Episcopacy ASSERTED: As it now stands established in our church and commonwealth. With The Titles of Honours. The dignity of Authority. The endowments of Revenues. By these following Argnmnts; Taken 1 From the word of God. 2 From the light of Nature. 3 From the rights of his Majesty. 4 From the laws of the kingdom. 5 From the laws of civility and common humanity. By THOMAS Cook, bachelor in divinity, WHO Is so far from any engagement by any relation to any of their Lordships, as he is enforced at this present to his great charge and trouble, to become an humble suitor to the High and honourable Court of Parliament, for redress of some grievances occasioned by the miscarriage of some of the Bishops, in a business that nearly concerned him. LONDON, Printed by THO. Faucet, for NATH: Butter. 1641. Episcopacy ASSERTED: As it now stands established in our commonwealth. AS for the Originals of Bishops and their antiquity, that is sufficiently cleared and proved by many and sundry learned Divines both Bishops and Doctors, and others, and may go for currant till encountered with better reason, and confuted with stronger Arguments. But as they now stand incorporated into the superior part of the body of our commonwealth, they are represented to every Ordinary apprehension, so impregnably fortified on all sides, as that they may securely endure, like Iron Pillars or Rocks of Marble, all the battery of any eloquence or Sophistry whatsoever. For although their opposers advance their notions towards the borders of Divinity, in imitation of the old heretics, who in a blush to be sole and bare in themselves and their single inventions, bragged out their absurdities for a while with Scripture flourishes, and as Vincentius Lyrenensis said of them that they did divinae legis sententiis quasi quibusdam vellerebus sese obvolvere, so they tired in themselves with their own self-conceited presumptions and preapprehending the dangers they are in to be censured as Sacrilegious, or enforced to flee to the Scriptures, and from thence to extort succour with a wrest of violence for the better boulstering out their homebred exceptions against Bishops, that savour something of ignorance and malignity, of whom i may say as Athanasius said of the Arrians in his Oration contra Arrianos; That Christum simulant & contra Christum pugnant, so they pretend the authority of Christ speaking in the Scriptures, when in very deed they strive though insensibly they perceive it not, and contend and argue against Christ and almost against all his Ordinances, & so fulfil not only the predictions of preferment wherewith blindness and ignorance should outstrip the clear sunshine of manifest light and truth, but also accomplish the Prophecies of the wild degeneration of Charity into new and strange heats and fits of zeal without knowledge, & so render themselves obnoxious to the wrathful displeasure of the Almighty; for as St. Gregory saith, Consilium divinum dum devitatur impletur, humana autem sapientia du reluctatur comprehenditur, so whiles man goes about to defeat and avoid the authority of his commanding Word by any act of disobedience, he falls within the compass of another branch of his word of prophecy, which is thereby fulfilled and accomplished, and so whiles human wisdom like the builders of Babel soars towards heaven in a pride, to vie and contest with the wisdom of the Almighty that is infinite and incomprehensible, it is taken in the snares of its own impotencies, and have its vain imaginations like Achitophel's turned round into folly and simplicity. 1. As first, because it is against Christ and his will revealed in his word, whereby he ever maintains the beauty of honour, and the dignity of authority, and the strength and sinews of Revenues, wheresoever he finds them rightly fixed by human laws, whether on Jew or Turk, or infidel, or upon Christians, but especially i● on his household servants and high stewards of his chiefest treasures, and most mysterious secrets, such as the Bishops are, who are graced in our commonwealth with titles of Honours, and with the dignity of authority by the favour of Princes, and are endowed with great Revenues by the frank donation of many famous Founders and Benefactors, and have ever been confirmed in all by the laws of the kingdom, which are as near as may be regulated by his will, so far as hath been possible to make discovery of it, either by the dictates of nature, or his express commands set forth in the Scriptures. And all this he seconds by surrounding them for the glory of his general providence, with a guard of a double perfection not only of strict Injunctions to honour and obey, to assist and support them in all. But also with direful menaces of punishment proportionable to their transgression, denounced against all (that prevent it not in time with a due repentance) that should dare to derogate from their honours, or disobey their authority, or disturb the peace they enjoy in their possessions, and turns of all violations of his Law committed on them, but against himself from any the least termination upon them only, and strikes in as a party, and makes himself the centre of the injury, and reflects back again like a Rock upon the Authors, the offences offered to his Messengers, as if he himself had