The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Biographical Introduction.
• Of Reformation In England, and the Causes That Hitherto Have Hindered It. In Two Books.
• Of Prelatical Episcopacy,
• The Reason of Church-government Urged Against Prelaty. In Two Books.
• Animadversions Upon the Remonstrant’s Defence Against Smectymnuus.
• An Apology For Smectymnuus.
• Of Education.
• Areopagitica: a Speech For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.
• The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce;
• The Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce.
• Tetrachordon. Expositions Upon the Four Chief Passages of Scripture Which Treat of Marriage, Or Nullities In Marriage.
• Colasterion. a Reply to a Nameless Answer Against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.
• The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:
• Observations On the Articles of Peace,
• ἘΙΚΟΝΟΚΛΑΣΤΗΣ. In Answer to a Book Entitled, ΕΙΚΩΝ ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΗ, the Portraiture of His Majesty In His Solitudes and Sufferings.

ANIMADVERSIONS OPON THE REMONSTRANT’S DEFENCE AGAINST SMECTYMNUUS.

[first published 1641.]

THE PREFACE.

Although it be a certain truth, that they who undertake a religious cause need not care to be men pleasers; yet because the satisfaction of tender and mild consciences is far different from that which is called men pleasing; to satisfy such, I shall address myself in few words to give notice beforehand of something in this book, which to some men perhaps may seem offensive, that when I have rendered a lawful reason of what is done, I may trust to have saved the labour of defending or excusing hereafter. We all know that in private or personal injuries, yea, in public sufferings for the cause of Christ, his rule and example teaches us to be so far from a readiness to speak evil, as not to answer the reviler in his language, though never so much provoked: yet in the detecting and convincing of any notorious enemy to truth and his country’s peace, especially that is conceited to have a voluble and smart fluence of tongue, and in the vain confidence of that, and out of a more tenacious cling to worldly respects, stands up for all the rest to justify a long usurpation and convicted pseudepiscopy of prelates, with all their ceremonies, liturgies, and tyrannies, which God and man are now ready to explode and hiss out of the land; I suppose, and more than suppose, it will be nothing disagreeing from Christian meekness to handle such a one in a rougher accent, and to send home his haughtiness well bespurted with his own holy water. Nor to do thus are we unauthorized either from the moral precept of Solomon, to answer him thereafter that prides him in his folly; nor from the example of Christ, and all his followers in all ages, who, in the refuting of those that resisted sound doctrine, and by subtile dissimulations corrupted the minds of men, have wrought up their sealous souls into such vehemencies, as nothing could be more killingly spoken: for who can be a greater enemy to mankind, who a more dangerous deceiver, than he who, defending a traditional corruption, uses no common arts, but with a wily stratagem of yielding to the time a greater part of his cause, seeming to forego all that man’s invention hath done therein, and driven from much of his hold in Scripture; yet leaving it hanging by a twined thread, not from divine command, but from apostolical prudence or assent; as if he had the surety of some rolling trench, creeps up by this mean to his relinquished fortress of divine authority again, and still hovering between the confines of that which he dares not be openly, and that which he will not be sincerely, trains on the easy Christian insensibly within the close ambushment of worst errors, and with a sly shuffle of counterfeit principles, chopping and changing till he have gleaned all the good ones out of their minds, leaves them at last, after a slight resemblance of sweeping and garnishing, under the seven-fold possession of a desperate stupidity? And therefore they that love the souls of men, which is the dearest love, and stirs up the noblest jealousy, when they meet with such collusion, cannot be blamed though they be transported with the zeal of truth to a well-heated fervency; especially, seeing they which thus offend against the souls of their brethren, do it with delight to their great gain, ease and advancement in this world; but they that seek to discover and oppose their false trade of deceiving, do it not without a sad and unwilling anger, not without many hazards; but without all private and personal spleen, and without any thought of earthly reward, whenas this very course they take stops their hopes of ascending above a lowly and unenviable pitch in this life. And although in the serious uncasing of a grand imposture, (for to deal plainly with you, readers, prelaty is no better,) there be mixed here and there such a grim laughter, as may appear at the same time in an austere visage, it cannot be taxed of levity or insolence: for even this vein of laughing (as I could produce out of grave authors) hath ofttimes a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting, nor can there be a more proper object of indignation and scorn together; than a false prophet taken in the greatest, dearest, and most dangerous cheat, the cheat of souls: in the disclosing whereof, if it be harmful to be angry, and withal to cast a lowering smile, when the properest object calls for both, it will be long enough ere any be able to say why those two most rational faculties of human intellect, anger and laughter, were first seated in the breast of man. Thus much, readers, in favour of the softer spirited Christian; for other exceptioners there was no thought taken. Only if it be asked why this close and succinct manner of coping with the adversary was rather chosen, this was the reason chiefly, that the ingenuous reader, without further amusing himself in the labyrinth of controversial antiquity, may come to the speediest way to see the truth vindicated, and sophistry taken short at the first false bound. Next that the Remonstrant himself, as oft as he pleases to be frolic, and brave it with others, may find no gain of money, and may learn not to insult in so bad a cause. But now he begins.

SECTION I.

Remonstrant.

My single remonstrance is encountered with a plural adversary.

Answer.

Did not your single remonstrance bring along with it a hot scent of your more than singular affection to spiritual pluralities, your singleness would be less suspected with all good Christians than it is.

Remonst.

Their names, persons, qualities, numbers, I care not to know.

Answ.

Their names are known to the all-knowing Power above; and in the mean while, doubtless, they reck not whether you or your nomenclator know them or not.

Remonst.

But could they say my name is Legion, for we are many.

Answ.

Wherefore should ye begin with the devil’s name, descanting upon the number of your opponents? Wherefore that conceit of Legion with a by-wipe? Was it because you would have men take notice how you esteem them, whom through all your book so bountifully you call your brethren? We had not thought that Legion could have furnished the Remonstrant with so many brethren.

Remonst.

My cause, ye gods would bid me meet them undismayed, &c.

Answ.

Ere a foot further we must be content to hear a preambling boast of your valour, what a St. Dunstan you are to encounter Legions, either infernal or human.

Remonst.

My cause, ye gods.

Answ.

What gods? Unless your belly, or the god of this world be he? Show us any one point of your remonstrance that does not more concern superiority, pride, ease, and the belly, than the truth and glory of God, or the salvation of souls.

Remonst.

My cause, ye gods, would bid me meet them undismayed, and to say with holy David, “though a host, &c.”

Answ.

Do not think to persuade us of your undaunted courage, by misapplying to yourself the words of holy David; we know you fear, and are in an agony at this present, lest you should lose that superfluity of riches and honour, which your party usurp. And whosoever covets, and so earnestly labours to keep such an incumbering surcharge of earthly things, cannot but have an earthquake still in his bones. You are not armed, Remonstrant, nor any of your band; you are not dieted nor your loins girt for spiritual valour, and Christian warfare; the luggage is too great that follows your camp; your hearts are there, you march heavily: how shall we think you have not carnal fear, while we see you so subject to carnal desires?

Remonst.

I do gladly fly to the bar.

Answ.

To the bar with him then. Gladly, you say. We believe you as gladly as your whole faction wished and longed for the assembling of this parliament, as gladly as your beneficiaries the priests came up to answer the complaints and outcries of all the shires.

Remonst.

The Areopagi! who were those? Truly, my masters, I had thought this had been the name of the place, not of the men.

Answ.

A soar-eagle would not stoop at a fly; but sure some pedagogue stood at your elbow, and made it itch with this parlous criticism; they urged you with a decree of the sage and severe judges of Athens, and you cite them to appear for certain paragogical contempts, before a capacious pedanty of hot-livered grammarians. Mistake not the matter, courteous Remonstrant; they were not making Latin: if in dealing with an outlandish name, they thought it best not to screw the English mouth to a harsh foreign termination, so they kept the radical word, they did no more than the elegantest authors among the Greeks, Romans, and at this day the Italians, in scorn of such a servility use to do. Remember how they mangle our British names abroad; what trespass were it, if we in requital should as much neglect theirs? And our learned Chaucer did not stick to do so, writing Semyramis for Semiramis, Amphiorax for Amphiaraus, K. Sejes for K. Ceyx the husband of Alcyone, with many other names strangely metamorphosed from the true orthography, if he had made any account of that in these kind of words.

Remonst.

Lest the world should think the press had of late forgot to speak any language other than libellous, this honest paper hath broken through the throng.

Answ.

Mince the matter while you will, it showed but green practice in the laws of discreet rhetoric to blurt upon the ears of a judicious parliament with such a presumptuous and overweening proem: but you do well to be the fewer of your own mess.

Remonst.

That which you miscall the preface, was a too just complaint of the shameful number of libels.

Answ.

How long is it that you and the prelatical troop have been in such distaste with libels? Ask your Lysimachus Nicanor what defaming invectives have lately flown abroad against the subjects of Scotland, and our poor expulsed brethren of New England, the prelates rather applauding than showing any dislike: and this hath been ever so, insomuch that Sir Francis Bacon in one of his discourses complains of the bishops, uneven hand over these pamphlets, confining those against bishops to darkness, but licensing those against puritans to be uttered openly, though with the greater mischief of leading into contempt the exercise of religion in the persons of sundry preachers, and disgracing the higher matter in the meaner person.

Remonst.

A point no less essential to that proposed remonstrance.

Answ.

We know where the shoe wrings you; you fret and are galled at the quick; and O what a death it is to the prelates to be thus unvisarded, thus uncased, to have the periwigs plucked off that cover your baldness, your inside nakedness thrown open to public view! The Romans had a time once every year, when their slaves might freely speak their minds; it were hard if the freeborn people of England, with whom the voice of truth for these many years, even against the proverb, hath not been heard but in corners, after all your monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes, your gags and snaffles, your proud Imprimaturs not to be obtained without the shallow surview, but not shallow hand of some mercenary, narrow-souled, and illiterate chaplain; when liberty of speaking, than which nothing is more sweet to man, was girded and strait-laced almost to a broken-winded phthisic, if now at a good time, our time of parliament, the very jubilee and resurrection of the state, if now the concealed, the aggrieved, and long persecuted truth, could not be suffered to speak; and though she burst out with some efficacy of words, could not be excused after such an injurious strangle of silence, nor avoid the censure of libelling, it were hard, it were something pinching in a kingdom of free spirit. Some princes, and great statists, have thought it a prime piece of necessary policy, to thrust themselves under disguise into a popular throng, to stand the night long under eaves of houses, and low windows, that they might hear every where the utterances of private breasts, and amongst them find out the precious gem of truth, as amongst the numberless pebbles of the shore; whereby they might be the abler to discover, and avoid, that deceitful and close-couched evil of flattery that ever attends them, and misleads them, and might skilfully know how to apply the several redresses to each malady of state, without trusting the disloyal information of parasites and sycophants: whereas now this permission of free writing, were there no good else in it, yet at some times thus licensed, is such an unripping, such an anatomy of the shyest and tenderest particular truths, as makes not only the whole nation in many points the wiser, but also presents and carries home to princes, men most remote from vulgar concourse, such a full insight of every lurking evil, or restrained good among the commons, as that they shall not need hereafter, in old cloaks and false beards, to stand to the courtesy of a nightwalking cudgeller for eaves-dropping, nor to accept quietly as a perfume, the overhead emptying of some salt lotion. Who could be angry, therefore, but those that are guilty, with these free-spoken and plain-hearted men, that are the eyes of their country, and the prospective-glasses of their prince? But these are the nettlers, these are the blabbing books that tell, though not half your fellows’ feats. You love toothless satires; let me inform you, a toothless satire is as improper as a toothed sleek-stone, and as bullish.

