradition i. e. the faith delivered in that forme is one and the same and I presume he means not by tradition those doctrines of faith which are delivered in the books and writings of the Evangelists and Apostles Finally he concludes with this expression and it is worthily worth our marking in the present case that he amongst the Governours of the Church who is best able to speak saith no more then this and no lesse then this the simplest and the most ignorant person which certainly he had not said but that there was one uniforme and determinate order of words which every one was bound to learn and adhere unto Tertullian he speaks plainer yet and affirmes expresly regulam fidei unam omnino esse solam immobilem et irreformabilem that there is but one rule of faith at all and that unmoveable and unalterable How could he say that there was but one rule of faith in the Church if every several Church had a several rule or that it was unmoveable and unalterable as he saith it was if there were no certain form of words prescribed which men were to keep to but every one might change and alter as he saw occasion So that I take it for a truth unquestionable that in the first ages nay the first beginnings of the Church of CHRIST there was a certain form of words prescribed for the ease and benefit of the Church a summarie or abstract of the Articles
Deus inferiorum rerum curam gerere nolit a Dei natura alienum est nimis c. To say saith he that GOD refuseth to take care of inferiour things is too too much abhorrent from the nature of God or makes him lyable to the passions of an envious man And on the other side to say he could not do it were altogether as unworthy and to make him impotent neither of which by any means may be said of God And therefore we must needs determine that God is both willing and able to take care of all things which he hath made already or shall make hereafter And first the goodness of the Lord though indivisible in it self as all things in him hath been divided by the Schoolmen with very good propriety both of words and meaning into these kindes the one of which they call 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Original the other 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 exemplified Illa in Deo existens haec in Creaturis expressa the first existing solely in the Lord our God the other manifested in his Creatures That which they call 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Original we may define to be an Everlasting and unalterable quality in the Lord our God qua modis omnibus summe bonus est by which he is supremely and entirely good In which regard the Divine Plato said of God that he is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 good only in and of himself 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the only saving good the most desirable felicity as others of the Heathen called him And he that knew him best our most gracious Saviour hath given this to us for a Maxime Vnus est bonus DEVS that there is none good but only God so good that his most blessed vision is the summum bonum the highest and supremest good that any of the Saints and Angels can aspire unto The other species of goodness which the Schools call 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Exemplified is that which God hath manifested on his Creatures and imparted to them and this they do again divide into general and special that being extended unto all his Creatures this more particularly restrained to his chosen servants His general goodness he hath shewn as before was noted in the continual preservation of the works of his hands clothing the hils with grass and the vales with corn feeding the Lyons and young Ravens when they call upon him apparelling the Lillies with a greater beauty then that of Solomon in his greatest glory making his Sun to shine and his rain to fall as well upon the sinner as the righteous person and in a word opening his hand and filling all things living with his plenteousness In which respect it is most truly said by the Royal Psalmist Repleta est Terra bonitate Domini the Earth is full of the goodness of the Lord Psal. 32.5 His special goodness he restraineth to his chosen servants to such as fear his name and observe his Precepts The Lord is good to Israel saith the Prophet David even unto all such as are of a clean heart And so the Prophet Ieremy in the Lamentations The Lord is good to them that wait for him to the soul that seeketh him This manifested in delivering them from the evils both of sin and punishment and in accumulating on them his sacred blessings both of Grace and Glory Goodness is graciousness in this sense and to be good is only to be kinde and gracious Sis bonus O felixque tuis in the Poets language And then we have it thus expressed in the words of David viz. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion slow to anger and of great mercy that is to say of great mercy in the pardon of our sins and wickednesses and gracious in the free collation of the gifts of the holy Spirit which therefore are called Graces quia gratis data By grace we are made fit for mercy by mercy capable of glory And by his grace and mercy on his chosen servants doth he preserve the world from those dreadful plagues which else would fall upon the wicked from whom he doth withhold his hand and keep off his vengeance out of that grace aud mercy to the righteous persons amongst whom they live For certainly it is most true which Ruffinus telleth us Mundum sanctorum meritis stare that the World hath hitherto been preserved by the prayers of the Saints And 't is as true which is affirmed by Stapleton a learned Papist Deum propter bonos sustinere malos that God gives many temporal blessings to ungodly men because they live so intermingled with his faithful servants and respites them sometimes from the hand of punishment not for their own but for the righteous persons sake amongst whom they dwell If Sodom stood so long unpunished it was because of righteous Lot who then dwelt amongst them And possibly it might have stood to this very day at least have scaped that fiery deluge which then fell upon it had it contained no more then teri righteous persons Far be it from the Lord our God to stay the godly with the wicked The Judge of all the World is more just then so When God raineth vengeance from above on the wicked man it cannot be but that the righteous must partake of the common miseries which do befall that State or Nation in the which he liveth as Abraham Isaac Iacob did of those several famines which God had sent upon their Neighbours There are not always such distinctions as was between the land of Goshen and the rest of Egypt God therefore sometimes holds his hands when the sins of wicked men cry loud for vengeance out of his grace and mercy to the righteous man or else abbreviates the time of their tribulation out of respect unto his chosen If they partake alike of the common miseries of Famine Pestilence War as sometimes they do it is because that even the best men have their imperfections and ever and anon commit some foul sinnes which God thinks fit to expiate with a temporal Purgatory But Iustice bears the greatest stroak in all Publick Governments Mercy and Grace although they be the fairest flowers in the Royal Diadem are used but at some times and on choyce occasions But Iustice is the standing and perpetual rule by which Kings reign and order the affairs of their several States And this the Civil Lawyers do define to be Perpetua constan◠voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi a constant and perpetual purpose to give to every man his due Which definition well accordeth with that heavenly justice which is Original in God and essential to him since that the Will of God is the only Standard by which his justice is directed in the Government of the World and mankinde Norma justitiae divinae est voluntas Dei as the old Rule was a shadow of which Soveraign power we may behold in some of the
now sitteth and shall sit till all things be fully perfected We believe also that from that place he shall come again to execute that general Iudgement as well of them whom he shall then finde alive in the body as of them that shall be already dead This is the main of that which is to be believed touching CHRIST IESVS our Lord but so that we divide not the man CHRIST IESVS from IESVS CHRIST the Son of God For though that note of Estius be exceeding true that all things contained in the Creed concerning Christ from his conception in the womb of the Virgin to his last coming unto judgement inclusively de Christo dicuntur secundum humanam naturam are verified and affirmed of him in his humane nature yet are we also bound to believe this of him that he was so truly and indissolubly the Son of God according to the Tenor of this present Article that whilest this man was born of the Virgin Mary the Son of God was also born of the self same Virgin whilest the man CHRIST IESVS suffered under Pontius Pilate the Son of God was also crucified dead and buried Et sic de caeteris For otherwise Tacitus who reporteth his sufferings under Pontius Pilate and Pontius Pilate who gave testimony to his Resurrection in a Letter writ on that occasion to Tiberius Caesar or Nicolas one of the Seven the Founder of the Sect of the Nicolaitans who beheld him at the instant of his Ascension might pass for Orthodox professors of the Christian Faith Besides a partial assent to one or to some only of the Articles which relate to CHRIST is not enough to give denomination to a true believer It must be uniform and alike sincere unto every truth recorded of him in the Scriptures or summarily comprehended in the present Creed which qualifieth a man a right to deserve that title So that unless we fix our selves upon this Principle that IESVS CHRIST our Lord is the Son of God the only begotten Son of God as the Nicene hath it and carry the same with us through every Article which hath relation to his Person our Faith being partial only to some matters of fact and not compleat and perfect in each several lineament fals short of that assent to the Word of God and all those supernatural truths revealed in it which is required unto the constitution of salvifical faâ—th Now for the better understanding of the present Article which is so operative and influential over all the rest we will resolve it first into this Proposition that IESVS CHRIST our Lord is the Son of God the only begotten Son of God as before we had it from the Nicene And having so resolved it into this Proposition will take a view thereof in its several parts and look upon our Saviour Christ first in his Person and his Office next in his several relations unto God and man His Person we finde represented in the name of IESVS his Offices in that of CHRIST his reference or relation to Almighty God as he is his Son his only Son to man as he is made our Lord. First for his person or his nature we finde it represented in the name of IESVS for Christus nomen est officii Jesus naturae personae as the learned note and that originally Hebrew derived from the future tense of the verb Iashang which signifieth Salvavit i. e. he hath saved or from the substantive Isshagnah which is as much as salus ipsa or salvation it self If from the first it is the very same in Hebrew with that of Iehoshua or Ioshua as our English reads it the son of Nun who by St. Luke Act. 7.45 and by St. Paul Heb. 4.8 is called plainly Iesus and then the difference betwixt him and the son of Nun will consist rather in the manner of the salvation which he hath bestowed then in the property of the name If from the second we finde more in old Simeons Nunc dimittis then hath been generally observed who did not only praise the Lord because his eyes had seen his Saviour but 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the salvation of God And then those Texts of holy Scripture which speak so clearly of the Salvation of God or where God is called our Salvation as Exod. 15.2 Esa. 12.1 2 3. 49.6 52.10 56.1 and also Habak 3.18 may possibly be intended of CHRIST our Saviour But whether this be so or not it can be no disparagement to the Son of God to have his name derived from the same Original with Ioshua the son of Nun who was so clear a type of the Lord himself that scarce a clearer doth occur in the book of God For as Moses the Law-giver of the Iews though he did bring that people out of the land of Egypt was not so happy as to settle them in the land of Canaan but left that work to be performed by the hand of Iesus the Son of Nun so neither could the Law which was the School-mistris unto CHRIST though it dispelled the clowds of Egyptian darkness bring them that did live under it into the Sanctum Sanctorum but left the honour of the work to IESVS the Son of God And as Ioshua or Iesus the son of Nun having subdued the heathenish Princes who possessed the land estated the whole house of Iacob in possession of it so IESVS CHRIST the Son of the living God having subdued Sin Hell and Satan who held the whole world of mankinde under their subjection brought those who are the children of Abrahams faith into a peaceable fruition of the land of Promise whereof the land of Canaan was a Type or figure The difference as unto the name was in this especially that Ioshua the son of Nun was at first called Oshea Numb 13.9 and had his name changed afterwards by Moses vers 16. on some presage perhaps of his future greatness but IESVS CHRIST the Son of God received that name from God himself in his first conception For thus the Angel Gabriel to the blessed Virgin Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a Son and shalt call his name IESVS The reason of which choyce or appellation is by another Angel thus given to Ioseph Ipse enim salvum faciet populum suum c. i. e. for he shall save his people from all their sins Here then we have a salvabit or a salvum faciet to manifest the true interpretation of this blessed name and therewithall the nature of a more blessed Person And so Ruffinus doth resolve it IESVS Hebraei vocabuli nomen est quod apud nos Salvator dicitur IESVS saith he is an Hebrew name and signifieth as much as Saviour Where we may note that the old Author keeps himself to the old Ecclesiastical word Salvator and was not so in love with the Roman elegancies as Beza for the most part is in his translation as to obtrude
