Mr. Hunt's POSTSCRIPT FOR Rectifying some MISTAKES in some of the Inferior CLERGY, Mischievous to our GOVERNMENT and RELIGION.  
With Two Discourses about the SUCCESSION, And Bill of EXCLUSION.  
In Answer to Two Books Affirming the Unalterable Right of SUCCESSION, and the Unlawfulness of the Bill of EXCLUSION.  
In turbas & discordias pessimo cuique plurima vis; pax & quies bonis artibus indigent.  Tacit. Hist. l. 4. 
LONDON: Printed for the Author, and are to be sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster. 1682.   

To the Right Honourable, JOHN, EARL OF RADNOR, Viscount Bodmin, Lord Roberts, Baron of Truro, And Lord Precedent of His Majesty's most Honourable Privy-Council.  
My Lord,  
THE Reason that moved me to inscribe these following Discourses to your Name, is to create a prejudice, and bespeak a good esteem with all Mankind to whom your Lordship's Character is arrived, of my Integrity and Snicerity therein. Your Lordship's free and open Acknowledgement of yourself to the World, That you have lived your inward Nature, That you never dissembled or disguised yourself, avowed plainness, and despised all Arts, Intrigues, and Applications, hath made your Lordship Universally Honoured every where, and by all sorts and parties of men entirely trusted; and you are become an Illustrious instance, That nothing is so popular in a Noble Person, as Simplicity and open Sincerity; no, not Bounty and Beneficence itself, to which Office likewise your Lordship is not indebted, or in any arrear. A great Moralist prescribes and commends to all Men that would hold on an uninterrupted Course of Virtue, and preserve their Innocence, to put on 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as a Defensative and Out-guard to Virtue; That is to say, a stiffness and inflexibleness of Mind, something that can resist those soft and gentle prejudices, that persuade undue compliances, and abuse the facile, weak, and tender Minds, to accommodate themselves in little Matters to the present occasions, until by little and little, sincerity is almost quite perished from the World, and mischiefs apt to destroy it ready to follow in consequence of such unmanly compliance. Men to relieve themselves from inward reproach, whilst they contradict their inward sense, have found out the specious names of Civility, Submission to our Superiors; Nay, have usurped the glorious name of the Virtue of Modesty, (which is the Noblest and most ample Virtue, which gives Rules that are almost comprehensive of our whole Duty; for to this Virtue we own a greatness of Mind, and a reverence of ourselves, as well as equability and Justice to others) to varnish over Dissimulation, Craft, Hypocrisy, Flattery, Treachery, Falsehood, and a deceitful Conversation: And are bold to reproach the severe Honest, with the Names of Morose, Disloyal, and Disobedient, to turn off from themselves the shame of their own prevarications and utter defections from public Interest; which God knows men easily slide into insensibly, if they once suffer themselves for any regard whatsoever to be carried off from the Rule of Right; for they bring themselves under some kind of Necessities of complying with the Evils their first aberrations occasioned, by greater faults; which increase reciprocally at every turn, until they become desperate Outlaws, absolve themselves from all Duty they own to their King and Country, abandon themselves to Chance, to live and subsist by untoward shifts and arts, which increase their first Guilts, and turn their Errors into unpardonable Crimes: having shipwrecked their Consciences, they care not if the Government be wrecked too, to which they have made themselves so very abnoxious.  
This whilst men please others, they lose themselves, and from Flattery it is easily proceeded to the most mischievous Treacheries.  
He that despiseth his own way, shall die, saith King Solomon. A man that accommodates himself to serve Occasions, dissembles himself, and appears other than he is; will soon extinguish his Conscience, and die to Virtue. He that doth not honour himself, will not regard men; and they that do not Reverence Men, will not fear God: Qui non verentur homines, fallent Deos.  