Remonst.

I beseech you, brethren, spend your logic upon your own works.

Answ.

The peremptory analysis that you call it, I believe will be so hardy as once more to unpin your spruce fastidious oratory, to rumple her laces, her frizzles, and her bobbins, though she wince and fling never so peevishly.

Remonst.

Those verbal exceptions are but light froth and will sink alone.

Answ.

O rare subtlety, beyond all that Cardan ever dreamed of! when, I beseech you, will light things sink? when will light froth sink alone? Here in your phrase, the same day that heavy plummets will swim alone. Trust this man, readers, if you please, whose divinity would reconcile England with Rome, and his philosophy make friends nature with the chaos, sine pondere habentia pondus.

Remonst.

That scum may be worth taking off which follows.

Answ.

Spare your ladle, sir; it will be as the bishop’s foot in the broth; the scum will be found upon your own remonstrance.

Remonst.

I shall desire all indifferent eyes to judge, whether these men do not endeavour to cast unjust envy upon me.

Answ.

Agreed.

Remonst.

I had said that the civil polity, as in general notion, hath sometimes varied, and that the civil came from arbitrary imposers; these gracious interpreters would needs draw my words to the present and particular government of our monarchy.

Answ.

And deservedly have they done so; take up your logic else and see: civil polity, say you, hath sometimes varied, and come from arbitrary imposers; what proposition is this? Bishop Downam in his dialectics will tell you it is a general axiom, though the universal particle be not expressed, and you yourself in your defence so explain in these words as in general notion. Hence is justly inferred, he that says civil polity is arbitrary, says that the civil polity of England is arbitrary. The inference is undeniable, a thesi ad hypothesin, or from the general to the particular, an evincing argument in logic.

Remonst.

Brethren, whiles ye desire to seem godly, learn to be less malicious.

Answ.

Remonstrant, till you have better learnt your principles of logic, take not upon you to be a doctor to others.

Remonst.

God bless all good men from such charity.

Answ.

I never found that logical maxims were uncharitable before; yet should a jury of logicians pass upon you, you would never be saved by the book.

Remonst.

And our sacred monarchy from such friends.

Answ.

Add, as the prelates.

Remonst.

If episcopacy have yoked monarchy, it is the insolence of the persons, not the fault of the calling.

Answ.

It was the fault of the persons, and of no calling; we do not count prelaty a calling.

Remonst.

The testimony of a pope (whom these men honour highly).

Answ.

That slanderous insertion was doubtless a pang of your incredible charity, the want whereof you lay so often to their charge; a kind token of your favour lapped up in a parenthesis; a piece of the clergy benevolence laid by to maintain the episcopal broil, whether the 1000 horse or no, time will discover: for certainly had those cavaliers come on to play their parts, such a ticket as this of highly honouring the pope, from the hand of a prelate, might have been of special use and safety to them that had cared for such a ransom.

Remonst.

And what says Antichrist?

Answ.

Ask your brethren the prelates, that hold intelligence with him: ask not us. But is the pope Antichrist now? Good news! take heed you be not shent for this; for it is verily thought, that had this bill been put in against him in your last convocation, he would have been cleared by most voices.

Remonst.

Any thing serves against episcopacy.

Answ.

See the frowardness of this man; he would persuade us, that the succession and divine right of bishopdom hath been unquestionable through all ages; yet when they bring against him kings, they were irreligious; popes, they are Antichrist. By what era of computation, through what fairy land, would the man deduce this perpetual beadroll of uncontradicted episcopacy? The pope may as well boast his ungainsaid authority to them that will believe, that all his contradicters were either irreligious or heretical.

Remonst.

If the bishops, saith the pope, be declared to be of divine right, they would be exempted from regal power; and if there might be this danger in those kingdoms, why is this enviously upbraided to those of ours? who do gladly profess, &c.

Answ.

Because your dissevered principles were but like the mangled pieces of a gashed serpent, that now begun to close, and grow together popish again. Whatsoever you now gladly profess out of fear, we know what your drifts were when you thought yourselves secure.

Remonst.

It is a foul slander to charge the name of episcopacy with a faction, for the fact imputed to some few.

Answ.

The more foul your faction that hath brought a harmless name into obloquy, and the fact may justly be imputed to all of ye that ought to have withstood it, and did not.

Remonst.

Fie, brethren! are ye the presbyters of the church of England, and dare challenge episcopacy of faction?

Answ.

Yes, as oft as episcopacy dares be factious.

Remonst.

Had you spoken such a word in the time of holy Cyprian, what had become of you?

Answ.

They had neither been haled into your Gehenna at Lambeth, nor strapadoed with an oath ex officio by your bowmen of the arches: and as for Cyprian’s time the cause was far unlike; he indeed succeeded into an episcopacy that began then to prelatize; but his personal excellence like an antidote overcame the malignity of that breeding corruption, which was then a disease that lay hid for a while under show of a full and healthy constitution, as those hydropic humours not discernible at first from a fair and juicy fleshiness of body, or that unwonted ruddy colour, which seems graceful to a cheek otherwise pale; and yet arises from evil causes, either of some inward obstruction or inflammation, and might deceive the first physicians till they had learned the sequel, which Cyprian’s days did not bring forth; and the prelatism of episcopacy, which began then to burgeon and spread, had as yet, especially in famous men, a fair, though a false imitation of flourishing.

Remonst.

Neither is the wrong less to make application of that which was most justly charged upon the practices and combinations of libelling separatists, whom I deservedly censured, &c.

Answ.

To conclude this section, our Remonstrant we see is resolved to make good that which was formerly said of his book, that it was neither humble nor a remonstrance, and this his defence is of the same complexion. When he is constrained to mention the notorious violence of his clergy attempted on the church of Scotland, he slightly terms it a fact imputed to some few; but when he speaks of that which the parliament vouchsafes to name the city petition, “which I,” saith he, (as if the state had made him public censor,) “deservedly censured.” And how? As before for a tumultuary and underhand way of procured subscriptions, so now in his defence more bitterly, as the practices and combinations of libelling separatists, and the miszealous advocates thereof, justly to be branded for incendiaries. Whether this be for the honour of our chief city to be noted with such an infamy for a petition, which not without some of the magistrates, and great numbers of sober and considerable men, was orderly and meekly presented, although our great clerks think that these men, because they have a trade, (as Christ himself and St. Paul had,) cannot therefore attain to some good measure of knowledge, and to a reason of their actions, as well as they that spend their youth in loitering, bezzling, and harlotting, their studies in unprofitable questions and barbarous sophistry, their middle age in ambition and idleness, their old age in avarice, dotage, and diseases. And whether this reflect not with a contumely upon the parliament itself, which thought this petition worthy, not only of receiving, but of voting to a commitment, after it had been advocated, and moved for by some honourable and learned gentleman of the house, to be called a combination of libelling separatists, and the advocates thereof to be branded for incendiaries; whether this appeach not the judgment and approbation of the parliament I leave to equal arbiters.

SECTION II.

Remonst.

After the overflowing of your gall, you descend to liturgy and episcopacy.

Answ.

The overflow being past, you cannot now in your own judgment impute any bitterness to their following discourses.

Remonst.

Dr. Hall, whom you name I dare say for honour’s sake.

Answ.

You are a merry man, sir, and dare say much.

Remonst.

And why should not I speak of martyrs, as the authors and users of this holy liturgy?

Answ.

As the authors! the translators, you might perhaps have said: for Edward the Sixth, as Hayward hath written in his story, will tell you upon the word of a king, that the order of the service, and the use thereof in the English tongue, is no other than the old service was, and the same words in English which were in Latin, except a few things omitted, so fond, that it had been a shame to have heard them in English; these are his words: whereby we are left uncertain who the author was, but certain that part of the work was esteemed so absurd by the translators thereof, as was to be ashamed of in English. O but the martyrs were the refiners of it, for that only is left you to say. Admit they were, they could not refine a scorpion into a fish, though they had drawn it, and rinsed it with never so cleanly cookery, which made them fall at variance among themselves about the use either of it, or the ceremonies belonging to it.

Remonst.

Slight you them as you please, we bless God for such patrons of our good cause.

Answ.

O Benedicite! Qui color ater erat, nunc est contrarius atro. Are not these they which one of your bishops in print scornfully terms the Foxian confessors? Are not these they whose acts and monuments are not only so contemptible, but so hateful to the prelates, that their story was almost come to be a prohibited book, which for these two or three editions hath crept into the world by stealth, and at times of advantage, not without the open regret and vexation of the bishops, as many honest men that had to do in setting forth the book will justify? And now at a dead lift for your liturgies you bless God for them: out upon such hypocrisy!

Remonst.

As if we were bound to make good every word that falls from the mouth of every bishop.

Answ.

Your faction then belike is a subtile Janus, and hath two faces: your bolder face to set forward any innovations or scandals in the church, your cautious and wary face to disavow them if they succeed not, that so the fault may not light upon the function, lest it should spoil the whole plot by giving it an irrecoverable wound. Wherefore else did you not long ago, as a good bishop should have done, disclaim and protest against them? Wherefore have you sat still, and complied and hood-winked, till the general complaints of the land have squeezed you to a wretched, cold, and hollow-hearted confession of some prelatical riots both in this and other places of your book? Nay, what if you still defend them as follows?

Remonst.

If a bishop have said that our liturgy hath been so wisely and charitably framed, as that the devotion of it yieldeth no cause of offence to a very pope’s ear.

Answ.

O new and never heard of supererogative height of wisdom and charity in our liturgy! Is the wisdom of God or the charitable framing of God’s word otherwise inoffensive to the pope’s ear, than as he may turn it to the working of his mysterious iniquity? A little pulley would have stretched your wise and charitable frame it may be three inches further, that the devotion of it might have yielded no cause of offence to the very devil’s ear, and that had been the same wisdom and charity surmounting to the highest degree. For Antichrist we know is but the devil’s vicar, and therefore please him with your liturgy, and you please his master.

Remonst.

Would you think it requisite, that we should chide and quarrel when we speak to the God of peace?

Answ.

Fie, no sir; but forecast our prayers so, that Satan and his instruments may take as little exception against them as may be, lest they should chide and quarrel with us.

Remonst.

It is no little advantage to our cause and piety, that our liturgy is taught to speak several languages for use and example.

Answ.

The language of Ashdod is one of them, and that makes so many Englishmen have such a smattering of their Philistian mother. And indeed our liturgy hath run up and down the world like an English galloping nun proffering herself, but we hear of none yet that bids money for her.

Remonst.

As for that sharp censure of learned Mr. Calvin, it might well have been forborn by him in aliena republica.

Answ.

Thus this untheological remonstrant would divide the individual catholic church into several republics: know, therefore, that every worthy pastor of the church of Christ hath universal right to admonish over all the world within the church; nor can that care be aliened from him by any distance or distinction of nation, so long as in Christ all nations and languages are as one household.

Remonst.

Neither would you think it could become any of our greatest divines, to meddle with his charge.

Answ.

It hath ill become them indeed, to meddle so maliciously, as many of them have done, though that patient and Christian city hath borne hitherto all their profane scoffs with silence.

Remonst.

Our liturgy passed the judgment of no less reverend heads than his own.

Answ.

It bribed their judgments with worldly engagements, and so passed it.

Remonst.

As for that unparalleled discourse concerning the antiquity of liturgies, I cannot help your wonder, but shall justify mine own assertion.