Deus in secula brnedictus as St. Paul calleth him in the 9. Chap. to the Romans vers 5. Deus in carne manifestatus God manifested in the flesh in the first to Timothy St. Iohn speakes home unto the point and doth more puzzle the Socinian and Arian hereticks then all the book of God besides In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God In the beginning when was that When God created first the heaven and the earth when the earth was without forme and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep then the word was that is to say it had a perfect actuall being when all things else did but begin to be and having then an actual and a proper being it could not at that time nor at any time since begin to be but was and is and so continueth without ending In the beginning was the word what word that word by which the worlds were made as St. Paul hath it by whom all things were made saith St. Iohn and without which nothing was made saith the same Evangelist The word which after was made flesh and did dwel amongst us and by the brightnesse of his glory did declare himself to be the only begotten Son of the Father Ioh. 1. The expresse image of his person Heb. 1.3 the image of the invisible God Col. 1.15 That word in the beginning was and was God the word the Son of God not by communication of grace but nature therefore the natural Son of God but so the Son of God his begotten Son as to be very God for the word was God The Word was God saith the Apostle not only by a participation of power or communiâ—ation of a more abundant measure of his graces in which respects some of the Sons of Men are called Gods in Scripture Ego dixi Dii estis saith the royal Psalmist but properly and truly God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the very true God and the Son of God We know that the Son of God is come and hath given us an understanding that we may know him that is true And we are in him that is true even in his son Jesus Christ who is the true God and the life eternal saith the same Apostle Here have we CHRIST the Son of God and CHRIST the true God both in one and what need further evidence in a point so clear Such further Topicks as are used for the proof hereof from the names given him in the Scripture the attributes and mighty workes ascribed unto him and the company of such texts in the book of God as being spoken of the Father in the old Testament are applyed in the new unto the Son I purposely forbear at present and shall content my self with such ample testimonies which CHRIST himself hath given to his own Divinity For though it be an unusual thing to admit a mans own testimony in his own cause according unto that of our Lord and Saviour If I bear witness of my self my witness is not true that is to say it would not passe for currant or be taken for truth yet when a man lyeth under any accusation he may then speak what he can in defence of himself and his testimony be allowed of towards his acquitment or justification And therefore Christ our Saviour being challenged by the Pharisees who were apt to cavil at his sayings for speaking in his own behalfe returned this answer Though I bear record of my self yet my record is true Upon this ground then we proceed and though it be the last in order of our Saviours life yet we will first alleage that passage which happened in the high Priests hall on the day of his passion The high Priest finding no sufficient testimony for his condemnation resolved to put him to the oath of ex officio and therefore did adjure him by the living God to tell them whether he were the Christ the Son of God to which our Saviour answered saying Thou hast said Which though it be equivalent to an affirmation yet to make sure work of it and put it out of doubt St. Marke hath given his answer in these positive termes Iesus said I am In which it is to be observed that when the high Priests put our Saviour to this dangerous question he spake not of the Son of God in that vulgar sense in which the just and righteous persons were called his sons but of the Son of God in the natural sense in which he could not verifie himself for the Son of God without including necessarily that he was also God As in the 5. Chap. of St. Iohn where our Saviour having said My Father worketh hitherto and I also work the incensed Iews intended him some present mischief not only because he had broken the Sabbath but had said also that God was his Father making himself equal with God And this appears yet further by the following words where it is said that the high Priest rent his clothes saying he hath spoken blasphemy and thereupon pronounced him to be guilty of death which vote they after prosecuted before Pontius Pilate affirming that he ought to die by the Law of Moses because he had made himself the Son of God Assuredly their meaning was that he had made himself the true and natural Son of God and not the Son of God by especial grace for otherwise they had not voted him to be guilty of death Nor had the high Priest rent his clothes if he had only taken upon himself the name of CHRIST or of the Messiah because that could not come within the compasse of Blasphemy For they knew well that the Messiah or the Christ was to come in the forme of man though with more outward pomp and glory as they supposed then our Saviour did and therefore though they might have condemned him of folly in that being a man of no reputation he had taken on himself the name of CHRIST they had no reason in the world to accuse him of Blaspheming the name of God Now that the Messiah was to come in the form of man being he was to come of the womans seed was a thing so perfectly resolved on that Eve immediately on the promise made that her seed should bruise the Serpents head supposed that Cain her first born was to be the man and therefore said upon his birth I have gotten a man or rather the man from the Lord Possedi virum ipsum Jehovah I have gotten a man even the Lord Jehovah as Fagius the learned Hebrician upon severall revises readeth it The like conceit possessed the Parents of Noah as many good Authours do conceive upon which ground they said when they gave him that name this same that is this son of ours shall comfort us concerning our work Nor had the very Iewes of our Saviours time sent to enquire of Iohn the Baptist
is not concerned who by the power of the most High understands here the very person of God the Son and by this over-shadowing of the blessed Virgin his voluntary Incarnation in her sanctified womb His words are these Per virtutem Altissimi intelligi ipsum Dei Filium qui est virtus brachium potentia Patris quique obumbraturus significatur Virginem illapsu suo in uterum Virginis per occultum Incarnationis mysterium But by his leave I cannot herein yeild unto his opinion though Chrysostom and Gregory for the antient Writers Beda and Damascene for the Authors of the middle times do seem to contenance it For not St. Augustine only as himself confesseth and Euthymius a good writer also are against him in it but the plain text and context of the holy Scripture which makes the quickning of the womb of this blessed Virgin to be the work only of one Agent though it be expressed by different titles Nor are such repetitions strange or extraordinary in the Book of God nor can it give any colour to distinguish the power of the most High from the holy Ghost as if they were two different Agents unless we can distinguish the Lord our God from him that dweleth in the Heavens because we finde them both together in the 2. Psalm He that dwelleth in the Heavens shall laugh them to scorn the Lord shall have them in derision And though it cannot be denyed but that the Son of God is the very power and strength of his Father yet himself doth give this very name of power to the holy Ghost For when he commanded the Apostles to abide in the City of Hierusalem donec induantur virtute ex alto i. e. until they were â—ndued with power from on high what else did he intend thereby but that they should continue there until they were endued with the holy Ghost Of which see Act. 2.4 Besides if this opinion should be once admitted we must exclude the holy Ghâ—st from having any thing to do in so great a mysterie and so not only bring the Creed under an Expurgatorius Index but the Scripture too Letting this therefore stand for a truth undeniable that the over-shadowing as the Text calleth it of the blessed Virgin was the proper and peculiar work of the holy Ghost let us next see whether the nature of the miracle be not agreeable to the operatioâ—s of the holy Spirit or such as may not be admitted for a truth undoubted by equal and indifferent men though they be not Christians nor take it up upon the credit of the Word of God And first that of it self it is agreeable to the operations of the Spirit the course of his Divine power in the works of nature doth expresly manifest For as in the spiritual regeneration though it be Paul that planteth and Apollo that watereth yet it is God who gives the increase without whose blessing on their labours their labours will prove fruitless and ineffectual so also in the act of carnal generation though the man and woman do their parts for the pro creation of children yet if the quickning Spirit of God do not bless them in it and stir up the emplastick virtue of the natural seed they may go childless to their graves It is the Spirit which quickneth what the womb doth breed And therefore in my minde Lactantius noted very well Hominem non Patrem esse sed generandi Ministrum that man was nothing but the instrument which the Lord did use for the effecting of his purpose to raise that goodly edifice of flesh and bloud which he contemplates in his children It is the Spirit of God as the Scripture tels us which first gave form unto the world from whence that known passage of the Poet Spiritus intus alit had its first Original of which we have made use in our former book And if the chief work or rather the principal part in the work of nature in the ordinary course of Generation and first production of the Word may be ascribed as most undoubtedly it must unto the powerful influence of this quickning Spirit with how much more assurance may he be entituled to the Incarnation of the Word to which one sex only did contribute and that the weakest without the mutual help and co-operation of the seed of man Nor is the greatness of the Miracle so beyond belief but that there is sufficient in the holy Scripture to convince the Iew and in the writings of the Poets to perswade the Gentiles to the admission of this truth and consequently to confirm all good Christians in it Out of the Virgin-Earth did God first make Adam and out of Virgin Adam he created Eve Adam first made without the help of man or woman and Eve made after out of Adam who had no wife but this which was made out of him Why might not then the blessed Virgin be as capable of conceiving a Son by the sole power and influence of the holy Ghost without help of man as Adam was of being Father unto Eve by the self same power without the use of a woman Without a Mother Eve without Father CHRIST Adam without both Father and Mother but all the handy-work of God by the holy Spirit Equivalent in effect to the creation of Adam and the production of Eve was the birth of Isaac conceived by Sarah when it had ceased to be with her after the manner of women by consequence as indisposed to the act of conception as if she had been still a Virgin or which is more then that under years of marriage The strength that Sarah had to bring forth that Son was not natural to her for she was 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 past the age of childe-bearing as the Text informs us but a strength supernatural given from God on high and therefore called a received strength she received strength to conceive seed Heb. 11.11 because not naturally her own but received extraordinarily from God As Isaac was in many things a Type of CHRIST so in no one thing more exactly then that he was the only Son or the dearly beloved Son of his Father begotten on a woman past the time of her age whose dead womb could not but by such a miracle be revived again To this the Iews most cheerfully do give assent boasting themselves to be the children of Abraham by this very venter What reason have they then not to yeild to this but that they resolved not to yeild to reason Next for the Gentiles do we not finde it in their Poets that Venus was ingendred of the froth of the Sea animated by the warmth and influence of the Sun that Pallas issued from Ioves brain and Bacchus from the thigh of Iupiter Do we not read that most of their Heroes so much famed of old were begotten by their Gods upon mortal creatures as Hercules on Alcmena by Iupiter Phaeton on Clymene by Phoebus and Paâ—
by which in the beginning of time all things were created By consequence when the Word was pleased to be incarnate or to be made flesh in St. Iohns own language the person thus made Christ of the Word and flesh though he was incorporated into this flesh by the powerful influence and operation of the holy Ghost was properly to be called the Son of God in whom and of whom only he before existed the holy Ghost not being the Author of any new Person but only betroathing to the Word the humane nature of CHRIST which had no actual existence before those Espousals I know I cannot speak too reverently of so great a mysterie or think too worthily of that wonderful and miraculous Act of the Incarnation or Conception of our blessed Saviour And yet I doubt that some by thinking that he was not formed and fashioned in his Mothers womb by those gradations to perfection which are necessary to all natural births but make his body to be perfected all at once in the very moment of his Conception and at that instant the reasonable soul to be actually infused into it do unawares deprive him of a great deal of honour which his humiliation to our nature did confer upon him Of this minde is Maldonate for one whose words take here together for our more assurance Alios paulatim sensimque in utero formari antequam Corpusculâ—m animetur Christi vero corpus eodem momento quo conceptum est formari animatum fuisse Which were it so our Saviour CHRIST had not in all things been made like unto us contrary to the express words of holy Scripture nor needed to have lien so long time in his Mothers womb his body being compleatly formed and animated in the first conception But I believe the Iesuite had a further aim in it then he pleased to discover And possibly it might be an ingenuous fear of arrogating or ascribing more to a common Priest then had been granted to be done by the holy Ghost For needs it must seem harsh to most Popish ears that the Body of CHRIST should be nine moneths in forming in his mothers womb though supernaturally conceived by the Divine power and influence of the holy Ghost and yet upon the Priests saying Hoc est Corpus meum the self same body and soul with his Divinity and all into the bargain should instantly be made of a piece of bread without expecting nine minutes for so great a miracle Most happy