suffered, saying not they, but I, not you, but me, which is the same with his language to Saul before he was St. Paul; saying, when he appeared to him as he was travelling to Damascus breathing out slaughter and threatenings against the Disciples of the Lord, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me, who, in all probability, were not Disciples of the ecclesiastic, but the civil state, and that too in the time of his ignorance, and while he was yet in unbelief, but here CHRIST is persecuted in his chief ecclesiastic Disciples, and that by knowing and believing Ministers, which is like the Contention between the sun and the moon, which is an allusion the Poet took to express the insolences wherewith the male contents of Rome seditiously did venture to outbrave their superiors and governors; saying, — Fratri Contraria Phoebe Ibit, & obliquum bigas agitare per orbem, Indignata, diem poscit sibi; totaque discors Machina convulsi turbabit foedera mundi. In English thus: The moon impatient of her rule by night, Would needs disease the sun the day to light; And by this civil and unnatural jar: Enforced the bands of the world's love to fry in war. Oh, let not the reddition be told in Gath, or spoken of in the tents of Ascalon. Secondly, It is against the light of nature, that prescribes a rule for every man to measure another's good by the estimate and affection they hold and bear to any thing they can, or do call theirs; Which is this, Quod tibi fieri non vis alteri ne feceris. Manifested thus: if there be any that can entitle themselves either to honour or office, or inheritance that hath been conferred upon them, either by the favour of Princes, or by the donation of Ancestors, and that confirmed by the Sanctions and Constitutions of human laws and judicatures, and that confirmation re-established by ancient prescription of long possession, and nothing to the contrary: It would be thought a thing very grievous and intolerable for a title so clear and strong, and so impregnable to be unhinged and abrogated, and not to allow like Justice to the Bishops in all they are, wherein like correspondence in every respect is obvious to every ordinary eye, will prove a Paradox too too pregnant with mysterious absurdities both in ordinary Divinity and natural logic and vulgar justice and Moralty. Secondly, it is against the King his sole Deputy and vicegerent upon Earth, and that in a threefold respect. As first, It is against his royal Prerogative, which above all other glorious beams of Divine Majesty that shine upon him, and abundantly show themselves in him, not only in his power, but in his parts, both of sanctity and intelligence, proves him the only express Image & lively representation both of the ample and free liberty, & also of the communicative goodness of the Almighty, wherein it is free and loose from the mixtures of human limitations and restrictions, which like seabanks bounds it up and circumscribes it in many particulars, but in this left free and absolute, and managed as it is according to the prescript rule of the word of God for the setting forth of his glory, by promoting of his people's good, which is the supreme end of all his Majesties; for Salus pupuli especially spiritualis & eterna is suprema lex, as his Majesty hath ever done to his eternal renown by countenancing, and continuing, and confirming according to the royal pattern of his famous progenitors, the honours and authority, and bountiful maintenance of the Bishops as he found them at his first coming to the crown. Wherein he approacheth by imitation as near as is possible to the nature of the Almighty, and that in a double respect. 1. First thus: as God when he sent his Angels as nuntios on his errand to Mankind, he formed them with lineaments suitable to human nature, to conciliate with their seeming german affinity to their kind, some reciprocal welcome to be spent in a willing and favourable attention, and waiting on the delivery of their message, and so to steal upon both their apprehensions, and faith, and belief, all together by the prefaces of human insinuations: so his Majesty takes his naked spiritual creatures, of the poor Ministers of the gospel, and lest they should be too much estranged, and abstracted, like Angels in respect of secular and political out sides from all familiar association, with common and vulgar expectations; he cloathes them with the Court wardrobe of honour and authority, and of the plentiful affluence of means, and so sends them forth, to charm the senses of his Subjects, with the pleasing shine of greatness, into a happy and holy treason to their souls, for the betraying of their darling ignorance, and misleading darkness, into the sweet captivity of a far better guide of light from above, which is usually as odious to them, as a candle or daylight is to a thief and a Robber. 