Answ.

Your justification is but a miserable shifting off those testimonies of the ancientest fathers alleged against you, and the authority of some synodal canons which are now arrant to us. We profess to decide our controversies only by the Scriptures; but yet to repress your vain-glory, there will be voluntarily bestowed upon you a sufficient conviction of your novelties out of succeeding antiquity.

Remonst.

I cannot see how you will avoid your own contradiction, for I demand, is this order of praying and administration set, or no? If it be not set, how is it an order? And if it be a set order both for matter and form—

Answ.

Remove that form, lest you tumble over it, while you make such haste to clap a contradiction upon others.

Remonst.

If the forms were merely arbitrary, to what use was the prescription of an order.

Answ.

Nothing will cure this man’s understanding but some familiar and kitchen physic, which, with pardon, must for plainness’ sake be administered to him. Call hither your cook. The order of breakfast, dinner, and supper, answer me, is it set or no? Set. Is a man therefore bound in the morning to poached eggs and vinegar, or at noon to brawn or beef, or at night to fresh salmon, and French kickshose? May he not make his meals in order, though he be not bound to this or that viand? Doubtless the neat-fingered artist will answer yes, and help us out of this great controversy without more trouble. Can we not understand an order in church-assemblies of praying, reading, expounding, and administering, unless our prayers be still the same crambe of words?

Remonst.

What a poor exception is this, that liturgies were composed by some particular men?

Answ.

It is a greater presumption in any particular men to arrogate to themselves, that which God universally gives to all his ministers. A minister that cannot be trusted to pray in his own words without being chewed to, and fescued to a formal injunction of his rote lesson, should as little be trusted to preach, besides the vain babble of praying over the same things immediately again; for there is a large difference in the repetition of some pathetical ejaculation raised out of the sudden earnestness and vigour of the inflamed soul, (such as was that of Christ in the garden,) from the continual rehearsal of our daily orisons; which if a man shall kneel down in a morning, and say over, and presently in another part of the room kneel down again, and in other words ask but still for the same things as it were out of one inventory, I cannot see how he will escape that heathenish battology of multiplying words, which Christ himself, that has the putting up of our prayers, told us would not be acceptable in heaven. Well may men of eminent gifts set forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose them on ministers lawfully called, and sufficiently tried, as all ought to be ere they be admitted, is a supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves.

Remonst.

Do we abridge this liberty by ordaining a public form?

Answ.

Your bishops have set as fair to do it as they durst for that old pharisaical fear that still dogs them, the fear of the people; though you will say you are none of those, still you would seem not to have joined with the worst, and yet keep aloof off from that which is best. I would you would either mingle, or part: most true it is what Savanarola complains, that while he endeavoured to reform the church, his greatest enemies were still these lukewarm ones.

Remonst.

And if the Lord’s prayer be an ordinary and stinted form, why not others?

Answ.

Because there be no other Lords, that can stint with like authority.

Remonst.

If Justin Martyr said, that the instructor of the people prayed (as they falsely term it) “according to his ability.”

Answ.

“Οση δύναμις ἀυτῷ will be so rendered to the world’s end by those that are not to learn Greek of the Remonstrant; and so Langus renders it to his face, if he could see; and this ancient father mentions no antiphonies or responsories of the people here, but the only plain acclamation of Amen.

Remonst.

The instructor of the people prayed according to his ability, it is true; so do ours: and yet we have a liturgy, and so had they.

Answ.

A quick come-off. The ancients used pikes and targets, and therefore guns and great ordnance, because we use both.

Remonst.

Neither is this liberty of pouring out ourselves in our prayers ever the more impeached by a public form.

Answ.

Yes, the time is taken up with a tedious number of liturgical tautologies, and impertinences.

Remonst.

The words of the council are full and affirmative.

Answ.

Set the grave councils up upon their shelves again, and string them hard, lest their various and jangling opinions put their leaves into a flutter. I shall not intend this hot season to bid you the base through the wide and dusty champaign of the councils, but shall take counsel of that which counselled them, reason: and although I know there is an obsolete reprehension now at your tongue’s end, yet I shall be bold to say, that reason is the gift of God in one man as well as in a thousand: by that which we have tasted already of their cisterns, we may find that reason was the only thing, and not any divine command that moved them to enjoin set forms of liturgy. First, lest any thing in general might be missaid in their public prayers through ignorance, or want of care, contrary to the faith: and next, lest the Arians, and Pelagians in particular, should infect the people by their hymns, and forms of prayer. By the leave of these ancient fathers, this was no solid prevention of spreading heresy, to debar the ministers of God the use of their noblest talent, prayer in the congregation; unless they had forbid the use of sermons, and lectures too, but such as were ready made to their hands, as our homilies: or else he that was heretically disposed, had as fair an opportunity of infecting in his discourse as in his prayer or hymn. As insufficiently, and to say truth, as imprudently, did they provide by their contrived liturgies, lest any thing should be erroneously prayed through ignorance, or want of care in the ministers. For if they were careless and ignorant in their prayers, certainly they would be more careless in their preaching, and yet more careless in watching over their flock; and what prescription could reach to bound them both in these? What if reason, now illustrated by the word of God, shall be able to produce a better prevention than these councils have left us against heresy, ignorance, or want of care in the ministry, that such wisdom and diligence be used in the education of those that would be ministers, and such strict and serious examination to be undergone, ere their admission, as St. Paul to Timothy sets down at large, and then they need not carry such an unworthy suspicion over the preachers of God’s word, as to tutor their unsoundness with the * Abcie of a liturgy or to diet their ignorance, and want of care, with the limited draught of a matin, and even-song drench. All this may suffice after all their laboursome scrutiny of the councils.

Remonst.

Our Saviour was pleased to make use in the celebration of his last and heavenly banquet both of the fashions and words which were usual in the Jewish feasts.

Answ.

What he pleased to make use of does not justify what you please to force.

Remonst.

The set forms of prayer at the Mincha.

Answ.

We will not buy your rabbinical fumes; we have one that calls us to buy of him pure gold tried in the fire.

Remonst.

In the Samaritan chronicle.

Answ.

As little do we esteem your Samaritan trumpery, of which people Christ himself testifies, Ye worship ye know not what.

Remonst.

They had their several songs.

Answ.

And so have we our several psalms for several occasions without gramercy to your liturgy.

Remonst.

Those forms which we have under the names of Saint James, &c., though they have some insertions which are plainly spurious, yet the substance of them cannot be taxed for other than holy and ancient.

Answ.

Setting aside the odd coinage of your phrase, which no mint-master of language would allow for sterling, that a thing should be taxed for no other than holy and ancient, let it be supposed the substance of them may savour of something holy or ancient, this is but the matter; the form, and the end of the thing, may yet render it either superstitious, fruitless, or impious, and so worthy to be rejected. The garments of a strumpet are often the same, materially, that clothe a chaste matron, and yet ignominious for her to wear: the substance of the tempter’s words to our Saviour were holy, but his drift nothing less.

Remonst.

In what sense we hold the Roman a true church, is so cleared that the iron is too hot for their fingers.

Answ.

Have a care it be not the iron to sear your own conscience.

Remonst.

You need not doubt but that the alteration of the liturgy will be considered by wiser heads than your own.

Answ.

We doubt it not, because we know your head looks to be one.

Remonst.

Our liturgy symbolizeth not with popish mass, neither as mass nor as popish.

Answ.

A pretty slipskin conveyance to sift mass into no mass, and popish into not popish; yet saving this passing fine sophistical boulting hutch, so long as she symbolizes in form, and pranks herself in the weeds of popish mass, it may be justly feared she provokes the jealousy of God, no otherwise than a wife affecting whorish attire kindles a disturbance in the eye of her discerning husband.

Remonst.

If I find gold in the channel, shall I throw it away because it was ill laid?

Answ.

You have forgot that gold hath been anathematized for the idolatrous use; and to eat the good creatures of God once offered to idols, is in St. Paul’s account to have fellowship with devils, and to partake of the devil’s table. And thus you throttle yourself with your own similes.

Remonst.

If the devils confessed the Son of God, shall I disclaim that truth?

Answ.

You sifted not so clean before, but you shuffle as foully now; as if there were the like necessity of confessing Christ, and using the liturgy: we do not disclaim that truth, because we never believed it for their testimony; but we may well reject a liturgy which had no being that we can know of, but from the corruptest times: if therefore the devil should be given never so much to prayer, I should not therefore cease from that duty, because I learned it not from him; but if he would commend to me a new Pater-noster, though never so seemingly holy, he should excuse me the form which was his; but the matter, which was none of his, he could not give me, nor I be said to take it from him. It is not the goodness of matter therefore which is not, nor can be owed to the liturgy, that will bear it out, if the form, which is the essence of it, be fantastic and superstitious, the end sinister, and the imposition violent.

Remonst.

Had it been composed into this frame on purpose to bring papists to our churches.

Answ.

To bring them to our churches? alas, what was that? unless they had been first fitted by repentance, and right instruction. You will say, the word was there preached, which is the means of conversion; you should have given so much honour then to the word preached, as to have left it to God’s working without the interloping of a liturgy baited for them to bite at.

Remonst.

The project had been charitable and gracious.

Answ.

It was pharisaical, and vain-glorious, a greedy desire to win proselytes by conforming to them unlawfully; like the desire of Tamar, who, to raise up seed to her husband, sate in the common road drest like a courtezan, and he that came to her committed incest with her. This was that which made the old Christians paganize, while by their scandalous and base conforming to heathenism they did no more, when they had done their utmost, but bring some pagans to Christianize; for true Christians they neither were themselves, nor could make other such in this fashion.

Remonst.

If there be found aught in liturgy that may endanger a scandal, it is under careful hands to remove it.

Answ.

Such careful hands as have shown themselves sooner bent to remove and expel the men from the scandals, than the scandals from the men, and to lose a soul rather than a syllable or a surplice.

Remonst.

It is idolized they say in England, they mean at Amsterdam.

Answ.

Be it idolized therefore where it will, it is only idolatrized in England.

Remonst.

Multitudes of people they say distaste it; more shame for those that have so mistaught them.

Answ.

More shame for those that regard not the troubling God’s church with things by themselves confessed to be indifferent, since true charity is afflicted, and burns at the offence of every little one. As for the Christian multitude which you affirm to be so mistaught, it is evident enough, though you would declaim never so long to the contrary, that God hath now taught them to detest your liturgy and prelacy; God who hath promised to teach all his children, and to deliver them out of your hands that hunt and worry their souls: hence is it that a man shall commonly find more savoury knowledge in one layman, than in a dozen of cathedral prelates; as we read in our Saviour’s time that the common people had a reverend esteem of him, and held him a great prophet, whilst the gowned rabbies, the incomparable and invincible doctors, were of opinion that he was a friend of Beelzebub.

Remonst.

If the multitude distaste wholesome doctrine, shall we, to humour them, abandon it?

Answ.

Yet again! as if they were like necessity of saving doctrine, and arbitrary, if not unlawful, or inconvenient liturgy: who would have thought a man could have thwacked together so many incongruous similitudes, had it not been to defend the motley incoherence of a patched missal?

Remonst.

Why did not other churches conform to us? I may boldly say ours was, and is, the more noble church.

Answ.

O Laodicean, how vainly and how carnally dost thou boast of nobleness and precedency! more lordly you have made our church indeed, but not more noble.

Remonst.

The second quære is so weak, that I wonder it could fall from the pens of wise men.

Answ.