men who come so nere the power and Majesty of Almighty God and the prerogatives of CHRIST that as the one could have raised children out of stones to Abraham and the other command stones to be made bread so they can out of bread raise a Son to God and not a son to God only but even God the Son which is more then was I dare not say or could be done by the holy Ghost whose part in this great work we have spoke of hitherto ARTICVLI 4. Pars 2da 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 i. e. Natus ex Virgine Maria. i. e. Born of the Virgin Mary CHAP. IV. Of the birth of CHRIST The feast of his Nativity Why born of a Virgin The Prophecie of Isaiah The Parentage and priviledge of the Blessed Virgin PRoceed we to the second branch of this present Article from the Conception to the Birth of our Lord and Saviour the most materiall part to us of the whole mysterie It had been little to our comfort though much unto the honour of our humane nature had the WORD been only made flesh and with that flesh ascended presently into heaven and had not dwelt amongst us and shewn forth his glory as the glory of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth It was not Gods being in the flesh but his being manifested in the flesh which St. Paul cals 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the great mysterie of Godlinesse For without that although he might have been seen of Angels yet had he not been preached unto the Gentiles nor been believed on in the world as the Saviour of it The end of his taking on himself our flesh was to save poor man For this is an acceptable saying as St. Paul hath told us that JESUS CHRIST came into the world to save sinners and come into the world he could not in the sense he speaks of but by being born I know some thinke that though ADAM had never sinned yet it had been necessary for the exaltation of humane nature that the WORD should have been made man and Bonaventure doth approve it as a Catholick opinion and consonant to natural reason But howsoever it may seem in his judgment to agree with reason assuredly it is more agreeable to the piety and analogie of faith that the Son of God had never appeared in our flesh but for the delivery of mankinde from sin and misery neither the Scripture nor the Fathers speaking of the incarnation but with reference to mans redemption To this effect St. Augustine speaketh most divinely Si homo non periisset filius hominis non venisset nulla causa fuit Christi veniendi nisi peccatores salvos facere Tolle morbos tolle vulnera et nulla est medicinae causa That is to say If man had not perished the son of man had not come for therefore came the son of man to save that which was lost there being no other cause of Christs coming but the salvation of sinners Take away diseases and wounds from man and what need is there of a Physitian So that resolving with the Scriptures and Fathers that there was no cause for the incarnation of the WORD but that he should be born for our redemption let us proceed therein with that fear and reverence which justly doth belong to so great a mysterie as the manifestation of God in the flesh is said to be by the Apostle A mysterie in which there is not any thing beneath a miracle Nor can it easily be resolved whether of the two be more full of wonder either that God the WORD should be born of Woman or born of such a woman as was a Virgin The first and greatest of the two that which indeed is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a miracle of miracles as man is somewhere called by Plato was that the word was made flesh and did receive that flesh from a mortall womb A wonder it seemed to Nicodemus that a man should be born when he was old or enter a second time into his mothers womb and be born again A greater wonder must it be for him to enter into the womb and thence to finde a passage into the world who was far older then all time and had his being when the world but began to be A greater wonder must it seem for him to take a being from a mortal creature by whom all creatures had their being and did himself create the same womb which bare him
But such was his unspeakable love to the sons of men that he disdained not to submit himself for their sakes to those low conditions as to be made man and to have a Mother a Mother which beyond example did bring forth her God and became the Parent of her Saviour Et mater sine exemplo genuit autorem suum as Lactantius hath it Born then our Saviour was of a mortall womb But the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 used in the present Article tels us more then so and telleth us that he was not only born of the Virgin Mary but so born of her as to be made of her also 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 And the word was made flesh Ioh. 1.14 God sent his Son 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 made of a woman saith St. Paul Gal. 4.4 where the same word is used as here Made then he was as well as born of the Virgin Mary And made not convertendo not by converting the Word into flesh as Cerinthus nor converting flesh into the WORD as Velentinus was of opinion for the deity cannot be changed into any thing nor any thing into it Nor was it made conciliando as friends are made one or reconciled so as they continue two persons still and while the flesh suffered the WORD stood still and looked on only as Nestorius taught for that were not to be made flesh but made with the flesh not caro sed cum carne saith my reverend Author Nor finally was he made componendo by compounding two persons together and so a third thing produced of both as Eutyches for so he should be neither of both neither the word nor flesh neither God nor man But made he was as St. Paul tels us assumendo by taking the seed of Abraham Heb. 2.16 His generation before time as verbum Deus is as the enditing the word within the heart His generation in time as verbum caro is as the uttering it forth with the voice The inward motion of the minde taketh unto it a naturall body of Aire and so becometh vocal It is not changed into it the word remaineth still as it was yet they two became one voice Take a similitude from our selves Our soul is not turned into nor compounded with the body yet they two though distinct in natures grow into one man So Athanasius in his Creed For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man so God and man is one Christ. So into the Godhead was the manhood taken the natures preserved without confusion the person entire without division The fourth General Councell so determineth also Sic factum est caro ut maneret verbum non immutando quod erat sed suscipiendo quod not erat Nostra auxit sua non minuit nec Sacramentum pietatis detrimentum est Deitatis i. e. He was so made flesh that he ceased not to be the Word never changing what he was but taking that he was not We were the better he was never the worse The mysterie of Godlinesse was was no detriment to the Godhead nor the honour of the creature wrong to the Creator No wrong indeed it was no detriment to the divine nature of the Word to be made flesh and take upon him the infirmities of our humane nature but much to the advancement of our humane nature which he took upon him as many Kings and soveraign Princes have been made free of some particular Corporations under their commands without diminution or impeachment of their Royal Power and highly to the honour of those Companies or Corporations Mortalis factus est non infirmata verbi divinitate sed carnis suscepta infirmitate as divinely Angustine in his De Civit. dei l. 9. c. 15. And herein miserable man hath a great advantage of the Angels though made lower then they in his creation in that the WORD God for ever blessed vouchsafed to be made in such manner of our rank and order as he is not of theirs From the manner passe we to the time when this work was wrought which St. Paul cals plenitudinem temporis or the fulnesse of time that is to say when the time was come and fully accomplished which God in his eternall wisdome had fore-determined which he had also signifyed to the house of Israel by the mouth of his Prophets In reference to the civil Account it was at the time when Herod a stranger to the bloud-royal of David was King of Iewry and Augustus Caesar the sole Monarch of the Roman Empire The first having translated the Scepter from Judah and the Law-giver from between his feet made an apparent way for the coming of Shiloh to whom the gathering of the people was now to be The latter having the third time closed the Temple of Ianus and setled an universal peace over all the Empire made it the most agreeable time for the birth of him who being called the Prince of peace by the Prophet Isaiah proclaimed peace unto all the earth at the hour of his birth and left it to his Disciples as his last Legacie at the time of his death And it was also in the time of a general taxing as our English or rather of a general enrolment cum universus orbis describeretur saith the vulgar very answerably to the Greek Originals as the Rhemists read it A time when every subject of the Roman Empire was to repaire to the head City of his family there to list his name and to professe ut profiterentur saith the Vulgar or make acknowledgment of his fealty and true allegeance to the Prince in being A thing not done at random or by humane providence that by this means the Emperour might come to know quot civium sociorumque in Armis the strength and number of his Subjects as the Statists tell us but by the speciall dispensation and appointment of Almighty God Though Christ had been conceived in Nazareth a City of Galilee yet was he to be born in Bethlehem the City of David And thither was Ioseph to repair to be taxed or enrolled rather with Mary his wife that she being there delivered of her blessed burden the word of God fore-signifyed by the Prophet Micah might be fulfilled viz. that out of Bethlehem-Judah there should come a Governour which should rule over the house of Israel The shutting of the Temple of Ianus and this general taxing or enrolment under the President-ship of Cyrenius point us directly to the 35. year of Augustus his Empire in which CHRIST was born And if it were esteemed as it seems to be so great an honour unto Cicero that this Augustus was born when he was Consul Consulatui Ciceronis non mediocre adjecit decus natus eo anno D. Augustus saith the Court Historian how great an honour may we count it unto this Augustus that CHRIST the Son of God the very brightnesse of his Father was born when he was Emperour And as the year so is the
affliction viz. they gave me gall for meat and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink They stripped him of his garments which they shared amongst them and lifting up his naked body a lamentable spectacle of reproach and shame extended him upon the Cross stretched him in all his joints till the sinews cracked and so nailed him fast thereby accomplishing that in him which was foresignified by David but literally executed upon Christ not David they have pierced my hands and feet Psal. 22.16 Nor staid they here but to adde shame and infamy to his other sufferings they cause him to be crucified between two Malefactors to make the world believe if it had been possible that they were equally involved in the same guilt because involved alike in the same condemnation Nay more then that vinegar and gall which they gave him to drink was but a taft of that extremity of gall and bitterness which they had in their hearts which they did vomit out in blasphemous words exposing him to contempt and scorn not only with the by-standers but the passers by the very malefactors joining with them to increase his sorrows as if thereby they could have mitigated and removed their own So that he might most justly have cryed out and said Consider and behold all ye that pass by the way if ever there were sorrow like my sorrow which was done unto me wherewith the Lord afflicted me in the day of the fierceness of his wrath Never so true a man of sorrows In which extremity of pain and grief of heart no wonder if nature made a start and seemed to tremble at the apprehension of so many miseries especially considering that the most bitter draught of that deadly CVP was to drink off yet And in this anguish and distress it was that he cryed aloud Eli Eli Lamasabaâ—hthani that is to say My God my God why hast thou forsaken me Which words because they seem to some to be an argument oâ— proof for those hellish pains which they have fancied to themselves in the soul of Christ by others are conceived to proceed out of desperation which is indeed one of the greatest torments in the pit of hell we will the rather look into them to see whether any such constructions can be gathered thence Now for the clearer exposition of this text of Scripture we will lay these grounds 1. That dereliction and forsaking do no where throughout Gods book import damnation but are applyed always to the judgements of this present life 2. That in wicked and udgodly men it argueth reprobation from grace and despair of glory which to imagine of CHRIST were rather a most furious blasphemy then an erroneous folly 3. That in the godly as in David whose words they were they either note destitution of help or diminution of comfort but neither in David nor in Christ the true pains of the damned and 4. That no construction must be made of these words which may decrease in Christ the fulness of truth and grace which never wanted in his soul or draw him within the compass of mistaking or mistrusting Gods favour towards him For how could he be tainted with any distrust of Gods mercy and purpose towards him who with such confidence commended his pure Spirit into the hands of his Father who in the midst of his extremities did promise to invest the penitent Thief in the joys of Paradise and finally who in the height of his afflictions when he spake these words had such an interest in God as to call him his own God My God my God and not God only as the text informs us Which grounds so laid we may the better understand the meaning of the words before us and what construction they will bear agreeable and conform to the rule of faith And first I know that many of the antient Fathers were of opinion that as Christ took upon him at this time the person of all mankinde so he made this complaint not in behalf of himself but of his members as when he said to Saul in another case Saul Saul why persecutest thou me he did not mean it of his person which was then in heaven but of his Church militant here on earth Thus Cyprian for the Latine Fathers Quod pro iis voluisti intelligi qui deseri a Deo propter peccata meruerant this complaint of being forsaken thou wouldst have understood as spoken of them