2. And secondly, as God made Kings, Prophets, as Melchisedeck, and King David, and after him Solomon his son: so his majesty vouchsafes to all the chief Evangelical Prophets that have been found famous for their parts, and piety, to participate in some measure of some of the branches of honour and authority, and of the ample revenues derived at the first from Kings. And that not so much to gratify those Reverend and holy Fathers, with a Paradise of temporal happiness, in their present preferments, which is nothing to them, in comparison of those, fortes laetitias & solida gaudia, they have in their studies and performances of their duties; as to win upon the affections of carnal and secular minded men, to comply with him unawares in a point of state, policy, whilst they pursue their own covetous and ambitious thirsts and ●ymes at profit and promotion for themselves or theirs, and that in his royal providence and designs to perpetuate an eternal propagation of a learned and Orthodox, and of an unblamable and unblemished Ministry to the world's end. 2. Secondly, it is against his royal title of defender of the faith, which is not to be conceived to be meant of faith in abstracto in any sense, but in concreto as it is incorporated (blessed be God for it) into the hearts of all or the greater part in some measure of his Christian people, the chief Champions and propugnators whereof, under his majesty, were as ever the Bishops, who have incoumptred and subdued almost all the powers of darkness, with all their antihcristian impostures, and diabolical, machinations wherewith they have ever endeavoured either to darken or eclipse, or totally to abolish the light of the gospel. 3. Thirdly, it is against his Oath by which he engaged himself at his Coronation to embossome the Church into his dearest and most intimate embraces, and to prove his Patronage thereof (according as hath been prophesied of him) by his care and zeal of its frail and tender safety and prosperity, subject to all the storms of envy and malignity, which being duly observed as hitherto by his Majesty is the Pillar and basis that bears up all other fundamentals both in Church and State, and that by reflecting back upon his Majesty a strength and an assurance complete and eternal both of all temporal and spiritual happiness, and to his royal Consort and all his royal issue, and to derive to all his loving Subjects throughout all his Dominions a confident security of the safe fruition of all the sundry objects of their chiefest and dearest delights the shaking and unloosing whereof upon any pretences, how spetious and advantageous soever will be little credit to their duty of loyalty that shall attempt it, and scarce thank worthy at his majesty's hands whensoever it shall be presented unto him. Thirdly, it is against the laws of the kingdom, and that in a double respect. 1. As first, it is against the grand fundamental Law of Magna Charta, so often confirmed by many sundry Acts of Parliament in sundry Kings reigns, which allows the Church and churchmen wherein no doubt Bishops were employed because it was a Bishop that first begun and co●arived, and continued, and occasioned the free enjoying of all their endowements and immunities and privileges to the strict observation whereof all that oppose the good of the Church, are or should be sworn. 2. Secondly, it is against the Law of propriety of late so much stood upon and revived a new to the great good and comfort of the meanest and the lowest of the civil state. And if the Heads and fathers of the Church should be condemned as aliens and political illegitimates to an incapability of common Rights, and interesses with their inferiors, it would amount to be a greater Monster in government then ever nature did produce. For seeing they are freeborn Subjects as well as others, and capable with them like free denizens of all Rights, and enlargements, either by honour, or authority, or by any additions of Reverewes they shall be thought worthy of, and can fairly arrive at, and being fully possessed of all by law accordingly, and that possession ratified by long prescription, they ought not neither can they be justly deceased of any, or all, but by order and course of Law, usually observed in all proceedings in every Court against any, either for disroabing, or dismounting of any from their honours, or for the deposing of any from their authority, or for the deprivation of any man of his means. And that too for some offence proportionable in weight to such a punishment, and that again not merely moral, as pride or covetousness, or neglect either of their episcopal or ministerial duties, for which or the like, or greater, as merely moral, never man was yet ever known to be questioned in any Court, nor legally can be: But political, and that not in generals only, for Dolosus versatur in universalibus (particulars are expected to be produced and proved, and they again to be tried, and examined, whether heinous and enormous enough to undo & destroy any one of the present Bishops) for their personal delinquences; for so the learned and the innocent, the pious and religious might save themselves with credit, and fairly escape; or whether so capital and outrageous, as like the sin of Adam, or a talon of Lead, it should unmercifully drown them all at once in one common confused deluge of an utter universal sweeping exstirpation, and final abolition of all, the learned with the ignorant, the innocent with the delinquent, the person, place, and Office, with all the concomitances, dependences, consequences, and influences for ever: Or whether according to the tenor of one or more leading precedents, practised in like case, by the sages of former