You but are a bad fencer, for you never make a proffer against another man’s weakness; but you leave your own side always open: mark what follows.

Remonst.

Brethren, can ye think that our reformers had any other intentions than all the other founders of liturgies, the least part of whose care was the help of the minister’s weakness?

Answ.

Do you not perceive the noose you have brought yourself into, whilst you were so brief to taunt other men with weakness? Is it clean out of your mind what you cited from among the councils; that the principal scope of those liturgy-founders was to prevent either the malice or the weakness of the ministers; their malice, of infusing heresy in their forms of prayer; their weakness, lest something might be composed by them through ignorance or want of care contrary to the faith? Is it not now rather to be wondered, that such a weakness could fall from the pen of such a wise remonstrant man?

Remonst.

Their main drift was the help of the people’s devotion, that they knowing before the matter that should be sued for,—

Answ.

A solicitous care, as if the people could be ignorant of the matter to be prayed for; seeing the heads of public prayer are either ever constant, or very frequently the same.

Remonst.

And the words wherewith it should be clothed, might be the more prepared, and be so much the more intent and less distracted.

Answ.

As for the words, it is more to be feared lest the same continually should make them careless or sleepy, than that variety on the same known subject should distract; variety (as both music and rhetoric teacheth us) erects and rouses an auditory, like the masterful running over many chords and divisions; whereas if men should ever be thumbing the drone of one plain song, it would be a dull opiate to the most wakeful attention.

Remonst.

Tell me, is this liturgy good or evil?

Answ.

It is evil; repair the acheloian horn of your dilemma how you can, against the next push.

Remonst.

If it be evil, it is unlawful to be used.

Answ.

We grant you, and we find you have not your salve about you.

Remonst.

Were the imposition amiss, what is that to the people?

Answ.

Not a little, because they bear an equal part with the priest in many places, and have their cues and verses as well as he.

Remonst.

The ears and hearts of our people look for a settled liturgy.

Answ.

You deceive yourself in their ears and hearts; they look for no such matter.

Remonst.

The like answer serves for homilies, surely they were enjoined to all, &c.

Answ.

Let it serve for them that will be ignorant; we know that Hayward their own creature writes, that for defect of preachers, homilies were appointed to be read in churches, while Edward VI. reigned.

Remonst.

Away then with the book, whilst it may be supplied with a more profitable nonsense.

Answ.

Away with it rather, because it will be hardly supplied with a more unprofitable nonsense, than is in some passages of it to be seen.

SECTION III.

Remonst.

Thus their cavils concerning liturgy are vanished.

Answ.

You wanted but hey pass, to have made your transition like a mystical man of Sturbridge. But for all your sleight of hand, our just exceptions against liturgy are not vanished; they stare you still in the face.

Remonst.

Certainly had I done so, I had been no less worthy to be spitten upon for my saucy uncharitableness, than they are now for their uncharitable falsehood.

Answ.

We see you are in a choler, therefore, till you cool awhile we turn us to the ingenuous reader. See how this Remonstrant would invest himself conditionally with all the rheum of the town, that he might have sufficient to bespaul his brethren. They are accused by him of uncharitable falsehood, whereas their only crime hath been, that they have too credulously thought him, if not an over-logical, yet a well-meaning man; but now we find him either grossly deficient in his principles of logic, or else purposely bent to delude the parliament with equivocal sophistry, scattering among his periods ambiguous words, whose interpretation he will afterwards dispense according to his pleasure, laying before us universal propositions, and then thinks when he will to pinion them with a limitation: for say, Remonstrant,

Remonst.

Episcopal government is cried down abroad by either weak or factious persons.

Answ.

Choose you whether you will have this proposition proved to you to be ridiculous or sophistical; for one of the two it must be. Step again to bishop Downam your patron, and let him gently catechise you in the grounds of logic; he will show you that this axiom, “episcopal government is cried down abroad by either weak or factious persons,” is as much as to say, they that cry down episcopacy abroad, are either weak or factious persons. He will tell you that this axiom contains a distribution, and that all such axioms are general; and lastly, that the distribution in which any part is wanting, or abundant, is faulty, and fallacious. If therefore distributing by the adjuncts of faction and weakness, the persons that decry episcopacy, and you made your distribution imperfect for the nonce, you cannot but be guilty of fraud intended toward the honourable court to whom you wrote. If you had rather vindicate your honesty, and suffer in your want of art you cannot condemn them of uncharitable falsehood, that attributed to you more skill than you had, thinking you had been able to have made a distribution, as it ought to be, general and full; and so any man would take it, the rather as being accompanied with that large word, (abroad,) and so take again either your manifest leasing, or manifest ignorance.

Remonst.

Now come these brotherly slanderers.

Answ.

Go on, dissembling Joab, as still your use is, call brother and smite; call brother and smite, till it be said of you, as the like was of Herod, a man had better be your hog than your brother.

Remonst.

Which never came within the verge of my thoughts.

Answ.

Take a metaphor or two more as good, the precinct, or the diocese of your thoughts.

Remonst.

Brethren, if you have any remainders of modesty or truth, cry God mercy.

Answ.

Remonstrant, if you have no groundwork of logic, or plain dealing in you, learn both as fast as you can.

Remonst.

Of the same strain is their witty descant of my confoundedness.

Answ.

Speak no more of it, it was a fatal word that God put into your mouth when you began to speak for episcopacy, as boding confusion to it.

Remonst.

I am still, and shall ever be thus self-confounded, as confidently to say, that he is no peaceable and right-affected son of the church of England, that doth not wish well to liturgy and episcopacy.

Answ.

If this be not that saucy uncharitableness, with which, in the foregoing page, you voluntarily invested yourself, with thought to have shifted it off, let the parliament judge, who now themselves are deliberating whether liturgy and episcopacy be to be well wished to, or no.

Remonst.

This they say they cannot but rank amongst my notorious—speak out, masters; I would not have that word stick in your teeth or in your throat.

Answ.

Take your spectacles, sir, it sticks in the paper, and was a pectoral roule we prepared for you to swallow down to your heart.

Remonst.

Wanton wits must have leave to play with their own stern.

Answ.

A meditation of yours doubtless observed at Lambeth from one of the archiepiscopal kittens.

Remonst.

As for that form of episcopal government, surely could those look with my eyes, they would see cause to be ashamed of this their injurious misconceit.

Answ.

We must call the barber for this wise sentence; one Mr. Ley the other day wrote a treatise of the sabbath, and his preface puts the wisdom of Balaam’s ass upon one of our bishops, bold man for his labour; but we shall have more respect to our Remonstrant, and liken him to the ass’s master, though the story say he was not so quick-sighted as his beast. Is not this Balaam the son of Beor, the man whose eyes are open, that said to the parliament, Surely, could those look with my eyes? Boast not of your eyes; it is feared you have Balaam’s disease, a pearl in your eye, Mammon’s prestriction.

Remonst.

Alas, we could tell you of China, Japan, Peru, Brazil, New England, Virginia, and a thousand others, that never had any bishops to this day.

Answ.

O do not foil your cause thus, and trouble Ortelius; we can help you, and tell you where they have been ever since Constantine’s time at least, in a place called Mundus alter et idem, in the spacious and rich countries of Crapulia, Pamphagonia, Yuronia, and in the dukedom of Orgilia, and Variana, and their metropolis of Ucalegonium. It was an oversight that none of your prime antiquaries could think of these venerable monuments to deduce episcopacy by; knowing that Mercurius Britannicus had them forthcoming.

SECTION IV.

Remonst.

Hitherto they have flourished, now I hope they will strike.

Answ.

His former transition was in the fair about the jugglers, now he is at the pageants among the whifflers.

Remonst.

As if arguments were almanacks.

Answ.

You will find some such as will prognosticate your date, and tell you that, after your long summer solstice, the equator calls for you, to reduce you to the ancient and equal house of Libra.

Remonst.

Truly, brethren, you have not well taken the height of the pole.

Answ.

No marvel; there be many more that do not take well the height of your pole; but will take better the declination of your altitude.

Remonst.

He that said I am the way, said that the old way was the good way.

Answ.

He bids ask of the old paths, or for the old ways, where or which is the good way; which implies that all old ways are not good, but that the good way is to be searched with diligence among the old ways, which is a thing that we do in the oldest records we have, the gospel. And if others may chance to spend more time with you in canvassing later antiquity, I suppose it is not for that they ground themselves thereon; but that they endeavour by showing the corruptions, uncertainties, and disagreements of those volumes, and the easiness of erring, or overslipping in such a boundless and vast search, if they may not convince those that are so strongly persuaded thereof; yet to free ingenuous minds from an overawful esteem of those more ancient than trusty fathers, whom custom and fond opinion, weak principles, and the neglect of sounder and superior knowledge hath exalted so high as to have gained them a blind reverence; whose books in bigness and number so endless and immeasurable, I cannot think that either God or nature, either divine or human wisdom, did ever mean should be a rule or reliance to us in the decision of any weighty and positive doctrine: for certainly every rule and instrument of necessary knowledge that God hath given us, ought to be so in proportion, as may be wielded and managed by the life of man, without penning him up from the duties of human society; and such a rule and instrument of knowledge perfectly is the holy Bible. But he that shall bind himself to make antiquity his rule, if he read but part, besides the difficulty of choice, his rule is deficient, and utterly unsatisfying; for there may be other writers of another mind, which he hath not seen; and if he undertake all, the length of man’s life cannot extend to give him a full and requisite knowledge of what was done in antiquity. Why do we therefore stand worshipping and admiring this unactive and lifeless Colossus, that, like a carved giant terribly menacing to children and weaklings, lifts up his club, but strikes not, and is subject to the muting of every sparrow? If you let him rest upon his basis, he may perhaps delight the eyes of some with his huge and mountainous bulk, and the quaint workmanship of his massy limbs; but if ye go about to take him in pieces, ye mar him; and if you think, like pigmies, to turn and wind him whole as he is, besides your vain toil and sweat, he may chance to fall upon your own heads. Go, therefore, and use all your art, apply your sledges, your levers, and your iron crows, to heave and hale your mighty Polypheme of antiquity to the delusion of novices and unexperienced Christians. We shall adhere close to the Scriptures of God, which he hath left us as the just and adequate measure of truth, fitted and proportioned to the diligent study, memory, and use of every faithful man, whose every part consenting, and making up the harmonious symmetry of complete instruction, is able to set out to us a perfect man of God, or bishop thoroughly furnished to all the good works of his charge: and with this weapon, without stepping a foot further, we shall not doubt to batter and throw down your Nebuchadnezzar’s image, and crumble it like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, as well the gold of those apostolic successors that you boast of, as your Constantinian silver, together with the iron, the brass, and the clay of those muddy and strawy ages that follow.

Remonst.

Let the boldest forehead of them all deny that episcopacy hath continued thus long in our island, or that any till this age contradicted it.

Answ.

That bold forehead you have cleanly put upon yourself, it is you who deny that any till this age contradicted it; no forehead of ours dares do so much: you have vowed yourself fairly between the Scylla and Charybdis, either of impudence or nonsense, and now betake you to whither you please.

Remonst.

As for that supply of accessory strength, which I not beg.

Answ.

Your whole remonstrance does nothing else but beg it, and your fellow-prelates do as good as whine to the parliament for their fleshpots of Egypt, making sad orations at the funeral of your dear prelacy, like that doughty centurion Afranius in Lucian; who, to imitate the noble Pericles in his epitaphian speech, stepping up after the battle to bewail the slain Severianus, falls into a pitiful condolement, to think of those costly suppers and drinking banquets, which he must now taste of no more; and by then he had done, lacked but little to lament the dear-loved memory and calamitous loss of his capon and white broth.