who had deserved to be forsaken of God in regard of their sins To the same purpose Augustine Epistola 120. and Leo in his 16. Sermon de Passione Thus also venerable Beda Quare dereliquisâ—i me i.e. meos c. Why saith he hast thou forsaken me i. e. mine because sin saith he did keep them back from saving me that is mine It is plain then that the head doth not speak here in his own Person for how could he be possibly forsaken or out of hope of salvation Thus Athanasius for the Greeks in fewer words but as significantly as the others Christ spake these words in our person for he was never forsaken of God And to this purpose speaks Theodoret in Psal. 21. and Euthymius on the same place also Thus also Damascene Christ saith he having put on our person and appropriated the same unto him prayed on that sort as when a man doth put on anothers person out of pity or charity and in his stead speaks such words sometimes 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as do not agree unto himself But this construction of the text though both pious and profitable is not so generally received but that some others of the Fathers do expound them otherwise who think that this complaint was poured out by Christ because he saw himself left helpless to the rage of the Iews and that he seemed so long forsaken of his heavenly Father not in regard of inward grace and comfort but of outward help An exposition so agreeable to the text in all the circumstances of it that some of those who did expound the same of Christs not speaking in his own person but in the person of his members do approve thereof For thus St. Hierom Marvail not at Christs complaint of being forsaken when thou seest the scandal of the Cross. St. Ambrose thus He speaketh as a man which was no shame for him to doe because that we our selves when we are in danger do think our selves forsaken of God Which words Venerable Bede Rabanuâ— Maurus and Aquinas in their Expositions of this Scripture do repeat and follow And this St. Augustine well approves of Quare me dereliquisti tanquam dicereâ— relinquendo me c. Why hast thou forsaken me as if he should have said by leaving me in the time of my trouble because not hearing me when I call upon thee thou art far off from my salvation praesenti scilicet salute hujus vitae that is to say in reference to
Heaven or taken up on high as our English reads it it was Gods act there And so it was indeed it was Gods and his the Persons having such an interest in one another that what was done by the one is ascribed to the other without wrong or prejudice to either as it is also in the case of the Resurrection in which although we find it to be his own act his Resurrexit only in the holy Gospels yet is it quem Deus suscitavit a mortuis him hath God raised from the dead in St. Peters Sermon Or else it may be answered thus that though our Saviour did ascend by his own power and vertue yet he may properly be said to be assumptus taken or carried up into Heaven in three regards that is to say either as taken up on the wings of Angels whereof we shall say more anon as Lazarus was carryed into Abrahams bosom or because he seemed to be wrapt up in a cloud and so taken up out of their sight or finally that the man CHRIST IESVS was taken up into Heaven by the power and vertue of the Godhead in separably united to him Either of these constructions will atone the difference and reconcile the Creed with the words of the Text though we may further add and ex abundanti that St. Luke doth not only say ferebatur in Coelum or he was carryed up into Heaven as if he were passive in it only but that Recessit ab iis first he left them of his own accord gave the first rise to his Ascension and after ferebatur for so it followeth suffered himself to be assumpted taken or carryed up into Heaven either by the Cloud or by the Angels or how else he pleased Lastly it is to be observed that he ascended into Heaven videntibus illis saith the Text whilest his Apostles looked on to signifie that he did ascend by little and little that he might feed their eyes and refresh their souls and by his leisurely ascent make them more able to attest it as occasion served For had he been caught up into Heaven as Elias was who had but one witness to affirm it or rapt up into Heaven as St. Paul was afterwards without any witness but himself and scarce that neither for whether it were in the body or out of the body he could hardly tell the truth thereof had wanted much of that estimation which the mouths of so many witnesses as beheld the mirâ—â—le were able to afford unto it And yet it was strange that many witnesses should need to confirm that truth which had so clearly been fore-signified both by Types and Prophecies that none who did believe the Scriptures could make question of it For if we look upon the Substance or the quod â—it of it or on the circumstances of the time the place the cloud the pomp and manner of the same or finally on the consequent or effect thereof as to Christ himself we finde all signified before-hand in the Book of God and that so fully and expressely as must needs convince the Iews of the greatest obstinacy that ever had been entertained in the hearts of men first in the way of Type or Figure we have that of Enoch before the Law and that of Elias under the Law Of Enoch it is said in the holy Scripture that he walked with God that is to say as the text doth expound it self in the case of Noah he was a just man and perfect in his generation for the times he lived in So righteous was he as it seems in the sight of God that we finde no mention of his death Only the Scriptures say that he was not found because God took him i. e. because God took him to himself translating him both body and soul to his heavenly Kingdome And so St. Paul expounds it saying By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death neither was he found because God had taken him And of Elijah it is said that being talking with Elisha one of his Disciples there appeared a Charet of fire and horses of fire and parted them asunder and that Elijah went up in a whirlwinde into Heaven Here then we have two Types or figures of the Lords Ascension the one delivered in the person of a righteous man who was unblameable in his conversation walking in the commandements of God without reproof the other of a Prophet mighty both in WORD AND WORK who did not only reprove sin and foretel of things which were to come but did confirm his Doctrine with signs and miracles And being that the Iews cannot but confess as Iosephus did that Christ was not only a wise man a Teacher of the people in the ways of truth one that wrought miracles and had gained many both of the Iews and Gentiles to adhere unto him being they cannot but acknowledge of our Saviour Christ as the good Theif did ille autem nil mali fecit that he had done nothing amiss or as Pilate that there was no fault to be found in him they have no reason but to think that Enoch and Elijah were the Types of the Lords Ascension aswell as of his life and doctrine But here perhaps it will be objected that either Enoch and Elijah were not taken up into Heaven and so no Types and figures of the Lords Ascension or if they were then was not Christ the first which opened the gates of Heaven and ascended thither in his body to make a way for others in due time to follow as all Antiquity in a manner do affirm he was grounding their judgement on the evident and plain texts of Scripture For doth not the Apostle expressely say that the way into the Holiest of all was not yet manifest while the first Tabernacle was yet standing Heb. 9.8 And doth not Christ our Saviour as expressely say that no man had ascended into Heaven but he that came down from Heaven even the Son of man Ioh. 3.13 How then were Enoch and Elijah Types of Christs Ascension if they were not taken up into Heaven or how was Christ the first if they there before him Our Saviour Christ himself makes answer unto this objection where he saith that in his Fathers house there were many mansions that is to say several degrees of happiness and estates in glory though all most glorious in themselves To some of which degrees of happiness and estates in glory unto some one or other of those heavenly Mansions both Enoch and Elijah were by God translated there 's no doubt of that the Scripture is expressely for it But that they were in Coelosummo in the highest Heaven that unto which the Lord ascended and where he now sitteth at the right hand of God the Father that as the Scriptures doe not say so there is no necessity why we should believe it Our Saviour was the first who ascended thither that place of supreme glory
the fowles of the Aire Next for the Nomothetical arts of Empire let us look on those and we shall finde that as he came not to destroy the Law of God but to fulfil it so hath he added more weight to it either by way of application or of explication then before it had They who consult our Saviours Sermon on the mount and look upon his Commentaries on the law of Moses which the chief Priests and Pharisees had perverted by adulterate glosses will quickly finde that he discharged us not from the Obligation which the moral law had laid upon us but only did become our surety and bound himself to see it faithfully performed by us in our severall places The burden was not made lesse heavy then it was before I speak still of the Moral Law not the Ceremonial but that he hath given more strength to bear it more grace to regulate our lives by Gods Commandements And somewhat he did adde of his own auhority which tended to a greater measure of perfection then possibly we could attain to by the Law of Moses and that not only in the way of Evangelical Counsels and that there are such Counsels I can easily grant but of positive precept For so far certainly we may joyn issue with the Council of Trent that IESVS CHRIST is to be honoured and observed Non tantum ut Redemptor cui omnâ—s fidant sedut Legislator cui obediant not only as a Saviour unto whom we may trust but as a Law-maker also whom we are to obey The same position is maintained also by the Arminian party but not the more unsound for either Veritas a quocunq est est a Spiritu sancto as St. Ambrose hath it And this is so agreeable to the Word of God that either we must deny the Scripture or else confess that it proceeded from the Spirit of God Nor are his laws indeered only to us and sugred over as it were by the promise of a great reward but enjoyned also under pain of grievous punishments punishment and reward being the square or measure of the heavenly government no otherwise then of the earthly Tribulation and anguish saith St. Paul shall come upon the soul of every man that doth evil but glory and honour and peace to every man that doth good to the Iew first and also to the Gentile for God is no respecter of persons By which two general motives set before our eyes and the co-operation of the holy Spirit working with his Word he doth illuminate our mindes and mollifie our hearts and quench our lusts instruct us in the faith confirm us in our hopes and strengthen us in Christian charity till in the end he bring us to the knowledge of his holy will then to obedience to his Laws and finally to a resemblance of his vertues also If after all this care and teaching either by frailty or infirmity we do break his laws or violate his sacred Statutes as we do too often he doth not presently take the forfeiture which the Law doth give him for then O Lord should no flesh living in thy sight be justified but in the midst of judgement he remembreth mercy We may affirm of him most truly as Lactantius did Vt erga pios indulgentissimus Pater ita adversus impios justissimus Iudex as terrible a Iudge he is to impenitent sinners as an indulgent Father to his towardly children as before was said Such is the nature and condition of our Saviours Kingdome which sitting at the right hand of Almighty God he doth direct and govern as seems best to his heavenly wisdome and so shall do untill his coming again to judge both the quick and the dead Although he hath withdrawn himself and his bodily presence yet is he present with it in his mighty power and by the influences and graces of his holy Spirit And in this sense it was that he said unto them Behold I am with you alwayes to the end of the world And that not only with you my Apostles unto whom he spake but cum vobis successoribus vestris with all you my Disciples and with your successors also in your several places till time be no more Though he be placed above in the heavenly glories and is not joyned unto his Church by any bodily connexion yet he is knit unto it in the bonds of love and out of that affection doth so guide and order it as the Head doth the members of the Body natural Habet ecclesia Caput positum in Coelestibus quod gubernat Corpus suum separatum quidem visione sed annectitur Charitate as St. Austin hath it Vice-roy there needeth none to supply his absence who is always with us Nor we the assistance of a Vicar General to supply his place whose Spirit bloweth where him listeth and who is linked unto us in so strong affections But for all this our Masters in the Church of Rome have determined positively that in regard our Saviour hath withdrawn himself from the Church in his Body secundum visibilem praesentiam for as much as doth concern his visible presence he needs must have some Deputy or Lieutenant General qui visibilem hanc Ecclesiam in unitate contineat to govern and direct the same in peace and unity It seemes they think our Saviour Christ to be reduced unto the same straights as Augustus was of whom it is reported in the Roman stories that he did therefore institute a Provost in the City of Rome because he could not always be there in person 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and durst not leave it absolutely without a Governor And sure however others may complain of our Saviours absence and for that reason think it necessary to have some general Deputy to supply his place yet of all others those of Rome have least cause to do it who can command his presence at all times and on all occasions For as Cornelius a Lapide affirms expressely by saying only these words Hoc est Corpus meum the Bread is not only transubstiated into our Saviours Body but Christ anew begotten and born again upon the Altar And not his Body only that 's not half enough but as the Canon of Trent tels us there is totus Christus una cum anima Divinitate whole Christ both body and soul and the Godhead also personally and substantially on the blessed Sacrament That he is present every where in his power and Spirit there is none of us which denyeth If they can have his bodily presence also in so short a warning what use can they pretend for a Vicar General Adeo Argumenta ex falso petita ineptos habent exitus said Lactantius rightly Besides it is a Maxime in Ecclesiastical Polity 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 c. that the external Regiment of the Church of Christ is to be fitted to the frame and order of the