times, which is the Cynosura, by which the whole Nation of Lawyers, both Judges and Pleaders for the most part usually steer and move in all their proceedings, who never had nor made precedents by the punishments of Communities, especially such as the Hierarchy of the Bishops is; for speculative, imaginary universalities of impieties. And in the mean time it ought maturely to be considered of; whether such a sudden violent redress of the supposed enormous crimes of the Bishops, would not become to them or some of them an irresistible rentation to greater and more intolerable, and unpardonable extravagant exorbitances, as of dejected and heartless, malcontentedness, and of impious and blasphemous murmuring against God's providence, & of seditious quarrelling with, and repining against the wisdom and the justice of the present government, or of busy studying out, and of subtle contriving of pernicious ways of revenge for the unexpected losses of those precious pledges of many former Prince's favours, and, as may be supposed by them, for the undeserved deprivation of the ancient inheritance of their famous predecessors, and so 〈◊〉 a course of more avocations and of greater in erruptions of their studies then as yet can possible be conjectured: But the consequences thereof may easily be discerned by any that is but weak sighted in future contingences, as blindness and ignorance which is said to be mater errorum & vitiorum ●utrix, the fountain and nurse of all impieties both Speculative and practical, for as the Psalmist saith; Thou makest darkness wherein all the Beasts of the forest move; so the night of blindness and ignorance is the only opportunity for all the works and fruits of darkness to advance and display, and to show themselves in their colours, such as are Heresies, schisms, Factions, dissensions, Seditions, Rebellions, Treasons of all kinds, Jesuitical powder plots, Regicydes state underminings, and God knows what Chaos of disturbance and confusion of the whole frame of Church and State of and all, for as Acosta very well observed of old, that Heresenan surores regnorum conturbationes secutae sunt, so it may be found true with us if not timely prevented. And as Varro said of Plautus; Postquam morte donatus est Plautus, Comaedia luget, scaena est diserta, Dem risus, lusus, jocusque Et numeri innumeri simul omnes collacrumarunt. Change but the scene into the Church and the Seminaries, and suburbs, and all the branches of it, and a man may see the like truth spring up faster and spreading already further then can be soove or easily remedied. Firstly, and Lastly, it is against the laws of civility and common humanity, and that in a double respect. 1. As first, thus to deprive the deceased founders of their proper inheritances who still survive themselves in their devices and donations which they did forbear whilst they lived to wast and consume on their own lusts and pleasures, and without respect had to their nearest and dearest friends and acquaintance diverted at their deaths ever their beneficence from them, and turned it into a Sacrifice to be offered up to the Almighty, and to be spent by the Bishops, for the setting forth of his glory, and that by promoting the public and spiritual good, both of King, and Church and State, and of all both at home and abroad, wheresoever the gospel is professed, as is sufficiently manifested by the famous Monuments of Learning and Piety, which they have continually set forth and published to the world, of which as Horace said of his works; Exegi monumentum aere perennius Regalique situ pyramidum altuis, Quod nec imber edax aut Aquilo impotens, Posset divere aut innumerabilis, Annorum eries, & fuga temporum. So may they say and more, and trulier of their works, but they are no boasters. And now to defeat the aims of those deceased founders, and to contend with them in a vie of better wisdom and larger liberty, and greater power than ever they had, or exercises over their own estates, is like cum mortuo Protogene bellum gerere was enough heretofore to make the victorious and courageous warrior Demetrius to retreat and shrink with shame and fear from his siege of the City Rhodus, where the Picture of jasylus made by the famous Painter Protogenes was kept, for when he was remembered to consider how foul a thing it was to war with the dead, it is said that forthwith oppugnatione desita & imagini & civitati pepercit: so if it might be but deliberately thought on, what an unworthy and uncomely thing it is, that those ancient Monuments and lively ravishing pictures of charity and piety, and beneficence, of the famous foundations and endowements of Bishops, that have thus long subsisted & flourished; should now be the objects of envy and hostility, they would spare their own trouble, and forbear their further prosecution of all the siege they have begirt them with, and of whatsoever they have attempted and enterprised 'gainst them. But to fly upon the Bs. their donees and adopted children, and to out them of their Legacies, as well or rather because they are Bishops, then for any moral or political offence, as yet either alleged, or sufficiently proved, notwithstanding all the worthy services wherewith they or some of them, or some of their famous predecessors have enlarged and