Remonst.

But raise and evince from the light of nature, and the rules of just policy, for the continuance of those things which long use and many laws have firmly established as necessary and beneficial.

Answ.

Open your eyes to the light of grace, a better guide than nature. Look upon the mean condition of Christ and his apostles, without that accessory strength you take such pains to raise from the light of nature and policy: take divine council, “Labour not for the things that perish:” you would be the salt of the earth; if that savour be not found in you, do not think much that the time is now come to throw you out, and tread you under-foot. Hark how St. Paul, writing to Timothy, informs a true bishop; “Bishops (saith he) must not be greedy of filthy lucre; and having food and raiment, let us be therewith content: but they (saith he, meaning, more especially in that place, bishops) that will be rich, fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition: for the love of money is the root of all evil, which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith.” How can we therefore expect sound doctrine, and the solution of this our controversy from any covetous and honour-hunting bishop, that shall plead so stiffly for these things, while St. Paul thus exhorts every bishop; “But thou, O man of God, flee these things?” As for the just policy, that long use and custom, and those many laws which you say have conferred these benefits upon you; it hath been nothing else but the superstitious devotion of princes and great men that knew no better, or the base importunity of begging friars, haunting and harassing the deathbeds of men departing this life, in a blind and wretched condition of hope to merit heaven for the building of churches, cloisters, and convents. The most of your vaunted possessions, and those proud endowments that ye as sinfully waste, what are they but the black revenues of purgatory, the price of abused and murdered souls, the damned simony of Trentals, and indulgences to mortal sin? How can ye choose but inherit the curse that goes along with such a patrimony? Alas! if there be any releasement, any mitigation, or more tolerable being for the souls of our misguided ancestors; could we imagine there might be any recovery to some degree of ease left for as many of them as are lost, there cannot be a better way than to take the misbestowed wealth which they were cheated of, from these our prelates, who are the true successors of those that popped them into the other world with this conceit of meriting by their goods, which was their final undoing; and to bestow their beneficent gifts upon places and means of Christian education, and the faithful labourers in God’s harvest, that may incessantly warn the posterity of Dives, lest they come where their miserable forefather was sent by the cozenage and misleading of avaricious and worldly prelates.

Remonst.

It will stand long enough against the battery of their paper pellets.

Answ.

That must be tried without a square cap in the council; and if pellets will not do, your own canons shall be turned against you.

Remonst.

They cannot name any man in this nation, that ever contradicted episcopacy, till this present age.

Answ.

What an overworn and bedridden argument is this! the last refuge ever of old falsehood, and therefore a good sign, I trust, that your castle cannot hold out long. This was the plea of Judaism and idolatry against Christ and his apostles; of papacy against reformation; and perhaps to the frailty of flesh and blood in a man destitute of better enlightening may for some while be pardonable: for what has fleshly apprehension other to subsist by than succession, custom, and visibility; which only hold, if in his weakness and blindness he be loth to lose, who can blame? But in a protestant nation, that should have thrown off these tattered rudiments long ago, after the many strivings of God’s Spirit, and our fourscore years’ vexation of him in this our wilderness since reformation began, to urge these rotten principles, and twit us with the present age, which is to us an age of ages wherein God is manifestly come down among us, to do some remarkable good to our church or state; is, as if a man should tax the renovating and reingendering Spirit of God with innovation, and that new creature for an upstart novelty; yea, the new Jerusalem, which, without your admired link of succession, descends from heaven, could not escape some such like censure. If you require a further answer, it will not misbecome a Christian to be either more magnanimous or more devout than Scipio was; who, instead of other answer to the frivolous accusations of Petilius the tribune, “This day, Romans, (saith he,) I fought with Hannibal prosperously; let us all go and thank the gods, that gave us so great a victory:” in like manner will we now say, not caring otherwise to answer this unprotestantlike objection; In this age, Britons, God hath reformed his church after many hundred years of popish corruption; in this age he hath freed us from the intolerable yoke of prelates and papal discipline; in this age he hath renewed our protestation against all those yet remaining dregs of superstition. Let us all go, every true protested Briton, throughout the three kingdoms, and render thanks to God the Father of light, and Fountain of heavenly grace, and to his Son Christ our Lord, leaving this Remonstrant and his adherents to their own designs; and let us recount even here without delay, the patience and long-suffering that God hath used towards our blindness and hardness time after time. For he being equally near to his whole creation of mankind, and of free power to turn his beneficent and fatherly regard to what region or kingdom he pleases, hath yet ever had this island under the special indulgent eye of his providence; and pitying us the first of all other nations, after he had decreed to purify and renew his church that lay wallowing in idolatrous pollutions, sent first to us a healing messenger to touch softly our sores, and carry a gentle hand over our wounds: he knocked once and twice, and came again, opening our drowsy eyelids leisurely by that glimmering light, which Wickliff and his followers dispersed; and still taking off by degrees the inveterate scales from our nigh perished sight, purged also our deaf ears, and prepared them to attend his second warning trumpet in our grandsires’ days. How else could they have been able to have received the sudden assault of his reforming Spirit, warring against human principles, and carnal sense, the pride of flesh, that still cried up antiquity, custom, canons, councils, and laws; and cried down the truth for novelty, schism, profaneness, and sacrilege? whenas we that have lived so long in abundant light, besides the sunny reflection of all the neighbouring churches, have yet our hearts rivetted with these old opinions, and so obstructed and benumbed with the same fleshly reasonings, which in our forefathers soon melted and gave way, against the morning beam of reformation. If God had left undone this whole work, so contrary to flesh and blood, till these times; how should we have yielded to his heavenly call, had we been taken, as they were, in the starkness of our ignorance; that yet, after all these spiritual preparatives and purgations, have our earthly apprehensions so clammed and furred with the old leaven? O if we freeze at noon after their early thaw, let us fear lest the sun for ever hide himself, and turn his orient steps from our ingrateful horizon, justly condemned to be eternally benighted. Which dreadful judgment, O thou the ever-begotten Light and perfect image of the Father! intercede, may never come upon us, as we trust thou hast; for thou hast opened our difficult and sad times, and given us an unexpected breathing after our long oppressions: thou hast done justice upon those that tyrannized over us, while some men wavered and admired a vain shadow of wisdom in a tongue nothing slow to utter guile, though thou hast taught us to admire only that which is good, and to count that only praiseworthy, which is grounded upon thy divine precepts. Thou hast discovered the plots, and frustrated the hopes, of all the wicked in the land, and put to shame the persecutors of thy church: thou hast made our false prophets to be found a lie in the sight of all the people, and chased them with sudden confusion and amazement before the redoubled brightness of thy descending cloud, that now covers they tabernacle. Who is there that cannot trace thee now in thy beamy walk through the midst of thy sanctuary, amidst those golden candlesticks, which have long suffered a dimness amongst us through the violence of those that had seized them, and were more taken with the mention of their gold than of their starry light; teaching the doctrine of Balaam, to cast a stumbling-block before thy servants, commanding them to eat things sacrificed to idols, and forcing them to fornication? Come, therefore, O thou that hast the seven stars in thy right hand, appoint thy chosen priests according to their orders and courses of old, to minister before thee, and duly to press and pour out the consecrated oil into thy holy and everburning lamps. Thou hast sent out the spirit of prayer upon thy servants over all the land to this effect, and stirred up their vows as the sound of many waters about thy throne. Every one can say, that now certainly thou hast visited this land, and hast not forgotten the utmost corners of the earth, in a time when men had thought that thou wast gone up from us to the farthest end of the heavens, and hadst left to do marvellously among the sons of these last ages. O perfect and accomplish thy glorious acts! for men may leave their works unfinished, but thou art a God, thy nature is perfection: shouldst thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this wilderness, though we deserve; yet thy great name would suffer in the rejoicing of thine enemies, and the deluded hope of all thy servants. When thou hast settled peace in the church, and righteous judgment in the kingdom, then shall all thy saints address their voices of joy and triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that Red sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnished present as a thank-offering to thee, which could not be deferred in regard of thy so many late deliverances wrought for us one upon another, may then perhaps take up a harp, and sing thee an elaborate song to generations. In that day it shall no more be said as in scorn, this or that was never held so till this present age, when men have better learnt that the times and seasons pass along under thy feet to go and come at thy bidding: and as thou didst dignify our fathers’ days with many revelations above all the foregoing ages, since thou tookest the flesh; so thou canst vouchsafe to us (though unworthy) as large a portion of thy Spirit as thou pleasest: for who shall prejudice thy all-governing will? seeing the power of thy grace is not passed away with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men imagine, but thy kingdom is now at hand, and thou standing at the door. Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the kings of the earth! put on the visible robes of thy imperial majesty, take up that unlimited sceptre which thy almighty Father hath bequeathed thee; for now the voice of thy bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed.

SECTION V.

Remonst.

Neglect not the gift which was given thee by prophecy, and by laying on the hands of presbytery.

Answ.

The English translation expresses the article (the,) and renders it the presbytery, which you do injury to omit.

Remonst.

Which I wonder ye can so press, when Calvin himself takes it of the office, and not of the men.

Answ.

You think then you are fairly quit of this proof, because Calvin interprets it for you, as if we could be put off with Calvin’s name, unless we be convinced with Calvin’s reason! the word πϱισβυτίϱιον is a collective noun, signifying a certain number of men in one order, as the word privy-council with us; and so Beza interprets, that knew Calvin’s mind doubtless, with whom he lived. If any amongst us should say the privy-council ordained it, and thereby constrain us to understand one man’s authority, should we not laugh at him? And therefore when you have used all your cramping-irons to the text, and done your utmost to cram a presbytery into the skin of one person, it will be but a piece of frugal nonsense. But if your meaning be with a violent hyperbaton to transpose the text, as if the words lay thus in order, “neglect not the gift of presbytery:” this were a construction like a harquebuss shot over a file of words twelve deep, without authority to bid them stoop; or to make the word gift, like the river Mole in Surry, to run under the bottom of a long line, and so start up to govern the word presbytery, as in immediate syntaxis; a device ridiculous enough to make good that old wife’s tale of a certain queen of England that sunk at Charing-cross, and rose up at Queenhithe. No marvel though the prelates be a troublesome generation, and, which way soever they turn them, put all things into a foul discomposure, when to maintain their domineering, they seek thus to rout and disarray the wise and well-couched order of Saint Paul’s own words, using either a certain textual riot to chop off the hands of the word presbytery, or else a like kind of simony to clap the word gift between them. Besides, if the verse must be read according to this transposition, μή ἀμέλει τ[Editor: illegible character] ἐν σοὶ χαϱίσματος τ[Editor: illegible character] πϱεσβυτεϱί[Editor: illegible character], it would be improper to call ordination χάϱισμα, whenas it is rather only χείϱιασμα, an outward testimony of approbation; unless they will make it a sacrament as the papists do: but surely the prelates would have Saint Paul’s words ramp one over another, as they use to climb into their livings and bishoprics.

Remonst.

Neither need we give any other satisfaction to the point, than from St. Paul himself, 2 Timothy, i. 6, “Stir up the gift of God which is in thee by the imposition of my hands;” mine, and not others.

Answ.