The Arts of Complaisance so much relied upon at the Courts of Princes, hath extruded the Laws of Honesty thence, where they are most necessary. This hath made the Condition of great Men very uncertain and fortuitous, infinitely subject to Chance and Hazard, the Thrones of Princes unstable and tottering, and left the Peace and Security of Kingdoms scarce at any time undisturbed with Fears & Jealousies, evil surmises, and contending Factions, upon Reason's true and false, real and feigned causes. Every man almost is sometimes complaining of the uneasy condition that he himself concurs to make to himself, but is always in some sort miserable, by fearing from others whom he gives too much cause to fear from himself, and to mistrust him for his double dealing. But what other consequence can they expect, that ever feign, and uncessantly dissemble, but not to be believed, not to be trusted, hated for their baseness, and feared for that great Evil they would dissemble. The greatness of the Evil designed, is justly measured by the coarse and base Artifices they use to hid them: they are impudent to all the discerning and wise, whilst they busily set themselves by mean and base Arts to abuse the Fools and inconsiderate, the vain and the credulous; whom they have at the same time in the greatest scorn, whilst they have nothing to value themselves upon, but that such little men are deceived by them.  
But there is another sort of men that design well for the Public, whilst they dispense with the strict Laws of Truth and Sincerity. But I cannot tell upon the whole matter, whether they are not more hurtful to themselves, than profitable to the Commonwealth, by their well-designed and honestly-directed compliances and dissimulations. I mean, such men as lend themselves to the service of the Public; who are so kind as to disfigure themselves, to take other shapes and appearances of what they are not: Who are content to neglect their Honour and Reputation of Sincerity, whilst under a feigned assentation they hinder all the evil, and do all the good they can do, and the present state of things will permit; and suffer the rest with a great compassion for the Public Weal. But such men's Praise must come from God, their Honour will never be entire amongst men; and after all the difficult and hazardous Services they can perform for their King and Country, their Honour will still remain suspected, doubtful and obscure amongst men, who must judge according to appearance. When we have been often abused by the fairest pretenders to a regular and constant Virtue, we cannot easily trust those that have sometime dissembled and repressed it.  
My Lord,  
It is a peculiar Felicity of your Lordship, that from a Generous and Honest Nature, and a Noble Mind, rather than from the institution of Books (though your Learning is famously great) to which you seem made rather than instructed; your sincerity is incorruptible, and stands in no need of that Artificial Defensative and Out-work which is prescribed by great Moralists, as necessary to weak Minds to secure their Virtue, especially when Virtue itself is out of Repute and disgraced.  
You have persisted constantly in one even Tenor of Life, have been Uniform, Regular, and Consistent with yourself. There may have been some compliance in appearance to your Lordship, but you never yet departed from yourself; nay, you have not so much as incurred the suspicion of so doing. No man makes any Question about your Lordship, or what it is you design; it is no man's Enquiry, no man's doubt: You have been always the same, and are, as every man concludes, immutably so. You are not unhappy to pass under Conjectures and various Opinions, there is no need of a Cryptique man to unriddle any intricacies in the course of your Life.  
Votiuâ pateat veluti descripta Tabellâ  
Vita senis.  
No false insinuations can hurt your Name: No Service but what is just, will ever be imposed upon you; no Mysteries of Iniquity will be committed to your Breast: no man will be offended at you, but he that hath reason to be displeased with himself, and takes himself in a sort reproved by every honest man, as every man doth that condemns himself. You cannot be disgraced by any Faction, but a real dishonour will return upon those that attempt it: Every honest man will be sensible, if you (being reckoned and esteemed a public good) are lessened: And you cannot fail of Honour from the worst of men, when in Honouring you they Honour themselves, and honestate their designs.  
My Lord,  
You represent to us the Condition of the Nation not desperate and incurable, whilst you preside in His Majesty's Councils: for no man can believe you would be an unconcerned Spectator of our Ruin, or the Preparations to it; or that you would contribute any thing thereto, by giving us a vain confidence of a secure condition, and suffer your famed Integrity to be Suborned to so mischievous a Deceit.  