advanced the felicity both of Church and State, cannot be warranted from the gests and acts of former times, and will prevent a Parallel in after ages. For as Tertullus the orator said to Foelix the governor, seeing we have enjoyed great quietness by thee, and many worthy things have been done unto our Nation by thy providence, we acknowledge it wholly, and in all places most noble Faelix, with all thanks, so they might understand, if they pleased, and confess and acknowledge, that they and their forefathers have enjoyed great quietness by their means; For as the Apostle saith of the Israelites, that to them appertain the adoption, and the glory, and the giving of the Law, and of the service of God, and of whom are the Fathers: so to them appertain, the adoption and the glory of the chief ambassadors, and Messengers of Christ, of the high Stewards of the great and manifold mysteries of Salvation, of the Master-builders of the great City and Temple of the Church, and body of our head Christ; of the faithful dispensers of the Covenant of Grace, and of the ministerial givers both of the Law and gospel, and of the constant preservers, with their utmost care and diligence, of the sincere service of God, and of whom came all the Fathers, in both the famous Universities, and in all the cathedral and parochial Churches, throughout the whole kingdom, who did baptize, and teach, and marry, and bless from God, all their forefathers, and were to them in stead of Christ their first and sole Deputy redeemers, who recovered them out of worse than Egyptian darkness & bondage: and so have hitherto preserved them, and, with their burning and shining rays of light from above, did enlighten and mollify, and reduce the old, blind, and hard-hearted world, into bright daylight, and dovelike mildness and gentleness, to combine, and knit, and grow up together by the bands of charity into one man and one mind. And from those Halcyon days of love, and peace, and joy, and delight, they deriving all their happiness 〈…〉 for their forefathers debts and their own, for former and present benefits all conce 〈…〉 them and theirs, with some thankful requitals of acknowledgement at the least. But in stead thereof, to affront the merits of their Piety, and constancy, and learning, and charity, with affections high and rough, and grim in frowns, and threats of their utter ruin and destruction, makes the gospel little better in event, than Seneca's institution of his great scholar Nero in his Heathenish morality, of whom it is said, that he seemed non tam erudi●sse ingenium Neronis, quam armasse saevitiam. And that by decreeing it incongruous and dangerous for them, as Bishops, to taste of the pleasures of any little parcel of secular and temporal greatness, that at the best, have but stillam gaudii in ultima te parvitatis constituam, which is not only to prejudicate their generous education of their continual exercise of their best parts in the sublimest contemplations, in the most abstruse mysteries in Divinity, as unfruitful to refine the temper they are of by nature, and as altogether unuseful & unprofitable to renew their infirm frame with sufficient supplies of grace, to be as pious and as religious amid the smiles of their great fortunes, as Joseph was in the Court of Pharaoh King of Egypt, and as the Evangelical Saints were in the Roman tyrant Nero's house: But to found and ground from thence a greater degree of Popery then ever yet was discovered in the late Bishops, or aimed at, or attempted by any of them; namely, the single life of the Clergy, which the Apostle calls the Doctrine of Devils. For if honours and intermeddling with secular affairs, and great possessions be inconsistent with holy orders, than must the clergy be interdicted and excommunicated altogether from the honourable estate of Matrimony, as too too various and tedious, with many more unavoidable changes of distractions and interruptions from their studies, which is by this means pointed at as the next intolerable burden and grievous captivity they must of necessity expect to be enthralled unto. And so from thence to derive restraints to the honourable, and to the rich and married, and to the great Commanders in the civil state to forbear their darling pleasures, and not to be like Polyphemus Evangeliophorus whom Erasmus brings in his Dialogue between him and Cannius, dreaming that the gospel hanging at his girdle, might reach an influence to his heart and head, and corporally work a spiritual change upon his intellectuals, as if the mere carrying of the gospel about a man, or the sometimes vouchsafing to a Preacher, an averse ear that is charmed from within, with swarms of a thousand curbs of sundry fancies, and that too but in case of distress, of necessitated respite, and leisure from their other occasions, and in a just dread of Court-censures, and the punishments prescribed by human laws: And as the stream & swing of custom and company, heaves and drives them, were enough to maintain the credit of a Christian profession, and in the mean time to engross and impropriate to themsel●es all the guerdions and garlands due to the greatest endowments and best deservings; and confine the Clergy only to their intellectual and spiritual delights and hopes of their future happiness and