Ye are too quick; this last place is to be understood by the former; as the law of method, which bears chief sway in the art of teaching, requires, that clearest and plainest expressions be set foremost, to the end they may enlighten any following obscurity; and wherefore we should not attribute a right method to the teachableness of Scripture, there can be no reason given: to which method, if we shall now go contrary, besides the breaking of a logical rule, which the Remonstrant hitherto we see hath made little account of, we shall also put a manifest violence and impropriety upon a known word against his common signification, in binding a collective to a singular person. But if we shall, as logic (or indeed reason) instructs us, expound the latter place by the former cited, and understand “by the imposition of my hands,” that is, of mine chiefly as an apostle, with the joint authority and assistance of the presbytery, there is nothing more ordinary or kindly in speech, than such a phrase as expresses only the chief in any action, and understands the rest. So that the imposition of Saint Paul’s hands, without more expression in this place, cannot exclude the joint act of the presbytery affirmed by the former text.

Remonst.

In the meanwhile see, brethren, how you have with Simon fished all night, and caught nothing.

Answ.

If we fishing with Simon the apostle can catch nothing, see what you can catch with Simon Magus; for all his hooks and fishing implements he bequeathed among you.

SECTION XIII.

Remonst.

We do again profess, that if our bishops challenge any other power than was delegated to and required of Timothy and Titus, we shall yield them usurpers.

Answ.

Ye cannot compare an ordinary bishop with Timothy, who was an extraordinary man, foretold and promised to the church by many prophecies, and his name joined as collateral with Saint Paul, in most of his apostolic epistles, even where he writes to the bishops of other churches, as those in Philippi. Nor can you prove out of the Scripture that Timothy was bishop of any particular place; for that wherein it is said in the third verse of the first epistle, “As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus,” will be such a gloss to prove the constitution of a bishop by, as would not only be not so good as a Bourdeaux gloss, but scarce be received to varnish a vizard of Modona. All that can be gathered out of holy writ concerning Timothy is, that he was either an apostle, or an apostle’s extraordinary vice-gerent, not confined to the charge of any place. The like may be said of Titus, (as those words import in the 5th verse,) that he was for that cause left in Crete, that he might supply or proceed to set in order that which St. Paul in apostolic manner had begun, for which he had his particular commission, as those words sound “as I had appointed thee.” So that what he did in Crete, cannot so much be thought the exercise of an ordinary function, as the direction of an inspired mouth. No less may be gathered from the 2 Cor. viii. 23.

Remonst.

You descend to the angels of the seven Asian churches; your shift is, that the word angel is here taken collectively, not individually.

Answ.

That the word is collective, appears plainly, Revel. ii.

First, Because the text itself expounds it so; for having spoken all the while as to the angel, the seventh verse concludes, that this was spoken to the churches. Now if the Spirit conclude collectively, and kept the same tenor all the way, for we see not where he particularizes; then certainly he must begin collectively, else the construction can be neither grammatical nor logical.

Secondly, If the word angel be individual, then are the faults attributed to him individual: but they are such as for which God threatens to remove the candlestick out of its place, which is as much as to take away from that church the light of his truth; and we cannot think he will do so for one bishop’s fault. Therefore those faults must be understood collective, and by consequence the subject of them collective.

Thirdly, An individual cannot branch itself into sub-individuals; but this word angel doth in the tenth verse. “Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer; behold the devil shall cast some of you into prison.” And the like from other places of this and the following chapter may be observed. Therefore it is no individual word, but a collective.

Fourthly, in the 24th verse this word angel is made capable of a pronoun plural, which could not be, unless it were a collective. As for the supposed manuscript of Tecla, and two or three other copies that have expunged the copulative, we cannot prefer them before the more received reading, and we hope you will not, against the translation of your mother the church of England, that passed the revise of your chiefest prelates: besides this, you will lay an unjust censure upon the much-praised bishop of Thyatira, and reckon him among those that had the doctrine of Jezebel when the text says, he only suffered her. Whereas, if you will but let in a charitable conjunction, as we know your so much called for charity will not deny, then you plainly acquit the bishop, if you comprehend him in the name of angel, otherwise you leave his case very doubtful.

Remonst.

“Thou sufferest thy wife Jezebel:” was she wife to the whole company, or to one bishop alone?

Answ.

Not to the whole company doubtless, for that had been worse than to have been the Levite’s wife in Gibeah: but here among all those that constantly read it otherwise, whom you trample upon, your good mother of England is down again in the throng, who with the rest reads it, ‘that woman Jezebel:’ but suppose it were wife, a man might as well interpret that word figuratively, as her name Jezebel no man doubts to be a borrowed name.

Remonst.

Yet what makes this for a diocesan bishop? Much every way.

Answ.

No more than a special endorsement could make to puff up the foreman of a jury. If we deny you more precedence, than as the senior of any society, or deny you this priority to be longer than annual; prove you the contrary from hence, if you can. That you think to do from the title of eminence, Angel: alas, your wings are too short. It is not ordination nor jurisdiction that is angelical, but the heavenly message of the gospel, which is the office of all ministers alike; in which sense John the Baptist is called an Angel, which in Greek signifies a messenger, as oft as it is meant by a man, and might be so rendered here without treason to the hierarchy; but that the whole book soars to a prophetic pitch in types and allegories. Seeing then the reason of this borrowed name is merely to signify the preaching of the gospel, and that this preaching equally appertains to the whole ministry; hence may be drawn a fifth argument, that if the reason of this borrowed name Angel be equally collective and communicative to the whole preaching ministry of the place, then must the name be collectively and communicatively taken; but the reason, that is to say, the office, of preaching and watching over the flock, is equally collective and communicative: therefore the borrowed name itself is to be understood as equally collective and communicative to the whole preaching ministry of the place. And if you will contend still for a superiority in one person, you must ground it better than from this metaphor, which you may now deplore as the axehead that fell into the water, and say, “Alas, master for it was borrowed;” unless you have as good a faculty to make iron swim, as you had to make light froth sink.

Remonst.

What is, if this be not, ordination and jurisdiction?

Answ.

Indeed in the constitution and founding of a church, that some men inspired from God should have an extraordinary calling to appoint, to order, and dispose, must needs be. So Moses, though himself no priest, sanctified and ordained Aaron and his sons; but when all needful things be set, and regulated by the writings of the apostles, whether it be not a mere folly to keep up a superior degree in the church only for ordination and jurisdiction, it will be no hurt to debate awhile. The apostles were the builders, and, as it were, the architects of the Christian church; wherein consisted their excellence above ordinary ministers? A prelate would say in commanding, in controlling, in appointing, in calling to them, and sending from about them, to all countries, their bishops and archbishops as their deputies, with a kind of legantine power. No, no, vain prelates; this was but as the scaffolding of a new edifice, which for the time must board and overlook the highest battlements; but if the structure once finished, any passenger should fall in love with them, and pray that they might still stand, as being a singular grace and strengthening to the house, who would otherwise think, but that the man was presently to be laid hold on, and sent to his friends and kindred? The eminence of the apostles consisted in their powerful preaching, their unwearied labouring in the word, their unquenchable charity, which, above all earthly respects, like a working flame, had spun up to such a height of pure desire, as might be thought next to that love which dwells in God to save souls; which, while they did, they were contented to be the offscouring of the world, and to expose themselves willingly to all afflictions, perfecting thereby their hope through patience to a joy unspeakable. As for ordination, what is it, but the laying on of hands, an outward sign or symbol of admission? It creates nothing, it confers nothing; it is the inward calling of God that makes a minister, and his own painful study and diligence that manures and improves his ministerial gifts. In the primitive times, many, before ever they had received ordination from the apostles, had done the church noble service, as Apollos and others. It is but an orderly form of receiving a man already fitted, and committing to him a particular charge; the employment of preaching is as holy, and far more excellent; the care also and judgment to be used in the winning of souls, which is thought to be sufficient in every worthy minister, is an ability above that which is required in ordination: for many may be able to judge who is fit to be made a minister, that would not be found fit to be made ministers themselves; as it will not be denied that he may be the competent judge of a neat picture, or elegant poem, that cannot limn the like. Why therefore we should constitute a superior order in the church to perform an office which is not only every minister’s function, but inferior also to that which he has a confessed right to; and why this superiority should remain thus usurped, some wise Epimenides tell us. Now for jurisdiction, this dear saint of the prelates, it will be best to consider, first, what it is: that sovereign Lord, who in the discharge of his holy anointment from God the Father, which made him supreme bishop of our souls, was so humble as to say, “Who made me a judge, or a divider over ye?” hath taught us that a churchman’s jurisdiction is no more but to watch over his flock in season, and out of season, to deal by sweet and efficacious instructions, gentle admonitions, and sometimes rounder reproofs: against negligence or obstinacy, will be required a rousing volley of pastorly threatenings; against a persisting stubbornness, or the fear of a reprobate sense, a timely separation from the flock by that interdictive sentence, lest his conversation unprohibited, or unbranded, might breathe a pestilential murrain into the other sheep. In sum, his jurisdiction is to see the thriving and prospering of that which he hath planted: what other work the prelates have found for chancellors and suffragans, delegates and officials, with all the hell-pestering rabble of summers and apparitors, is but an invasion upon the temporal magistrate, and affected by them as men that are not ashamed of the ensign and banner of antichrist. But true evangelical jurisdiction or discipline is no more, as was said, than for a minister to see to the thriving and prospering of that which he hath planted. And which is the worthiest work of these two, to plant as every minister’s office is equally with the bishops, or to tend that which is planted, which the blind and undiscerning prelates call jurisdiction, and would appropriate to themselves as a business of higher dignity? Have patience therefore a little, and hear a law case. A certain man of large possessions had a fair garden, and kept therein an honest and laborious servant, whose skill and profession was to set or sow all wholesome herbs and delightful flowers, according to every season, and whatever else was to be done in a well-husbanded nursery of plants and fruits. Now, when the time was come that he should cut his hedges, prune his trees, look to his tender slips, and pluck up the weeds that hindered their growth, he gets him up by break of day, and makes account to do what was needful in his garden; and who would think that any other should know better than he how the day’s work was to be spent? Yet for all this there comes another strange gardener that never knew the soil, never handled a dibble or spade to set the least potherb that grew there, much less had endured an hour’s sweat or chillness, and yet challenges as his right the binding or unbinding of every flower, the clipping of every bush, the weeding and worming of every bed, both in that and all other gardens thereabout. The honest gardener, that ever since the day-peep, till now the sun was grown somewhat rank, had wrought painfully about his banks and seedplots, at his commanding voice turns suddenly about with some wonder; and although he could have well beteemed to have thanked him of the ease he proffered, yet loving his own handywork, modestly refused him, telling him withal, that, for his part, if he had thought much of his own pains, he could for once have committed the work to one of his fellow-labourers, for as much as it is well-known to be a matter of less skill and less labour to keep a garden handsome, than it is to plant it, or contrive it, and that he had already performed himself. No, said the stranger, this is neither for you nor your fellows to meddle with, but for me only that am for this purpose in dignity far above you; and the provision which the lord of the soil allows me in this office is, and that with good reason, tenfold your wages. The gardener smiled and shook his head; but what was determined, I cannot tell you till the end of this parliament.

Remonst.

If in time you shall see wooden chalices, and wooden priests, thank yourselves.

Answ.