under him saith the Apostle Nor must we understand it so as it Christ delivering up the Kingdome had no more to doe but was reduced to the condition of a private Saint that were injurious to the dignity of our Lord CHRIST IESVS Nec sic arbitremur eum traâ—iturum Deo Patri ut adimat sibi as St. Austin hath it we must not think saith he that he will so deliver up the Kingdome unto God the Father as to devest himself of all Power Majesty Not so His meaning is but this at most taking the word Kingdome in the usual and accustomed sense that the form of governing this Kingdome shall then be altered Sâ—n Hell and Death being all subdued as in himself before so in all his Members and Heaven replenished with those Saints for whose sakes principally he received the Kingdome And though this Exposition be both safe and general yet I conceive it may admit another sense and such as do most happily avoid those difficulties which otherwise it may seem to be subject to What then if we should say that by Regnum here we are so understand only filios Regni if by the word Kingdome in this place St. Paul meaneth those who are called the Children of the Kingdome in another place and that by the delivering up of the Kingdome unto God the Father we are to understand no more then the presenting of his children Behold I and the children whom thou hast given me to the fight of God to be received into his glories and crowned by him with immortality Assuredly if I should both say it and stand to it too I should not think the Exposition either forced nor new Not forced for Metonymies of this kinde in the Book of God and in all Classick Authors too are exceeding obvious For Classick Authors first to name two or three we have in Tacitus Matrimonium Principale pessimum principalis Matrimonii instrumentum for the Princes wife And in the Poet Coelum Heaven for Coelites the heavenly Citizens as Coelo gratissimus amnis a River very acceptable unto those in heaven O Coelo dilecta domus an house beloved of the Gods in another Poet. Thus also in the holy Scripture Regale Presbyterium a Royal Priesthood 1 Pet. 2. vers 8. is put for a society of Royal Priests Regnum which is the word here used is in our English rendred Kings Fecit nos Regnum sacerdotes saith the Vulgar Latine He hath made us Kings and Priests saith our Translation Apoc. 1. vers 6. And more then so in the 13. of St. Matthewes Gospel the word Regnum is directly used by Christ our Saviour pro filiis Regni the Kingdome for the sons of the Kingdome The Kingdome of Heaven saith he is like a Merchant man i. e. the children of the Kingdome of Heaven are like to Merchant men seeking godly pearls vers 24. Use but the word so here as in that of St. Matthew and the delivery of the Kingdome unto God the Father will signifie no more then the presenting of the Saints as before I said or tendring Gods adopted Sonnes which are the children of the great King and the Kingdome too to their heavenly Father This shews the Exposition is not forced we are sure of that And we have hopes to prove that it is not new being I think as old as St. Augustines time For asking this question of himself What is the meaning of this Text Then shall he deliver up the Kingdome unto God the Father He makes this answer Quia justos omnes in quibus nunc regnat c. The meaning is that he shall bring the righteous persons in whom he reigns as Mediator between God and man unto the blessed Vision of Almighty God that they may see him face to face And in another place to the same effect It is as much as if he should have said in other words Cum perduxerit credentes ad contemplationem Dei Patris Then shall he bring the faithfull to behold the face of God the Father Which Faithfull or the body of his holy ones he cals plainly in another place by the name of Regnum the word here used by the Apostle affirming of the Saints of God eos ita esse in Regno ejus ut ipsi etiam sint Regnum ejus They are saith he estated in the Kingdome of God but so as to be his Kingdome also But this discourse is out of season though not out of the way For though our Saviour shall deliver up the Kingdome unto God the Father in what sense soever we understand it yet shall not this be done till after the day of general Judgement till he hath judged the quick and dead and given to every one according to his works Which is the last act of his Regal Office and the subject of the following Article ARTICLE VIII Of the Eighth ARTICLE OF THE CREED Ascribed unto St. MATTHEW 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 i. e. Inde venturus judicare vivos mortous i. e. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead CHAP. XV. Touching the coming of our Saviour to Iudgement both of quick and dead The souls of just men not in the highest state of blisse till the day of judgment and of the time and place and other circumstances of that action WE are now come unto the last and greatest act of the Regal Office the supreme power of Iudicature and to the best part also of the Royall power potestas vitae mortis the power of life and death as the Lawyers call it All other acts of the Kingly function he executeth sitting at the right hand of God in the Heavenly places But when he cometh to judge both the quick and the dead his Judgement-seat shall be erected in some visible place though still at the right hand of Almighty God where both the wicked shall behold him to their finall confusion and his obedient Servants finde accesse unto him to their endlesse comforts And this is also the last and highest degree of his exaltation the last in order but the highest in esteem and honour The first step or degree of his exaltation was his descent into hell to beat the Devill at his own home in his strongest fortresse and take possession of that part of his Kingdome Devils as well as Men and Angels things under the earth as well as on the earth and above the heavens being to bow the knee before him and be subject to him This was done only in the fight of the Devils and the infernal fiends of hell but in the next which was his resurrection he had both men and Angels to bear witnesse to it and some raised purposely from the dead to attend him in it The third degree or step for he still went higher was his ascending into heaven performed openly in the sight of the people and so performed that it excelled all the triumphs which were gone
this blessed Spirit on the particular Members of his Congregation that is to say the joyning of the Saints together in an holy Communion the free remission of our sins in this present life resurrection of the body after death and the uniting again of Soul and Body unto life eternal This is the sum and method of the following Articles and these we shall pursue in their order beginning first with that of the Holy Ghost Whose gracious assistance I implore to guide me in the waies of Truth that so the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart may be alwayes acceptable in the sight of God the Lord my strength and my Redeemer But because the word or notion of the Holy Ghost is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a word of various signification in the Book of God we will first look upon it in those significations and then conclude on that which is chiefly pertinent to the intent and purpose of the present Article For certainly the Orators Rule is both good and useful viz. Prius dividenda antequam definienda sit oratio That we must first distinguish of the Termes in all Propositions before we come unto a positive definition of them According to which Rule if we search the Scripture we shall there find that the Holy Ghost is first taken personaliter or essentialiter for the third person in the Oeconomie of the glorious Trinity We find him in this sense in the incarnation of our Lord and Saviour as the principal Agent in that Work The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee Luk. 1.35 And in his Baptism descending on him like a Dove to fit him and prepare him for the Prophetical Office he was then to exercise And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a Dove upon him Luk. 3.22 From which descent St. Peter telleth us that he was anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power and that from thenceforth he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed with the Devil In the next place the Holy Ghost is used in Scripture to signifie the Gifts and Graces of the holy Spirit as in Act. 2. where it is said of the Apostles that they were all filled with the holy Ghost ver 4. not with his essence or his person but with the impressions of the Spirit the Gifts and Graces of the Holy Ghost such as the Gift of Tongues mentioned in the following words The Gift of the Holy Ghost as it is called expresly Ver. 38. Thus read we also that the holy Ghost was given by the hands of Peter Act. 8.17 18. And by the hands of Paul Act. 19.6 In which we read that when Paul had laid his hands upon them the Holy Ghost came on them and they spoke with tongues and Prophesied which last words are a commentary upon those before and shew that by the holy Ghost which did come upon them is meant the Gift of Tongues and the power of Prophecying both which the holy Ghost then conferred upon them And lastly it is taken not onely for the ability of doing Miracles as speaking with strange Tongues Prophecying curing of Diseases and the like to these but for the Authority and Power which in the Church is given to some certain men to be Ministers of holy things to the rest of the people As when Christ breathed on his Apostles and said unto them Receive the holy Ghost that is to say Receive ye an holy and spiritual power over the soules of men a part whereof consisteth in the remitting and retaining of sins mentioned in the words next following and serving as a Comment to explaine the former In which respect the Holy Ghost said unto certain of the Elders in the Church of Antioch Segregate mihi Barnabam Saulum Separate unto me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them Act. 13.2 It is the Holy Ghost which cals it is his work to which they were called and therefore separate mihi separate to me may not unfitly be expounded to my Work and Ministery and consequently to the authority and power which belongs unto it Which being premised the meaning of the Article will in briefe be this That we beleeve not onely that there is such a person as the Holy Ghost in the Oeconomy of the blessed Trinity though that be principally intended but that he doth so distribute and dispose of his Gifts and Graces as most conduceth to the edification of the Church of Christ. But this I cannot couch in a clearer way as to the sense and doctrine of the Church of England than in the words of Bishop Iewel who doth thus expresse it Credimus spiritum sanctum qui est tertia persona in sacra Triadi illum verum esse Deum c. i. e. we beleeve that the Holy Ghost who is the Third Person in the holy Trinity is very God not made nor created nor begotten but proceeding both from the Father and the Son by an unspeakable means and unknowne to man and that it is his property to mollifie and soften mans heart when he is once received thereinto either by the wholesome Preaching of the Gospel or by any other way that he doth give men light and guide them to the knowledge of God to the wayes of truth to newnesse of life and to everlasting hope of salvation This being the sum of that which is to be beleeved of the Holy Ghost both for his Person and his Office we will first look upon his Person on his Property or Office afterwards And yet before we come unto his Person I mean his Nature and his Essence We will first look a little on the quid Nominis the name by which he is expressed in the Book of God In the Original he is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with a double Article as Luk. 3.22 in Latine Spiritus sanctus or the Holy Spirit but generally in our English Idiom the Holy Ghost The Greek word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 comes from 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 which signifieth to breath and is the same with the Latine Spiro from whence comes Spiritus or the Spirit a name not given as I suppose because he doth proceed from the Father or the Son or both in the way of breathing though Christ be said to breath upon his Apostles when he said receive the Holy Ghost but because the breath being in it selfe an incorporeal substance and that which is the great preservative of all living creatures it got the name first of Spiritus vitae we read it in our English the breath of life Gen. 11.7 and afterwards came to be the name of all unbodyed incorporeal essences For thus is God said to be a Spirit God is a Spirit Ioh. 4.24 The Angels are called Ministring Spirits Heb. 1.14 the Soule of man is called his Spirit let us cleanse our selves saith the Apostle from all filthiness both of flesh and Spirit that is of the body and