My Lord,  
Your Lordship hath afforded a mighty recommendation of sincerity and simplicity to the practice if the world; you have Honoured thereby the Age wherein you live, acquired true Honours to yourself, and are thereby become a public Blessing. I hope I shall have your Lordships Pardon in making a further advantage of your Lordship's Noble Integrity and Wisdom, by presuming to offer these Sheets to your Lordship's favourable Judgement. That I adventure to appear to so great a Judgement, is the best Argument I can use to the World for my integrity and honest designment therein; and besides, the good Opinion of so great a man as yourself, would give great assurance to my own Conscience. If your Lordship doth think any thing therein useful to the World, I am sure it will have your Lordship's Countenance, which will make them more useful, since, as my Lord Bacon observes, The Cause of Laws, and Defence of the ancient State, hath ever found this Privilege, That such as for their own Interest disturb the same, Excuse (if they Honour not) their Defenders.  
My Lord,  
I shall ever pray for increase of Honour to your Lordship, and that full of years you may change this Life for a better; to which I am bound, for that I esteem you a Public Good, if I had no particular Obligations (as I have) to your Lordship; and for the greatest Reason I take myself Obliged to be in true Honour of your Lordship,  
My Lord, Your Lordship's 
 Most Obedient Servant, 
 THO HUNT.   

THE PREFACE.  
I Cannot but take notice, That my honest Design in my Argument and Postscript, to serve the Church of England, and therein the Nation, hath been by many perverted: and how it hath been endeavoured to make them lose that effect to which they were sincerely directed. I have therein asserted the rightful Authority the Bishops have in the Government, & represented the just Expectations the Nation hath of their due Exercise of that Authority for the public good; and have endeavoured to remove the great prejudice against their Order, especially those that are occasioned by the Mistakes of the Inferior Clergy; for such we have taken notice of, as those which do most hurt, then esteem and affect them with the greatest dishonour and danger. I have therein faithfully defended the Authority and Power of the Bishops in the Government: But these I take to be but other Names for the Duty they own to the Commonwealth. Civil Honours and Dignities declare respectively the trusts that the Government hath placed in the persons under such Characters, and admeasure the Duties and Offices that are expected from them. The present state of the Kingdom doth most importunately urge and require, that they should perform their duty in its fullest and utmost extent, and thereby vindicate the honour of their Order: It cannot fail being venerable, in the same degrees we find it beneficial. All positive Duties indeed have an indefinite latitude, and we have a great liberty in the performing of them: They are not peccant against the rule of Virtue, who do not always exhibit to us the most Excellent Actions. It is not expected from the Duty that every man owes to his King and Country, that he should serve them always to his utmost Capacity, and with an Heroical Bravery. But he that doth not lend all the assistance to their service which his place requires, and his power can perform, in the greatest Exigency, in the Extremest need, is a wretched Traitor, and Betrayer of his Country.  
In the Postscript I have by no means lessened the Authority of the Church, or narrowed their Capacity of serving the Public weal. But with great satisfaction considered their Authority, and how much they may contribute to the uniting our Distracted Nation, almost ruined by our Divisions, which are occasioned and promoted by the Enemies of our Church, and principally designed for her Destruction. If we lose our Government, for the sake of her ruin, and in order to that we lose it; and which is worse, if we lose it, it must be by the instrumentality of her Clergy: if the Government be not preserved, the Church must perish.  
Therefore I did not confine my thoughts to a Defence of the Church her Rights, but employed them for the Preservation of the Church herself, and did endeavour to remove some great Prejudices and Mistakes, that assist the designs of her Enemies upon her. Mistakes to which our Enemies own all the power they have to hurt us; in virtue of these Mistakes, their malice is only considerable; it could never have affected us, nor we brought within any danger or fear of them, if these vain Opinions had not been entertained by some of our Churchmen.  