It had been happy for this land, if your priests had been but only wooden; all England knows they have been to this island not wood, but wormwood, that have infected the third part of our waters, like that apostate star in the Revelation, that many souls have died of their bitterness; and if you mean by wooden, illiterate or contemptible, there was no want of that sort among you; and their number increasing daily, as their laziness, their tavern-hunting, their neglect of all sound literature, and their liking of doltish and monastical schoolmen daily increased. What, should I tell you how the universities, that men look should be fountains of learning and knowledge, have been poisoned and choked under your governance? And if to be wooden be to be base, where could there be found among all the reformed churches, nay in the church of Rome itself, a baser brood of flattering and time-serving priests? according as God pronounces by Isaiah, the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail. As for your young scholars, that petition for bishoprics and deaneries, to encourage them in their studies, and that many gentlemen else will not put their sons to learning; away with such young mercenary striplings, and their simoniacal fathers; God has no need of such, they have no part or lot in his vineyard: they may as well sue for nunneries, that they may have some convenient stowage for their withered daughters, because they cannot give them portions answerable to the pride and vanity they have bred them in. This is the root of all our mischief, that which they allege for the encouragement of their studies, should be cut away forewith as the very bait of pride and ambition, the very garbage that draws together all the fowls of prey and ravin in the land to come and gorge upon the church. How can it be but ever unhappy to the church of England, while she shall think to entice men to the pure service of God by the same means that were used to tempt our Saviour to the service of the devil, by laying before him honour and preferment? Fit professors indeed are they like to be, to teach others that godliness with content is great gain, whenas their godliness of teaching had not been but for worldly gain. The heathen philosophers thought that virtue was for its own sake inestimable, and the greatest gain of a teacher to make a soul virtuous; so Xenophon writes to Socrates, who never bargained with any for teaching them; he feared not lest those who had received so high a benefit from him, would not of their own free will return him all possible thanks. Was moral virtue so lovely, and so alluring, and heathen men so enamoured of her, as to teach and study her with greatest neglect and contempt of worldly profit and advancement? And is Christian piety so homely and so unpleasant, and Christian men so cloyed with her, as that none will study and teach her, but for lucre and preferment? O stale-grown piety! O gospel rated as cheap as thy Master, at thirty pence, and not worth the study, unless thou canst buy those that will sell thee! O race of Capernaïtans, senseless of divine doctrine, and capable only of loaves and bellycheer! But they will grant, perhaps, piety may thrive, but learning will decay: I would fain ask these men at whose hands they seek inferior things, as wealth, honour, their dainty fare, their lofty houses? No doubt but they will soon answer, that all these things they seek at God’s hands. Do they think then, that all these meaner and superfluous things come from God, and the divine gift of learning from the den of Plutus, or the cave of Mammon? Certainly never any clear spirit nursed up from brighter influences, with a soul enlarged to the dimensions of spacious art and high knowledge, ever entered there but with scorn, and thought it ever foul disdain to make pelf or ambition the reward of his studies; it being the greatest honour, the greatest fruit and proficiency of learned studies to despise these things. Not liberal science, but illiberal must that needs be, that mounts in contemplation merely for money. And what would it avail us to have a hireling clergy, though never so learned? For such can have neither true wisdom nor grace; and then in vain do men trust in learning, where these be wanting. If in less noble and almost mechanic arts, according to the definitions of those authors, he is not esteemed to deserve the name of a complete architect, an excellent painter, or the like, that bears not a generous mind above the peasantly regard of wages and hire; much more must we think him a most imperfect and incomplete divine, who is so far from being a contemner of filthy lucre, that his whole divinity is moulded and bred up in the beggarly and brutish hopes of a fat prebendary, deanery, or bishopric; which poor and low-pitched desires, if they do but mix with those other heavenly intentions that draw a man to this study, it is justly expected that they should bring forth a baseborn issue of divinity, like that of those imperfect and putrid creatures that receive a crawling life from two most unlike procreants, the sun and mud. And in matters of religion, there is not any thing more intolerable than a learned fool, or a learned hypocrite; the one is ever cooped up at his empty speculations, a sot, an idiot for any use that mankind can make of him, or else sowing the world with nice and idle questions, and with much toil and difficulty wading to his auditors up to the eyebrows in deep shallows that wet not the instep: a plain unlearned man that lives well by that light which he has, is better and wiser, and edifies others more towards a godly and happy life than he. The other is still using his sophisticated arts, and bending all his studies how to make his insatiate avarice and ambition seem pious and orthodoxal, by painting his lewd and deceitful principles with a smooth and glossy varnish in a doctrinal way, to bring about his wickedest purposes. Instead of the great harm therefore that these men fear upon the dissolving of prelates, what an ease and happiness will it be to us, when tempting rewards are taken away, that the cunningest and most dangerous mercenaries will cease of themselves to frequent the fold, whom otherwise scarce all the prayers of the faithful could have kept back from devouring the flock! But a true pastor of Christ’s sending hath this especial mark, that for greatest labours and greatest merits in the church, he requires either nothing, if he could so subsist, or a very common and reasonable supply of human necessaries: we cannot therefore do better than to leave this care of ours to God; he can easily send labourers into his harvest, that shall not cry, Give, give, but be contented with a moderate and beseeming allowance; nor will he suffer true learning to be wanting, where true grace and our obedience to him abounds; for if he give us to know him aright, and to practise this our knowledge in right established discipline, how much more will he replenish us with all abilities in tongues and arts, that may conduce to his glory and our good! He can stir up rich fathers to bestow exquisite education upon their children, and so dedicate them to the service of the gospel; he can make the sons of nobles his ministers, and princes to be his Nazarites; for certainly there is no employment more honourable, more worthy to take up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of heavenly truth from God to man, and, by the faithful work of holy doctrine, to procreate a number of faithful men, making a kind of creation like to God’s, by infusing his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as God did into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge, and good works. Can a man, thus employed, find himself discontented, or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries? Or because he may not as a judge, sit out the wrangling noise of litigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discouraged though men call him not lord, whenas the due performance of his office would gain him, even from lords and princes, the voluntary title of father? Would he tug for a barony to sit and vote in parliament, knowing that no man can take from him the gift of wisdom and sound doctrine, which leaves him free, though not to be a member, yet a teacher and persuader of the parliament? And in all wise apprehensions, the persuasive power in man to win others to goodness by instruction is greater, and more divine, than the compulsive power to restrain men from being evil by terror of the law; and therefore Christ left Moses to be the lawgiver, but himself came down amongst us to be a teacher, with which office his heavenly wisdom was so well pleased, as that he was angry with those that would have put a piece of temporal judicature into his hands, disclaiming that he had any commission from above for such matters.

Such a high calling therefore as this, sends not for those drossy spirits that need the lure and whistle of earthly preferment, like those animals that fetch and carry for a morsel; no. She can find such as therefore study her precepts, because she teaches to despise preferment. And let not those wretched fathers think they shall impoverish the church of willing and able supply, though they keep back their sordid sperm, begotten in the lustiness of their avarice, and turn them to their malting kilns; rather let them take heed what lessons they instil into that lump of flesh which they are the cause of; lest, thinking to offer him as a present to God, they dish him out for the devil. Let the novice learn first to renounce the world, and so give himself to God, and not therefore give himself to God, that he may close the better with the world, like that false shepherd Palinode in the eclogue of May, under whom the poet lively personates our prelates, whose whole life is a recantation of their pastoral vow, and whose profession to forsake the world, as they use the matter, bogs them deeper into the world. Those our admired Spenser inveighs against, not without some presage of these reforming times:

• The time was once and may again return,
• (For oft may happen that hath been beforn,)
• When shepherds had none inheritance,
• Ne of land nor fee in sufferance,
• But what might arise of the bare sheep,
• (Were it more or less,) which they did keep.
• Well ywis was it with shepherds tho,
• Nought having, nought feared they to forego:
• For Pan himself was their inheritance,
• And little them served for their maintenance:
• The shepherds God so well them guided,
• That of nought they were unprovided.
• Butter enough, honey, milk and whey,
• And their flock fleeces them to array.
• But tract of time, and long prosperity
• (That nurse of vice, this of insolency)
• Lulled the shepherds in such security,
• That not content with loyal obeysance,
• Some gan to gape for greedy governance,
• And match themselves with mighty potentates,
• Lovers of lordships and troublers of states.
• Tho gan shepherds swains to looke aloft,
• And leave to live hard, and learne to lig soft.
• Tho under colour of shepherds some while
• There crept in wolves full of fraud and guile,
• That often devoured their own sheep,
• And often the shepherd that did them keep.
• This was the first source of shepherds sorrow,
• That now nill be quit with bale nor borrow.

By all this we may conjecture, how little we need fear that the ungilding of our prelates will prove the woodening of our priests. In the mean while let no man carry in his head either such narrow or such evil eyes, as not to look upon the churches of Belgia and Helvetia, and that envied city Geneva: where in the Christian world doth learning more flourish than in these places? Not among your beloved Jesuits, nor their favourers, though you take all the prelates into the number, and instance in what kind of learning you please. And how in England all noble sciences attending upon the train of Christian doctrine may flourish more than ever; and how the able professors of every art may with ample stipends be honestly provided; and finally, how there may be better care had that their hearers may benefit by them, and all this without the prelates; the courses are so many and so easy, that I shall pass them over.

Remonst.

It is God that makes the bishop, the king that gives the bishopric; what can you say to this?

Answ.

What you shall not long stay for: we say it is God that makes a bishop, and the devil that makes him take a prelatical bishopric; as for the king’s gift, regal bounty may be excusable in giving, where the bishop’s covetousness is damnable in taking.

Remonst.

Many eminent divines of the churches abroad have earnestly wished themselves in our condition.

Answ.

I cannot blame them, they were not only eminent but supereminent divines, and for stomach much like to Pompey the Great, that could endure no equal.

Remonst.

The Babylonian note sounds well in your ears, “Down with it, down with it, even to the ground.”

Answ.

You mistake the matter, it was the Edomitish note; but change it, and if you be an angel, cry with the angel, “It is fallen, it is fallen.”

Remonst.

But the God of heaven will, we hope, vindicate his own ordinance so long perpetuated to his church.

Answ.

Go rather to your god of this world, and see if he can vindicate your lordships, your temporal and spiritual tyrannies, and all your pelf; for the God of heaven is already come down to vindicate his ordinance from your so long perpetuated usurpation.

Remonst.

If yet you can blush.

Answ.

This is a more Edomitish conceit than the former, and must be silenced with a counter quip of the same country. So often and so unsavourily has it been repeated, that the reader may well cry, Down with it, down with it, for shame. A man would think you had eaten over-liberally of Esau’s red porridge, and from thence dream continually of blushing; or perhaps, to heighten your fancy in writing, are wont to sit in your doctor’s scarlet, which through your eyes infecting your pregnant imaginative with a red suffusion, begets a continual thought of blushing; that you thus persecute ingenuous men over all your book, with this one overtired rubrical conceit still of blushing: but if you have no mercy upon them, yet spare yourself, lest you bejade the good galloway, your own opiniatre wit, and make the very conceit itself blush with spurgalling.

Remonst.

The scandals of our inferior ministers I desired to have had less public.

Answ.

And what your superior archbishop or bishops! O forbid to have it told in Gath! say you. O dauber! and therefore remove not impieties from Israel. Constantine might have done more justly to have punished those clergical faults which he could not conceal, than to leave them unpunished, that they might remain concealed: better had it been for him, that the heathen had heard the fame of his justice, than of his wilful connivance and partiality; and so the name of God and his truth had been less blasphemed among his enemies, and the clergy amended, which daily, by this impunity, grew worse and worse. But, O to publish in the streets of Ascalon! sure some colony of puritans have taken Ascalon from the Turk lately, that the Remonstrant is so afraid of Ascalon. The papists we know condole you, and neither Constantinople nor your neighbours of Morocco trouble you. What other Ascalon can you allude to?