the soule and by a metaphor the motions of the minde whether good or evill are called spirits also as the spirit of giddiness Isa. 19.14 the spirit of error 1 Tim. 4.1 the spirit of envie Iam. 4.5 which come all from the unclean spirit mentioned Luk. 11.24 And thus in general the pious motions in the mind are called Spirits too Quench not the spirit saith St. Paul i. e. those godly motions to the works of Faith and Piety which the Holy Spirit of God doth secretly kindle in thee For the word Ghost it is originally Saxon and signifieth properly the soul of a man as when we read of Christ that he gave up the Ghost Mark 15.37 and in the rest of the Evangelists also the meaning is that his soule departed from his body he yeelded up his soule to the hands of God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 saith the Original Expiravit as the Latine reads it that is to say he breathed out his soul or he breathed his last Nor doth it signifie the soule onely though that most properly but generally also any spiritual substance as doth the word spiritus in the Latine a touch whereof we have still remaining in the Adjective Ghostly by which we mean that which is spiritual as our Ghostly Father Ghostly Counsel i. e. our Father in the spiritual matters counsel that savoreth of the spirit So then the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit are the same Person here though in different words and the word Holy which is added doth clearly difference him from all other spirits Not that God being a spirit is not holy also or that the Angelical spirits are not replenished with as much holinesse as a created nature can be capable of but because it is his Office to sanctifie or make holy all the elect Children of God therefore hath he the title or attribute of holy annexed unto him And yet the title of holy is not always added to denote this person though when we find mention of the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit it is meant and spoken of him onely For sometimes he is called the Spirit without any adjunct the Spirit 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or by way of eminency but still with reference to those gifts which he doth bestow The manifestation of the spirit 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with the Article demonstrative is given to every man to profit withall For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdome to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit Sometimes he is called the Spirit of the Father as Matth. 10.20 It is not yee that speak but the Spirit of the Father which speaketh in you sometimes the Spirit of the Son as Gal. 4.6 where it is said that God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying Abba Father Most generally he is called the Spirit of God as Gen 1.2 and Matth. 3.16 and infinite other places of the holy Scripture and more particularly the Spirit of Christ Rom. 8.9 in which place he is also called the Spirit of God Ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if that the Spirit of God dwel in you there the Spirit of God if any have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his So the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit both of God and Christ and in one verse both So far we are onwards on our way for discoverie of the nature of this blessâ—d Spirit as to have found him out to be the Spirit of God the Father from whom he doth proceed by an unspeakable way of emanation and unknown to man for he proceedeth from the Father as our Saviour telleth us and to be also the Spirit of Christ the Son of God by whom he was breathed on the Apostles and so proceeding from the Son doth proceed from both Sent from the Father at the desire and prayer of the Son I will pray the Father and he shall send you another Comforter Iohn 14.16 Sent by the Son with the consent and approbation of the Father whom I will send unto you from the Father Iohn 15.26 and so sent of both And yet not therefore the less God because sent by either than IESUS CHRIST is God God for ever blessed as St. Paul calls him Rom. 9.5 because he was sent by God the Father He sent his Son made of a woman Gal. 4.4 saith the same Apostle If any doubt hereof as I know some do he may be sent for resolution of his doubt to the beginning of Genesis where he shall finde the Spirit of God moving on the waters Gen. 1.2 And to the Law where he shall read how the same Spirit came down on the Seventy Elders Numb 11.26 And to the Psalms Thou sendest forth thy Spirit and they are created Psal. 104.30 And to the Prophets The Spirit of God is upon me saith the Prophet Isaiah Chap. 61.1 which was Christs first Text And I will pour my Spirit upon all flesh saith the Prophet Ioel Chap. 1.28 which was Peters first Text The Spirit of God is God no question for in Deo non est nisi Deus say the Schoolmen rightly Not a created Spirit as the Angels were For in the beginning when God created the Heaven and the Earth and all things visible and invisible then the Spirit was and was not onely actually in a way of existence but was of such a powerful influence in the Creation of the World that on the moving of this Spirit on the face of the Waters the darkness was removed from the face of the deep and the Chaos of undigested matter made capable of Form and Beauty In the New Testament the evidence is far more clear than that of the Old by how much the Sun of Light did shine more brightly in the times of the Gospel than in those of the Law Saith not St. Peter in the Acts Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie unto the Holy Ghost and then addes presently Thou hast not lied unto men but unto God What saith St. Austin on this Text The Holy Ghost saith he is God Unde Petrus cum dixisset ausus eâ— mentiri Spiritui Sancto continuo secutus adjunxit quid esset Spiritus Sanctus ait non mentitus es hominibus sed Deo i. e. Therefore when Peter said unto Ananias thou hast dared to lie to the Holy Ghost he added presently to shew what was the Holy Ghost Thou hast not lied unto men but unto God Saith not St. Paul Know ye not that ye are the Temple of God How so Because the Spirit of God dwelleth in you What saith the Father unto this Ostendit Paulus deum esse Spiritum Sanctum ideo non esse Creaturam that is to say St. Paul by this sheweth That the Holy Ghost is God and so no Creature Doth not the same Apostle say in another place Know ye not that your bodies are the Temple of the Holy Ghost
and then subjoyns Glorifie God therefore in your body And doth not the same Father infer from thence the Deitie or Godhead of the Holy Ghost Ne quisquam Spiritum Sanctum negaret Deum continuo sequutus ait Glorificate portate Deum in corpore vestro Lest any man saith he should possibly deny the Holy Ghost to be God he addes immediately Glorifie and bear God in your bodies To seek for Testimonies from more of the Fathers to confirm this point were to run into an endless Ocean of Allegations there being few who lived after the rising of the Arian and Macedonian Heresies who have not written whole Tracts in defence hereof and none at all who give not very pregnant evidence to the cause in hand But where the Scripture is so clear what need they come in And so exceeding clear is Scripture as is shewn already that I marvel with what confidence it could be said by Doctor Harding in his Reply to Bishop Iewel That though the Doctrine of the Church of England were true and Catholick in this point yet we had neither express Scripture for it nor any of the four first General Councils and thereon tacitely inferreth That the Deity of the Holy Ghost depended for the proof thereof not on holy Scripture but on the Tradition of the Church and the Authority of some subsequent Councils of the Popes confirming To which that learned Prelate wittily replieth That if God cannot be God unless he be allowed of by the Pope and Church of Râ—me then we are come again to that which Tertullian wrote merrily of the Heathens saying Nisi homini Deus placuerit Deus non erit Homo jam Deo propitius esse debebit i.e. Unless God humor man he shall not be God Some further Arguments may be used to confirm this Truth and they no less concludent than those before As namely from the Form of Baptism ordained by Christ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost From the Form of Benediction used by St. Paul The Grace of our Lord Iesus Christ and the Love of God and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost From the Doxologie or Form of giving glory used in the Church and used as St. Basil confidently averreth from the first beginning Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost And finally from the place it holds in the present Creed composed by the joynt concurrence of the Blessed Apostles But that which I shall specially insist upon is that passage in three of the Evangelists touching the sinâ—t â—t blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of God which is there said to be of that heinous nature that it shall neither be forgiven in this world nor in the world to come Matth. 12.32 That is to say It shall never have forgiveness as S. Mark expounds it Mark 3.29 St. Ambrose gathereth from this Text a concluding Argument against the Macedonian and Eunomian Hereticks who held the Holy Ghost to be onely a created power Quomodo inter Creaturas aâ—det quisquam Spiritum Sanctum computare c. How dareth any man saith he compute the Holy Ghost amongst the rest of the Creatures considering that it is affirmed by the Lord himself That whosoever speaketh against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven him but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him And to this inference of his we may well subscribe though the sin or blasphemy spoken of by our Lord and Saviour was not against the Person of the Holy Ghost but against his Power For that no sin or heresie against his person was so irremissible as to exclude the offending party from all hope of pardon is evident by the constant practise of the Primitive Church which as St. Chrysostom observeth used daily to receive again to the Word and Sacraments the Eunomian Hereticks on the recanting of their Error That therefore being not the siâ— which is here intended it would be worth the while and very pertinent to our present business to enquire into it though as St. Augustine notes right well In omnibus Scripturis sanctis nulla major quaestio nulla difficilior That there is not a greater nor more difficult question in all the Scripture And well might he say so of all men who in delivering his own judgement upon the point doth so much vary from himself that it is impossible to finde what he doth resolve on For sometimes he makes it to be final impenitency as Lib. de fide ad Pet. c. 3. Sometimes to be despair of Gods mercy as in his Comment on the Romans Sometimes to be a denying of the Churches power to forgive sins as in his Eucheirid c. 83. Sometimes to be sins of malice as De Ser. Domini in monte l. 1. And sometimes neerer to the truth to be an ascribing of the works of the Holy Ghost to the power of the Devil as in his Tract De Quâ—st ex utroque Testam quaest 102. Nor do the Writers of the former or later times agree better in this point with one another than that Learned Father with himself Some holding it to be a renouncing of the Faith of Christ as the Novatians others the denying of the Divinity of Christ as Hilary Philastrius extending it unto every Heresie and Origen whom some of the Novatians also followed to every sin committed after Baptism For later Writers the Schoolmen generally make it to be sins of malice affirming sins of infirmity to be committed against the Father whose proper attribute is Power and sins of ignorance against the Son whose proper attribute is Wisdom and therefore sins against the Holy Ghost must be sins of malice because his attribute is Love And on the other side the Protestants as generally do make it to be final Apostasie or a wilful and malicious resisting of the Truth to the very last And so it is defined by Calvin who makes them to be guilty of this sin against the Holy Ghost Qui divinae veritati cujus fulgore sic per stringuntur ut ignorantiam causari nequeant tamen destinata malicia resistâ—nt in hoc tantum ut resistant that is to say Who out of determined malice resist the known Truth of God with the Beams whereof they are so dazled that they cannot pretend ignorance to the end onely to resist But God forbid that most if at all any of the sins before enumerated should come within the compass of that grievous sentence which is denounced against blaspheming of the Holy Ghost For if either every sin committed after Baptism or every sin of malice or despair of mercy or falling into heresie especially in that large sense as Philastrius takes it should be uncapable of pardon it were almost impossible for any man to be sayed And for the rest final Impenitency is not so properly a particular and distinct species
16. And since it is not another thing to say The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of the Father and the Son than that he is or proceeds from the Father and the Son in this they seem to agree with us in eandem fidei sententiam on the same doctrine of Faith though they differ in words Thus also Rob. Grosthead the learned and renowned Bishop of Lincoln as he is cited by Scotus a famous Schoolman delivereth his opinion touching this great Controversie The Grecians saith he are of opinion that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of the Son but that he proceedeth not from the Son but from the Father onely yet by the Son which opinion seemeth to be contrary to ours But happily if two wise and understanding men the one of the Greek Church and the other of the Latine both lovers of the truth and not of their own expressions did meet to consider of this seeming contrariety it would in the end appear Ipsam contrarietatem non esse veraciter realem sicut est vocalis That the difference is not real but verbal onely Azorius the great Casuist goeth further yet and upon due examination of the state of the Question not onely freeth the Greeks from Heresie but from Schism also By consequence the Church of Rome hath run into the greater and more grievous error in condemning every Maundy Thursday in their Bulla Coenae the whole Eastern Churches which for ought any of her own more sober children are able to discern on deliberation are fully as Orthodox as her self in the truth of Doctrine and more agreeable to antiquity in their forms of Speech For if we please to look into the Antient Writers we shall finde Tertullian saying very positively Spiritum non aliunde quam à Patre per filium which is the very same with that of Damascen before delivered And Ierom though a stout maintainer of the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son also yet doth he sometimes fall upon this expression Spiritus à Patre egreditur propter naturae societatem à filio mittitur That he proceedeth from the Father and is sent by the Son which none of the Greek Church will deny But if we look upon the Fathers of the Eastern Churches we shall finde not onely private men as Basil Nazianzen Nyssen Cyril not to descend so low as Damascen to make no mention of the proceeding of the Holy Ghost from the Son at all but a whole Synod of 180 Prelates gathered together in the second General Council at Constantinople to be silent in it though purposely assembled to suppress the Heresie of Macedonius who had denied the Divinity of the Holy Ghost For in the Constantinopolitan Creed according as it stands in all old Records the Fathers having ratified the Nicene Creed added these words for the declaring of their Faith in the Holy Ghost viz. I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord and giver of Life who proceedeth from the Father who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified who spake by the Prophets No word in this of his proceeding from the Son And though this Creed was afterwards continued in the Council of Ephesus yet so far was that Council from altering any thing which had been formerly delivered as to this paâ—ticular that it imposed a curse on those who should adde unto it And so it stood a long time in the Christian Church possessing