And yet two Discourses so agreeable in all the parts thereof one to another united in Design, and that could not possibly but concur to the thoughts of any man that truly and hearty designed to serve to the prosperity of the Church and State, are endeavoured to be set at variance with themselves; and some there are so false and unjust, as to suggest, That the Argument for the Bishops Right, was written to set off the Postscipt with some advantage; and that the Author designed to gain from the Argument, a more pardonable liberty of inveighing against the Churchmen in the Postscript.  
If this had been the conceit of men of the Popish Faction only (and not also of many Gentlemen whom I principally designed to serve, and in them the Church of England, thereby) I should not have thought it worthy my notice. For every man understands it is their business and design to divide the Churchmen from the Interest of the Church, to set the Church against herself. To rob the sheep of their shepherds, and the pastors of their flocks. They know (and true it is) that no good and useful Constitution can ever be destroyed but by itself; i e. by ceasing to be so: And that the people will never part from any thing wherein they find their benefit and advantage; except they can deprave our Church, they can never hope to destroy her. They have corrupted some of our Churchmen with Principles that subvert our Government, and betray the Rights of our People. They have debauched the Manners of our Churchmen, and lessened their Authority and Esteem with the people. The Order is enslaved by Collation of Preferments upon less worthy men. Qui beneficium accepit libertatem vendidit. They have raised a bitter zeal against that Separation, that they themselves have contrived, fomented, and promoted. And it is brought to pass, that those are accounted Church-Fanaticks, though Conformists, that cannot contentedly see and endure the near approaches of ruin both of Church and State: These are their fear and their hate. The Sons of Anak, the Giants of the Land, that they they imagine so insuperable, that they are for making themselves a Captain and returning back into Egypt. Against these they exercise the keenness of their Wit; and to supply themselves with matter of Raillery against them, they lick up the Vomit of the Popish Priests, and whatever is maliciously said by them against the first Reformers, is daily repeated by our young Clerks out of the Pulpit, with advantages of immodesty and indiscretion, for the disservice and dishonour of their Order: with the impudent Lies that the Papists have forged against Luther, Beza, and Calvin, and other renowned instruments in the Reformation, they disparage the Reformation: of great service this to the Church of England, and the Protestant Religion. These young men, like Dotterels, Apes, and Parrots, who have no more understanding than those Animals, are perpetually repeating any thing, though never so destructive to Church and State, that is suggested by any Popish Mercenary Writer, if he hath but the cunning to bestow an idle Compliment upon the Church, or calls Rogue and Villain seemingly or in pretence for their sake; especially, if he can furnish to their young invention any Topics of Raillery against an imaginary Presbytery, and against Parliaments, an essential part of our Government, and the security of our Liberty. A very fair capacity and recommendation this (as they imagine) to Preferment. These are the Men, I confess, for whose sake I writ the Postscript. And if it can conduce any thing either to reform them from their Errors, or else to make them of no regard with the People. That they be not hereafter taken to speak the sense of the Church of England, and we tied down to certain ruin by her pretended Authority. And especially that she may not hereafter suffer under the scandal of such forward and precocious youths. I say, if I can obtain by my endeavours any of these effects in any degree, I reckon I have performed an agreeable service to the King and Kingdom.  
We have a sort of young men, that have left nothing behind them in the University, but the taint of a bad example, and brought no more Learning with them thence, than what serves to make them more assured and more remarkable Coxcombs; who will undertake to discourse continually of the Interest of Religion, of which they have no manner of sense; and of the Constitution of our Government, of which they are utterly ignorant.  
These take our degenerate Gentlemen to be the great Supporters of our Religion and Government, whose Loyalty consists principally in Rounds of Brimmers and Huzzahs; who have not so much leisure from their repeated Excesses and Debauches, as to consider that they are not the wiser for their Cups. In these Loyal Debauches too many of the young Clergy do most scandalously assist, for the service of the Church, and for maintaining the honour of their Order. This, if the Superior Clergy do not in time redress, they will betray our Religion, and ruin the Government both in Church and State. These degenerate Levites are magnifying perpetually the Privileges of their Tribe, extolling their Order, yet in terms that disgrace it, but by their Lives they vilify it. The most degenerate offsprings of Noble Families, are the greatest Braggadocio's of their Descent: Those boast most of their Ancestors, who dishonour them by their Relation.  