inheritance in the kingdom of Heaven; as Julian the Apostata, did the Christians, when he spoiled them of their goods and estates, jeering them with their Master's Doctrine, saying to them, blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven. As if our blessed Saviour had suffered death only to redeem them from the bookish and lean drudgery of the Clergy, and had come to crown them, like a temporal King (as the Jews expected) with the Rose buds of all the delights, or more than ever Solomon provided for his lusts, in the days of his vanity, and to content himself only with some few younger brother Parsons to be conformable to his poverty; and to side with him in the fellowship of his sufferings, but rather they are to be like Epiphanius, of whom it is said, that Pingebat actibus paginam quam legisset; So they are to express, in their lives and conversations, all their Lectures they have heard, and read, and received from their learned Ministers. For as the exemption of them from the busy employments of Magistracy, and the denudation of them from the bewitching splendour of honours, or exonerating them of the cumbersome luggage of riches and great possessions, must be turminated altogether by them in a moonkish Retirement, and that to be worn out and spent in restless and incessant labours at their studies; the fruits whereof are all to be expended for the enriching of the Laity, with all the precious treasure of Divine Mysteries: so are they to be correspondent in a mutual reciprocation of proportion●ble offices and duties; and that by incorporating all that knowledge into all their existences, occasions, and occurrences, and as St. Origen said of St. Paul, Sanctificabat prophana, & fecit ecclesiastica: So they are to sanctify all their civil and secular conditions; And as one said of the Sacraments, that they were Verba visibilia: So they are to rarify and sublimate all their low & terrene temporal employments, into a manifest visibility of the purity of Religion; which will apparently result not only out of the exact measuring of the length and the breadth, and of the height and depth of all their endeavours and undertakings, according to the strict rule of the word of God: But also by pointing all their intentions, with a defixed ●yme at the high and chief end of the glory of God; and by ever rancking all their other inferior and secondary ends, with a methodical subordination and a harmonious coherence, and an orderly and tributary subserviency to the supreme. And then, is the Poet said of Isla and her Picture: which the Painter had drawn so to the life-like her. Vt utramque putabis esse v●ram: Aut utramque putabis e●●e pictam. So an ordinary Spectator, that is divided, through weakness of judgement, into a dubious apprehension, might either think both Laicke and ecclesiastical persons to be a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy Nation, a peculiar people; a● St. Peter called the distressed Jews, writing to them being strangers scattered through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bythinia, or both of them to be and not to be, like a Picture, that is and is not, what it seems to signify and represent; a Nation and no Nation, a people and no people, Christians, and yet no Christians, as they ought to be. Or else because they are, as they are good Bishops; who for the most part are as good as any sort of men: amid the many infirmities our weak nature is subject unto, and notwithstanding the many tentations our best performances are too too frequently blasted and blemished with. And in some respects do far surmount and transcend many thousands of other vocations and conditions, in both unknown and unvaluable eminencies, and that in a double respect. 1. As first, because in their tender years, almost as soon as they could see, to discern of colours and differences, they could be so Eagle-eyed, as to spy out the precious pearl of the gospel; to the study whereof they did wholly dedicate themselves without any further consult with nature; and that with a kind of disdain of all other professions whatsoever, and singled out its excellencies from all the flatteries of honour, and riches, and renown, that courted their judgement from every corner of the earth, and the known world; to be their sole, and secure, and most sincere delight, and as most really and substantially advantageous to themselves, and as most universally and freely profitable to all others in their most spiritualised, and sanctified desires and wishes; howsoever slighted and undervalued by some ignorant Atheist, as the most barren and chargeable, and laborious, and difficult, and despicable vocation in the world. 