that part in the Publick Liturgies which it still retaineth But in some tract of time some Spanish Bishops in the eighth Council of Toledo added the clause à filioque and made it to run thus in their publick Formulas who proceedeth from the Father and the Son The French not long after followed their example but still the Church of Rome adhered to the old expression Whereupon Charls the Great commanded a Council of his Prelates to be held at Aken Aquisgranum it is called in Latine to consider somewhat better of this addition and caused some of them to be sent to Pope Leo the third to have his opinion in the matter who was so far from giving any allowance unto the addition that he perswaded them to leave it out by little and little And nor content to give this Counsel unto them for fear lest the addition might creep in at Rome he caused the Constantinopolitan Creed to be fairly written out on a Table of Silver and placed it behinde the Altar of St. Peter to the end it might remain unto posterity as a lasting Monument of the true Faith which he professed The like distast did Iohn the eighth declare against this addition in a Letter by him written unto Photius Patriark of Constantinople in which he gives him to understand not onely that they had no such addition in the Church of Rome but that he did condemn them who were Authors of it adding withal That as he was careful for his part to cause all the Bishops of the West to be so perswaded of it as he was himself so that he did not think it reasonable that any should be violently constrained to leave out the addition But after in the yeer 883 Pope Nicholas the first caused this clause à filioque to be added also to the Creed in all the Churches under the Command and Jurisdiction of the Popes of Rome and from thence-forwards did they brand the Greek Churches with the brand of Heresie for not admitting that clause to the Antient Creeds which they themselves had added of their own Authority without the consent of the Eastern Churches or so much as the pretence of a General Council But as my Lord of Canterbury hath right well observed in his learned Answer unto Fisher It is an hard thing to adde and anathematize too And yet to that height of uncharitableness did they come at last that whereas it was the miserable fortune of Constantinople to be taken by the Turks upon Whitsunday being the Festival of the coming of the Holy Ghost this was given out to be a just judgment on them from the Almighty for thinking so erroneously of his Blessed Spirit as if it might not be concluded in as good form of Logick That sure the Knights of Rhodes had in their lives and actions denied Christ who bought them because that Town and all the Iland was taken by the Turks upon Christmas-day or that the People of Chios had denied and abnegated the Resurrection of our Saviour who redeemed them because that Town and therewith all the Iland also was taken by the said Turks upon Easter-day I have now done with so much of the present Article as relates unto the Person of the Holy Ghost which is the first signification of the term or notion as it is taken personaliter and essentialiter We must next look upon the word as it is used to signifie in the Book of God the gifts and graces of the
Countrey A Proclamation following in the Rear from the Civil Magistrate That no man should presume to afford them any help or maintenance during that miserable exile Whether this were not too severe I regard not here This is enough to shew that National or Provincial Councils do still claim a power in handling and determining controversies touching points of Faith and that they challenge an obedience to their Resolutions of all which live within the bounds of their jurisdiction without which all Synodical meetings were but vain and fruitless Nor hath the Church onely an especial power in determining of controversies raised within her according to the Word of God but so to explicate and interpret the Word of God that no controversie may arise about it for the time to come Four Offices there are which the Church performs in reference to the holy Scriptures The first Tabellionis of a Messenger or Letter-Carrier to convey it to us Quid enim est Scriptura tota nisi Epistola omnipotentis Dei ad Creaturam suam saith St. Gregory What else is the whole Scripture but a Letter or Epistle from Almighty God unto his Creature and by whose hands doth he convey this Letter to us but by the Ministery of his Church The next is Vindicis of a Champion to defend it in all times of danger from the attempts and machinations of malicious Hereticks and such corruptions of the Text as possibly enough might have crept into it in long tract of time The Iews since our Redeemers time had falsified some places of the Old Testament and expunged others which spake expresly of Christs coming Delentes namque literas inficiati sunt Scripturam as we finde in Chrysostom The like saith Athanasius of their falsifications Tam manifestis Scripturis de Christo Prophetiis excaecavit Satanas Judaeorum oculos c. Ut talia testimonia falsa Scriptione falsarent The Arians stand convicted of the like attempt who had expunged ou◠of all their Bibles these words of St. Iohn Deus est Spiritus Iohn 14.24 because they seemed to prove the Deity of the Holy Ghost and that not out of their own Bibles onely but out of the Publick Bibles also of the Church of Millain Et fortasse hoc etiam in oriente fecistis and probable enough it was that they had done the same in the Eastern Churches saith St. Ambrose of them But such a vigilant and careful eye did the Church keep over them that their corruptions were discovered and the Text restored again to its first integrity The like may also be affirmed of such corruptions as casually had crept into the Text of holy Scripture by the negligence of the Transcribers and mistakes of Printers Which the Church no sooner did observe as observe them she did but they were rectified by comparing them with such other Copies as still continued uncorrupted Of which St. Augustine telleth us thus Corrumpi non possunt c The Scriptures saith he cannot be corrupted because they are in the hands of so many persons And if any one hath dared to attempt the same Vetustiorum codicum collatione confutabatur he was confuted by comparing them with the elder Copies The third Office is Praeconis of a Publisher or Proclaimer of the Will of God revealed in Scripture by calling on the people diligently to peruse the same and carefully to believe and practise what is therein written And this is that whereof St. Augustine speaks in another place saying Non crederem Evangelio nisi me Ecclesiae Catholicae moveret autoritas i. e. That he being then a Novice in the Schools of Christ had not given credit to the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholick Church had moved him to it The fourth and last Office is Interpretis of an Interpreter or Expounder of the Word of God which in many places are so hard to be understood that Ignorant and unstable men may and do often wrest them to their own destruction who therefore are to have recourse to the Priests of God whose lips preserve knowledge and from whose mouth the people are to take the explication of the Law of God But being it hapneth many times that the Priests and Ministers themselves do not agree upon the sense of holy Scripture and that no small disturbance hath been raised in the Church of Christ by reason of such different Interpretations as are made thereof every one making it to speak in favor of his own opinion the Body of the Church assembled in her Representatives hath the full power of making such Interpretation of the places controverted as may conclude all parties in her Exposition Both Protestants and Papists do agree in this not all but some of each side and no mean ones neither Sacrae Scripturae sensus nativus indubitatus ab Ecclesia Catholica est petendus so said Petrus à Soto for the Papist The proper and undoubted sense of the holy Scripture is to be sought saith he from the Catholick Church which is indeed the general opinion of the Roman Schools And to the same effect saith Luther for the Protestant Doctors De nullo privat◠homine nos certos esse habeant necne revelationem Patris Ecclesiam unam esse de qua non liceat dubitare We cannot be assured said he of private persons whether or not they have a revelation from the Father of Truth it is the Church alone whereof we need make no question Which words considering the temper of the man and how much he ascribed to his own spirit in expounding Scripture may serve instead of many testimonies from the Protestant Writers who look with reverence on him as the first Reformer This also was the judgment of the Antient Fathers St. Augustine thus We do uphold the truth of Scripture when we do that which the Vniversal Church commandeth recommended by the authority of holy Scripture And for as much as the Scriptures cannot deceive us a man that would not willingly erre in a point of such obscurity as that then in question ought to enquire the Churches judgment With him agrees St. Ambrose also who much commends the Emperor Gratian for referring the interpretation of a doubtful Text unto the judgment of his Bishops convened in Council Ecce quid statuit Imperator Noluit injuriam facere sacerdotibus ipsos interpretes constituit Episcopos Behold saith he what the good Christian Emperor did ordain therein Because he would not derogate from the power of the Bishops he made them the Interpreters Thus Innocent one of the Popes doth affirm in Gratian Facilius inveniri quod à pluribus senioribus quaeritur i. e. The meaning of the Scripture is soonest found when it is sought of many Presbyters or Elders convened together And reason good For seeing that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation because it came originally from such holy Men who spake as
causa etiam ad hodiernum diem Purgatorium non est à Graecis creditum In which besides a plain acknowledgement that the Greek Fathers knew not of it there is a very shreud intimation that there is little mention in the antien◠Latines Some other ground there must be for the fire of Purgatory than prayers and offerings for the dead but what that is is not so easily agreed upon amongst themselves Some relie wholly on Tradition and others as they build on that for the main foundation so they bring Texts of Scripture as a second help for their collateral security onely and no more than so But Frier Iohn Bacon hath declared That there be others who think that Purgatory cannot be proved by authority of Scripture that the Books of Maccabees which commonly are alleged for proof thereof are not Canonical that the Apostle 1 Cor. 3. speaks of that fire that shall purge the elements of the world in the last day and that touching those words of Christ it shall never be remitted in this world nor in that to come they prove not that there is a remission of sins in the other world Nor is Iohn Bacon onely of this opinion For they who carefully consult the writings of our Romish Adversaries will easily perceive how little confidence they have in those Texts of Scripture which commonly are alleged in defence hereof there being not so much as one Text hitherto produced and insisted on by some of that party but what by others is denied to be meant of Purgatory And to say truth their differences are so many and irreeoncilable in all the points and circumstances which concern this doctrine that the disagreements which they have amongst themselves may serve sufficiently instead of all other Arguments to confute the Tenet First for the place which Eckius will have to be in the bottom of the Sea some in Mount Aetna others in the Centre of the Earth and Bernard de Busses in an Hill of Ireland next for the Torments which Sir Thomas Moor will have to be onely by fire Fisher his fellow-sufferer by Fire and Water Lorichius neither by Fire nor Water but by the violent convulsions of Hope and Fear then for the Executioners which Bishop Fisher will have to be holy Angels Sir Thomas Moor to be very Devils So for the sins that are to be expiated in those flames which some will have to be onely venial others to be the venial ones and the mortal too And for the time of their continuing in that state which Dennis the Carthusian extends to the end of the world Dominicus à Soto limits but to ten years onely others have shortned that time too if either their friends will hire some Priest to say Mass for their souls or the Pope do but speak the word And last of all for the extremity of the pain which Aquinas makes as violent as those of Hell and yet the Rhemists say that they which are in Purgatory are in a more happy and blessed condition than any man living Durandus betwixt these extreams gives them some intermission from these terrible pains upon Sundays and Holidays By which uncertainty or contrariety rather of opinions we may clearly see upon what weak foundations they have raised this building which probably had faln to the ground long since if the profit which ariseth by it to their Monks and Friers had not kept it up But I forbear to meddle further in this point of Purgatory which for my part I do conceive to be rather a Platonical and Poetical fiction than to have any ground in Scripture or true Antiquity The Fathers for the first 600 years after Christs Nativity making no resolution in it either publick or private save that St. Augustine to avoide a worse inconvenience may seem to some to patronize it And yet he doth it with such doubtingness and so much uncertainty that any man not blinded with his own opinion may see he knew not what to determine of it For sometimes it is no more then quantum arbitror for as much as he thinks and other whiles incredibile non est that it is not incredible But then he leaves it off with a quaeri potest as a matter disputable At other times he goes as far as a forsitan verum that peradventure it is true and yet at last utterly rejects it with an ignoramus Heaven we do know saith he and we know Hell also Tertium locum ignoramus a third place between both we can tell of none He that can ground a point of faith upon such uncertainties must have more skill in Architecture than I dare pretend to But this is onely on the by to shew how little the Communion of the Saints hath to do with Purgatory which neither is a consequent nor concomitant of it The Saints may pray for one another we for their consummation in the state of glory and they for our wel-doing in our passage thither and no such thing as Purgatory be inferred from either It is now time that I proceed to such other benefits as do redound unto the Church from her Head CHRIST IESUS Articuli X. Pars Secunda 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 i. e. Remissionem Peccatorum i. e. The forgiveness of Sins CHAP. V. Of the first Introduction of sin God not the Author of it Of the nature and contagion of Original sin No Actual sin so great but it in capable of forgiveness In what respect some sins may be counted Venial and others Mortal IT is a saying of St. Augustines in no point so uncertain as in that of Purgatory that possibly God could not have bestowed a greater blessing on his Church than making his onely begotten Son Christ Iesus to be head thereof By means whereof it cometh to pass that one and the same person Et orat pro nobis orat in nobis oratur à nobis doth both pray for us and pray with us and yet is also prayed to by us How so That he resolves immediately in the words next following Orat pro nobis ut sacerdos noster orat in nobis ut caput nostrum oratur à nobis ut deu◠noster that is to say He prayeth for us as our Priest he prayeth with us as our Head and is prayed to by us as our God Himself is both the Suter and the Mediator yea and the party sued unto and therefore doubt we not when we call upon him but he will grant us those Petitions which himself makes for us As Priest he represents continually to Almighty God the benefit and effect of that perfect Sacrifice which he once offered on the Cross for the sins of the world As Head unto the Church he recommends our prayers to the Throne of Grace and joyneth with his Members in their sutes to God for the more speedy and effectual obtaining of them As God he hath his eye still over