Remonst.

What a death it is to think of the sport and advantage these watchful enemies, these opposite spectators, will be sure to make of our sin and shame!

Answ.

This is but to fling and struggle under the inevitable net of God, that now begins to environ you round.

Remonst.

No one clergy in the whole Christian world yields so many eminent scholars, learned preachers, grave, holy, and accomplished divines, as this church of England doth at this day.

Answ.

Ha, ha, ha!

Remonst.

And long, and ever may it thus flourish.

Answ.

O pestilent imprecation! flourish as it does at this day in the prelates?

Remonst.

But O forbid to have it told in Gath!

Answ.

Forbid him rather, sacred parliament, to violate the sense of Scripture, and turn that which is spoken of the afflictions of the church under her pagan enemies, to a pargetted concealment of those prelatical crying sins: for from these is profaneness gone forth into all the land; they have hid their eyes from the sabbaths of the Lord; they have fed themselves, and not their flocks; with force and cruelty have they ruled over God’s people: they have fed his sheep (contrary to that which St. Peter writes) not of a ready mind, but for filthy lucre; not as examples to the flock, but as being lords over God’s heritage: and yet this dauber would daub still with his untempered mortar. But hearken what God says by the prophet Ezekiel, “Say unto them that daub this wall with untempered mortar, that it shall fall; there shall be an overflowing shower, and ye, O great hailstones, shall fall, and a stormy wind shall rend it, and I will say unto you, the wall is no more, neither they that daubed it.”

Remonst.

Whether of us shall give a better account of our charity to the God of peace, I appeal.

Answ.

Your charity is much to your fellow-offenders, but nothing to the numberless souls that have been lost by their false feeding: use not therefore so sillily the name of charity, as most commonly you do, and the peaceful attribute of God to a preposterous end.

Remonst.

In the next section, like illbred sons, you spit in the face of your mother the church of England.

Answ.

What should we do or say to this Remonstrant, that, by his idle and shallow reasonings, seems to have been conversant in no divinity, but that which is colourable to uphold bishopries? we acknowledge, and believe, the catholic reformed church; and if any man be disposed to use a trope or figure, as St. Paul did in calling her the common mother of us all, let him do as his own rhetoric shall persuade him. If, therefore, we must needs have a mother, and if the catholic church only be, and must be she, let all genealogy tell us, if it can, what we must call the church of England, unless we shall make every English protestant a kind of poetical Bacchus, to have two mothers: but mark, readers, the crafty scope of these prelates; they endeavour to impress deeply into weak and superstitious fancies, the awful notion of a mother, that hereby they might cheat them into a blind and implicit obedience to whatsoever they shall decree or think fit. And if we come to ask a reason of aught from our dear mother, she is invisible, under the lock and key of the prelates her spiritual adulterers; they only are the internuncios, or the go-betweens, of this trim-devised mummery: whatsoever they say, she says must be a deadly sin of disobedience not to believe. So that we, who by God’s special grace have shaken off the servitude of a great male tyrant, our pretended father the pope, should now, if we be not betimes aware of these wily teachers, sink under the slavery of a female notion, the cloudy conception of a demy-island mother; and, while we think to be obedient sons, should make ourselves rather the bastards, or the centaurs of their spiritual fornications.

Remonst.

Take heed of the ravens of the valley.

Answ.

The ravens we are to take heed of are yourselves, that would peck out the eyes of all knowing Christians.

Remonst.

Sit you, merry brethren.

Answ.

So we shall when the furies of prelatical consciences will not give them leave to do so.

Queries.

Whether they would not jeopard their ears rather, &c.

Answ.

A punishment that awaits the merits of your bold accomplices, for the lopping and stigmatizing of so many freeborn Christians.

Remonst.

Whether the professed slovenliness in God’s service, &c.

Answ.

We have heard of Aaron and his linen amice, but those days are past; and for your priest under the gospel, that thinks himself the purer or the cleanlier in his office for his new-washed surplice, we esteem him for sanctity little better than Apollonius Thyanæus in his white frock, or the priest of Isis in his lawn sleeves; and they may all for holiness lie together in the suds.

Remonst.

Whether it were not most lawful and just to punish your presumption and disobedience.

Answ.

The punishing of that which you call our presumption and disobedience, lies not now within the execution of your fangs; the merciful God above, and our just parliament, will deliver us from your Ephesian beasts, your cruel Nimrods, with whom we shall be ever fearless to encounter.

Remonst.

God give you wisdom to see the truth, and grace to follow it.

Answ.

I wish the like to all those that resist not the Holy Ghost; for of such God commands Jeremiah, saying, “Pray not thou for them, neither lift up cry or prayer for them, neither make intercession to me, for I will not hear thee;” and of such St. John saith, “He that bids them God speed, is partaker of their evil deeds.”

TO THE POSTSCRIPT.

Remonst.

A goodly pasquin borrowed for a great part out of Sion’s plea, or the breviate consisting of a rhapsody of histories.

Answ.

How wittily you tell us what your wonted course is upon the like occasion: the collection was taken, be it known to you, from as authentic authors in this kind, as any in a bishop’s library; and the collector of it says, moreover, that if the like occasion come again, he shall less need the help of breviates, or historical rhapsodies, than your reverence to eke out your sermonings shall need repair to postils or poliantheas.

Remonst.

They were bishops, you say; true, but they were popish bishops.

Answ.

Since you would bind us to your jurisdiction by their canon law; since you would enforce upon us the old riffraff of Sarum, and other monastical relics; since you live upon their unjust purchases, allege their authorities, boast of their succession, walk in their steps, their pride, their titles, their covetousness, their persecuting of God’s people; since you disclaim their actions, and build their sepulchres, it is most just that all their faults should be imputed to you, and their iniquities visited upon you.

Remonst.

Could you see no colleges, no hospitals built?

Answ.

At that primero of piety, the pope and cardinals are the better gamesters, and will cog a die into heaven before you.

Remonst.

No churches re-edified?

Answ.

Yes, more churches that souls.

Remonst.

No learned volumes writ?

Answ.

So did the miscreant bishop of Spalato write learned volumes against the pope, and run to Rome when he had done: ye write them in your closets, and unwrite them in your courts; hot volumists and cold bishops; a swashbuckler against the pope, and a dormouse against the devil, while the whole diocese be sown with tares, and none to resist the enemy but such as let him in at the postern; a rare superintendent at Rome, and a cipher at home. Hypocrites! the gospel faithfully preached to the poor, the desolate parishes visited and duly fed, loiterers thrown out, wolves driven from the fold, had been a better confutation of the pope and mass, than whole hecatontomes of controversies; and all this careering with spear in rest, and thundering upon the steel cap of Baronius or Bellarmine.

Remonst.

No seduced persons reclaimed?

Answ.

More reclaimed persons seduced.

Remonst.

No hospitality kept?

Answ.

Bacchanalias good store in every bishop’s family, and good gleeking.

Remonst.

No great offenders punished?

Answ.

The trophies of your high commission are renowned.

Remonst.

No good offices done for the public?

Answ.

Yes, the good office of reducing monarchy to tyranny, of breaking pacifications, and calumniating the people to the king.

Remonst.

No care of the peace of the church?

Answ.

No, nor of the land; witness the two armies in the North, that now lie plundered and overrun by a liturgy.

Remonst.

No diligence in preaching?

Answ.

Scarce any preaching at all.

Remonst.

No holiness in living?

Answ.

No.

Remonst.

Truly, brethren, I can say no more, but that the fault is in your eyes.

Answ.

If you can say no more than this, you were a proper Remonstrant to stand up for the whole tribe!

Remonst.

Wipe them and look better.

Answ.

Wipe your fat corpulencies out of our light.

Remonst.

Yea, I beseech God to open them rather that they may see good.

Answ.

If you mean good prelates, let be your prayer. Ask not impossibilities.

Remonst.

As for that proverb, “the bishop’s foot hath been in it,” it were more fit for a Scurra in Trivio, or some ribald upon an alebench.

Answ.

The fitter for them then of whom it was meant.

Remonst.

I doubt not but they will say, the bishop’s foot hath been in your book, for I am sure it is quite spoiled by this just confutation; for your proverb, Sapit ollam.

Answ.

Spoiled, quoth ye? Indeed it is so spoiled, as a good song is spoiled by a lewd singer; or as the saying is, “God sends meat, but the cooks work their wills:” in that sense we grant your bishop’s foot may have spoiled it, and made it “Sapere ollam,” if not “Sapere aulam;” which is the same in old Latin, and perhaps in plain English. For certain your confutation hath achieved nothing against it, and left nothing upon it but a foul taste of your skillet foot, and a more perfect and distinguishable odour of your socks, than of your nightcap. And how the bishop should confute a book with his foot, unless his brains were dropped into his great toe, I cannot meet with any man that can resolve me; only they tell me that certainly such a confutation must needs be gouty. So much for the bishop’s foot.

Remonst.

You tell us of Bonner’s broth; it is the fashion in some countries to send in their keal in the last service; and this it seems is the manner among our Smectymnuans.

Answ.

Your latter service at the high altar you mean: but soft, sir; the feast was but begun; the broth was your own; you have been inviting the land to it this fourscore years; and so long we have been your slaves to serve it up for you, much against our wills: we know you have the beef to it ready in your kitchens, we are sure it was almost sod before this parliament begun; what direction you have given since to your cooks, to set it by in the pantry till some fitter time, we know not, and therefore your dear jest is lost: this broth was but your first service: Alas, sir, why do you delude your guests? Why do not those goodly flanks and briskets march up in your stately charges? Doubtless if need be, the pope, that owes you for mollifying the matter so well with him, and making him a true church, will furnish you with all the fat oxen of Italy.

Remonst.

Learned and worthy Doctor Moulin shall tell them.

Answ.

Moulin says in his book of the calling of pastors, that because bishops were the reformers of the English church, therefore they were left remaining: this argument is but of small force to keep you in your cathedrals. For first, it may be denied that bishops were our first reformers; for Wickliff was before them; and his egregious labours are not to be neglected: besides, our bishops were in this work but the disciples of priests, and began the reformation before they were bishops. But what though Luther and other monks were the reformers of other places? Does it follow therefore that monks ought to continue? No; though Luther had taught so. And lastly, Moulin’s argument directly makes against you; for if there be nothing in it but this, bishops were left remaining because they were reformers of the church; by as good a consequence therefore they are now to be removed, because they have been the most certain deformers and ruiners of the church. Thus you see how little it avails you to take sanctuary among those churches which in the general scope of your actions formerly you have disregarded and despised; however, your fair words would now smooth it over otherwise.

Remonst.

Our bishops, some whereof being crowned with martyrdom, subscribed the gospel with their blood.

Answ.

You boast much of martyrs to uphold your episcopacy; but if you would call to mind what Eusebius in his fifth book recites from Apollinarius of Hieropolis, you should then hear it esteemed no other than an old heretical argument, to prove a position true, because some that held it were martyrs; this was that which gave boldness to the Marcionists and Cataphryges to avouch their impious heresies for pious doctrine, because they could reckon many martyrs of their sect; and when they were confuted in other points, this was ever their last and stoutest plea.

Remonst.

In the mean time I beseech the God of heaven to humble you.

Answ.

We shall beseech the same God to give you a more profitable and pertinent humiliation than yet you know, and a less mistaken charitableness, with that peace which you have hitherto so perversely misaffected.

[* ]i. e. A, b, c.