2. And secondly, for the many weary days and, weeks, and months, and years, and anxious, and vexatious cares and indefatigable and restless, pains, whereby they have exhausted and consumed the flower of their strength, and prime time, and all to enrich themselves by God's blessing, and the assistance of his holy Spirit, with heavenly treasures, to be retayled again, sometime to men of corrupt minds, who for the most part requite them with no other rewards, but heaps of contumelies and heart-breaking reproaches; wherewith they abundantly revenge all the great good of grace and glory which they intended them. And to conclude, when the State did never yet decree by any public act, either riches, or any honourable remuneration, to any of the Bishops, or any of theirs; for any of the best services, and performances; which measured by the strictest exactions of human laws; may well go for luxuriant and redundant super-erogations. And now to treat of nothing but degradations and demolitions of those Pillars of earth; contrary to the word of God, and the light of nature; and contrary to the Rights of his Majesty; his Title, Oath, and Prerogative; and contrary to the laws of the kingdom, and of common humanity, and civility, and supra, and praeter, and ultra, all their demerits, and when many poor and beggarly Incorporations, are permitted and allowed to triumph in needless, and superfluous privileges; whose chief Magistrates wisdom and policy; is sometimes recorded with his own handiwork on the roof, & top of his ruinous habitation: this would make St. Jerome, if he were now alive, to blush, and repent; at what he said in his Epistle, ad Eustochium, quid Cicero cum Apostolis? For the orator's exclamation of o tempora! O mores! may well suit for a fit amplification of the Apostles prediction of these our perilous times, the Apostle speaks of in his 2. Epistle to Tim. 3. c. v. 1. This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. v. 2. For men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy. v. 3. Without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good. v. 4. traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. v. 5. Having a form of godliness, but denying the powers thereof. He that please may read, and use it as his looking-glass, and m●ke Discovery of some things amiss in himself, and thence learn to surrender up all the surfeits of mistakes, wherewith they have undervalued and vilified those reverend Fathers, whom Tertullian calls A postolici semi●is frutices & haereditarios discipulos Christi, and are procuratores salutis generis humani, and the Chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof, as Elisha said of Elias, and aught to be honoured with all thankfulness; omni loco, actu, habitu, tempore, as Ausonius said to Gratian the Emperor, and rather than to abase them any lower, than they are, with any dimiunitions; to study how to add to them further and ampler enlargements in all; for as St. Jerome said in point of obedience, so may I say in matter of beneficence, quis pudor, quod nonpraestet fides, quod praestitit infidelitas, so what a shame is it that Our Father should not be as bountiful to the Church as ever was Pater Noster. But instead thereof, in this clear and plentiful sunshine of the gospel, to bereave them contrary to the laws of grace, & of nature; of those endowements which were conferred upon them, by such as were contrary to themselves, both in nature and in grace, in respect both of natural and spiritual affections: will prove a double equivocal operation, in the production of contrary effects in both Religions, both theirs, and ours. For as their blind superstition, became to them like the clay, wherewith our Saviour opered the blind man's eyes in the Gospel, which was likelier quite to put them out, than any way to clear them or recover them: taught them to work out new Discoveries of better ways of serving God, and honouring him with their substance; not only for the buying out of the Prince of darkness from his regency (if it were possible) wherewith he tyrannised over the Children of darkness: but also for the hiring of the light of the world (if it might be) to break out, and shine upon them, their kindred and countrymen; and with a holy kind of simony, to purchase for them the gifts of the holy Ghost. So the abundant bright sunshine of the Gospel, dazzles the light of nature in some, into such a stupor of insensible blindness and ignorance; as they can neither see their own hands; nor yet the surplussages of their overflowing estates, nor the sundry forms of wants and miseries, wherein our Saviour proclaims and presents his distresses, continually in many thousands of his poor and afflicted members. But when they come to the Church they seem to see double, and take all temporal accessions, of honours, of authority, and of revenues, to be a voenenum, and a perditio, and altogether superfluous, bursome and dangerous. But manum a tabula. Therefore as the Hills stand about Jerusalem, as the Psal. saith, so let the Lord, and the Lord's anointed, and all the minor Lords of the earth; and all that bear good will unto Zion, encompass, and encamp, like Legions of angels; round about the reverend Bishops, and all they are, from this time fourth, and for evermore, Amen good Lord, so be it. Amen, Amen. FINIS. Errata, PAge 3. line 23. for perfection read protection, page 5. line 2. for spoken read published, line 27. for secondly read Thirdly, p. 6. l. 15. for Majesty r. majesty, is (p. 9 line 11: for Thirdly read Fourthly, l, 18. for employed r. employed, l. 19, for con●rived r. contrived, p. 12. l. 18. for Heresenan r. Heres●on, & l. 24. for deni r●dein, p. 13. l. 19 for altuis 1. altius, l. 22. for ●ries r. series, & l. 28. for exercises r. exercised) p. 16 l. 1●. for constituam r. constitut●m, & line 22. for in read of page 21. line 27, for earth read the earth.