ab his putat exigendam fidem quos novit nullam propriam habere culpam The justice of Almighty God saith he doth not think it fitting that having committed no particular sin of their own he should exact of them a proper and particular faith of their own but as they were undone by anothers fault so they should be relieved by anothers faith To which effect though not so fully I have read somewhere I am sure in St. Ierome but cannot well remember where Qui peccavit in altero credat in altero That he which hath sinned in others may believe by others For the next point though we maintain the necessity of Baptism as the ordinary outward means to attain salvation and do correct those Ministers by the Churches censures by whose gross negligence or default if required to do it an Infant shall die unbaptized Yet we conceive it not so absolutely necessary in the way to Heaven but it is possible for a man to be saved without it For antiquity supplied in some the want of water by blood which many times was the case of Martyrs in others the inevitable want of Baptism by the Holy Ghost the earnestness of the desire if it might have been had supplying the defect of the outward Ceremony Hence came the old distinction of Baptismus fluminis Baptismus flaminis and Baptismus sanguinis Concerning which the Fathers teach us this in brief That where men are debarred by an evitable impossibility from the outward Sacrament Faith and the inward conversion of the heart flying unto God in IESUS CHRIST through the sweet motion and gracious instinct of the Holy Spirit may be reckoned for a kinde of Baptism because thereby they obtain all that which they so earnestly sought after in the Sacrament of Baptism if they could have been partakers of it And if it be so that an ordinary degree of Faith do sometime obtain salvation without the Baptism of Water much more may that which makes men willing to suffer death for Christs and the Gospels sake and be baptized as it were in their dearest blood It was not simply the want of Baptism but the neglect and contempt thereof which antiently in the Adulti men of riper years was accounted damnable But what may then be said in the case of Infants in whom are no such strong desires no such sanctified motions Shall we adjudge them with St. Augustine to eternal fire as some say he did who thereby worthily got the name of Infanto-mastyx or the scourge of Infants as he had gloriously gained the title of Malleus Pelagianorum The Maul or Hammer of the Pelagian Hereticks No God forbid that we should so restrain his most infinite mercies unto outward means Or shall we feign a third place for them near the skirts of Hell as our good Masters do in the Church of Rome We have as little ground for that in the holy Scripture Rather than so we may resolve and I think with safety that as the Faith of the Church and of those which do present such as are baptized is by God accepted for their own so the desire and willingness of the same Church and of their God-fathers and Parents where Baptism cannot possibly be had is reputed theirs also Or if not so yet we refer them full of hope to the grace of God in whose most rigorous constitutions and sharpest denunciations deepest mercies are hid and who is still the Father of mercies though the God of justice And so I shut up this discourse with these words of Hooker That for the Will of God to impart his grace to Infants without Baptism the very circumstance of their natural birth may serve in that case for a just Argument whereupon it is not to be misliked that men in a charitable presumption do gather a great likelihood of their salvation to whom the benefit of Christian parentage being given the rest that should follow is prevented by some such casualty as man hath no power himself to avoid So he of those which are descended of a Christian stock What may be thought of children born of unbelievers hath been said elswhere And so much of the first ordinary outward means ordained by Christ for the remission of our sins the holy Sacrament of Baptism Proceed we next unto the other which is the power of the Keys committed in the person of St. Peter to the Catholick Church and those which by the Churches order are authorized and appointed to it That miserable man being wrought upon unto repentance by the power and preaching of the Word may on confession of his sins be forgiven of God or have the benefit of absolution from the hands of his Ministers if their spiritual necessities do so require For certainly there is not a more ready way to forgiveness of sins than by sincere and sound repentance nor any speedier means to beget repentance than to present our sins unto us in their own deformity by the most righteous myrror of the Word of God For when the sinner comes to know by the Word of God the heinousness of his misdeeds the wrath which God conceives against him for his gross offences together with the punishment which is due unto them according to his rigorous judgments The thought thereof must needs affect him both with fear and horror and make him truly sensible of his desperate state To whom then shall he flie for succor but to God alone humbly confessing unto him both his sins and sorrows How can he look to be recovered of the biting of these fiery Serpents but by looking with the eye of faith on that brazen Serpent which was exalted on the Cross for his Redemption Or if he finde his Conscience troubled and his minde afflicted and that he hath not confidence enough to draw near to God then let him go unto the Priest whom God hath made to be the Iudge between the unclean and the clean whom God hath authorized to minister the word of comfort to raise up them that be faln and support the weak to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and to guide their feet in the way of peace This is the Method to be used the course to be pursued by those who do desire to profit in the School of repentance And about this as to the main and substance of it there is but little difference amongst knowing men For that Repentance is a necessary means required for the remission of sins committed after Baptism the Antients and the Moderns do agree in one The Fathers used to call it secundam tabulam post naufragium the second Table after Spiritual shipwrack on which all those who had made shipwrack of the Faith and a good conscience used to lay hold after they had foregone the benefit received in Baptism to keep them up from sinking in the depth of despair from being overwhelmed in the bottomless Ocean of sin and judgment
otherwise then now they are For neither is the prescience or foreknowledge of almighty God for by that name his infinite knowledge may be styled the necessary and adaequate cause that things shall fall out as they do not otherwise but rather because things shall in time so fall out therefore GOD fore-knowes them Nor doth his infinite wisdome in pursuit of the means conducing to the end proposed so fetter and intangle his most infinite power but that he is still liberum agens and is at liberty to produce his end by things plainly contingent as well as by such whereon he hath imposed an everlasting necessity or to suspend the execution of some former edict according as he seeth just occasion for it which liberty in the holy one of Israel is an high perfection For as his eternal knowledge of all things doth not make all things which he knoweth to be eternal so neither doth the immutability of his decrees make every thing which he decrees to be immutable there being many temporal and mutable things which he eternally both knew and decreed accordingly So that for GOD to alter his proceedings with men according as they stand or fall in the acts of piety now punishing where he lately rewarded and presently rewarding where before he punished argueth no mutability in the counsails of GOD but rather an unmovable constancy to the immutable rule of justice which being alwayes one and the same without variation must needs afford different measure unto different deserts and sit contrary dispositions with contrary recompences And on the other side to make this conclusion that because God fore-knoweth by his infinite knowledge and by his infinite wisdome hath decreed of all things even from all eternity therefore it is as impossible for any thing to be otherwise then it is or otherwise then it hath been or will be hereafter as to recall again that which is past already were either to make GOD an impertinent agent in the continuall governance of humane affaires or that he hath nothing else to do but to behold the issue of his former counsails For plainly they which so conceive of the counsails of GOD that all things are decreed and predetermined by him even to the taking up of a straw which was Cartwrights phrase although they have not said it in terms express yet do they necessarily infer or involve thus much That God by his eternall and immutable decrees did set the whole course of nature going with an irresistible and untractable swindge and doth since only look upon it with an awfull eye as Masters sometimes watch their servants to see how willingly or unwillingly how carefully or negligenly they attend his businesse Which how derogatory it is to the truth of the Gospell those words of CHRIST Et pater adhuc operatur i. e. I work and my Father also worketh do declare sufficiently it being evident by that Text if considered rightly that there is altogether as much need of Gods power and wisdome to manage and direct the affaires of the world as at first to make it Thus are we come at last to the fourth and last species of Infinity which is that of Power or of Omnipotence and therein to behold GOD as the Father Almighty the Father because the fountain and root of being and the Almighty Father too because that being in himself an eternal being he had withall a power invested or inherent in him to give a being to the Creatures and to make all things out of nothing which needs must be the act of a power most mighty To this the former part of this Chapter served but as a preamble or a necessary introduction to bring us to the knowledge of this part of the Article viz. That GOD is not only a Father but a Father Almighty which could not otherwise have been fully cleered and made known unto us then by a serious looking on him in his names and attributes For finding in the name IEHOVAH that he is existing of himself and that from him all things that are receive their being his mighty strength in the name of El his eminent power in that of Adonai or Lord that he is God most high in Helion and a Judge in Elohim and then concluding out of these that being such he must be of an uncompounded and most simple essence by consequence eternal and incomprehensible of infinite knowledge to foresee and wisdome to effect what he meaneth to do we may from all together come to this result that he can be no other then the Father Almighty And this was the result which was made of old by the most learned of the Gentiles who having made a muster of his severall Attributes resolved all into this at last that he was the general Father both of God and Men the Parent of the Universe both of Heaven and Earth and therefore without question an Almighty Father Mercurius Trismegistus calleth him in termes expresse Patrem mundi the Father or Parent of the world affirming that the name of good and of a Father belong only to him and so Pythagoras cals him too as is said by Clement Plato entituled him Universi Patrem the Father or Parent of the Universe Iamblichus one of Plato's followers 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or self-father as before was noted By Aristotle in his book de Mundo he is called Pater deorum et hominum the Father both of Gods and Men 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in the words of Homer By Virgil in the same sense Hominum sator atque Deorum in the first of the Aeneids By Orpheus 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Original Ancester of all and by Apollo himself 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the unspeakable Father And for the titile of Almighty I finde it given expresly to him in a verse of one of the Sibyls where he is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 i. e. Omnipotent invisible and yet seeing all things The like doth frequently occurre in the Latine Poets who call him the Almighty Father in as positive termes as he is called here in the Creed Tum Pater Omnipotens foecundis imbribus c. And in another place At pater Omnipotens speluncis abdidit atris as we read in Virgil. At Pater Omnipotens misso perfregit Olympum c. so it is in Ovid And by Valerius Soranus one of elder times their Iupiter or supreme deity had the title of Almighty and King of Kings assigned unto him Iupiter Omnipotens Regum Rex ipse Deusque as St. Augustine citeth him out of Varro More might be added unto this were not this sufficient to shew that even the learned Gentiles did acknowledge God to be the Father Almighty We must next see how and in what respects he is called a Father and doth stand so entituled in the front of the Creed And first the name of Father as applyed to God in holy Scripture is taken 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Personally as