The Jews did not boast more of their Temple, the Templum Domini, the Templum Domini, at that time when they had filled up the measure of their iniquity, and the destruction both of their Temple and Nation was at the door, (their Temple had not one stone left upon another, and they carried into Captivity) than these Gentlemen do of the Church of England, when Popery is like to be let in upon her, by their wicked follies, and indiscretions: Popery, I say, which by some Doctrines undermines the very foundation, and by others unroofs the Edifice, and defaces the Walls of Christian Faith, and leaves nothing thereof but Altar-stones for their Idolatrous Sacrifices: what ever the fates will be that they are pulling down upon the Nation.  
The Apostolicalness of their Order will not secure it, if they do not fill up the duty of their Office, no more than the Templum Domini did privilege the Jewish Church and Nation from destruction.  
A Temple without a Numen, and an Undedicated Church, are things common and profane. They may remember there are Churches of Christ that do make a shift without their Order, and Religion need not perish though the Order fail: but may subsist much easier than Nations under Change of Governments, which yet generally last longer than any one form. Nothing can subsist longer, or at least to any good purpose, than it answers the ends of its Institution, and if it do not, it is much better that it should not continue than that it should subsist.  
Grotius in his Book De Jure Summarum Potestatum circa Sacra, assigns these Reasons for the Discontinuance of Episcopacy in some Churches, viz. Longa atque inveterata jam plane Officii Episcopalis depravatio. Nomen & Eminentia Episcopalis eorum culpâ quibus obtigerat omnem sui reverentiam perdiderat, & in odium venerat plebis. Non debent (saith he) res bonae damnari quia sunt qui iis abutuntur, sed verso in morem abusu intermitti res ipsas non est infrequens. The young men of the Church of England have their Heads filled with the Imagination of a numerous Sect of Presbyterians amongst us, and have formed a frightful Idea and Character of this Imaginary Sect, as sworn Enemies to the Episcopal Government. Whereas our old Puritans and late Dissenters, (I speak of the gross of them, for they are not answerable for the Fools and Rogues sent amongst them, or at least spirited by the Roman Priests, no more than any other Party or Division of men are for the Rogues that pass under their numbers or respective denominations) have not disliked the Episcopal Government; though by their senseless and unaccountable scruples, they have deprived themselves of the benefit of the Communion of our Church, and thereby give so much scandal to the Government, and make the Popish Plot considerable, which can no longer subsist, than they are pleased to continue obstinate in their conceited follies.  
They beg to be readmitted, to have the terms of our Communion made easy, by relaxation of a Ceremony or two, and a few matters of Scruple: To be received again under the Governance and Guidance of our Church; and are ready to acknowledge the benefit of the Episcopal Order in the Church of Christ. Let this be asked by any man, who doubts the truth thereof, of any man that is considerable amongst our unhappy Dissenters. Dr. Durel in his Book called Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae, tells what a high opinion the Reformed Churches abroad have of our English Episcopacy; and that the Bishops were deposed by them, because they would not assist, but opposed, the Reformation, not of dislike to their Order. Mr. Calvin in his Opusc. de Necessitate Reformandae Ecclesiae, hath declared himself to be of the same mind; Talem (saith he there) nobis Hierarchiam exhibeant in quâ sic emineant Episcopi, ut Christo subesse non recusent; ut ab illo tanquam vinco capite pendeant, & ad ipsum referantur, in quâ sic inter se fraternam Societatem colant, ut non alio modo quam ejus veritati sint colligati. Tum vero, nullo non anathemate dignos fatear, si quis erunt, quos non eam revereantur, summâque obedientiâ observent. His very good liking and great approbation of the Order, appears plainly by the earnestness and vehemency of his stile, whereby he expresseth himself in the matter. Beza de Minist. Evangel. Gradibus, Cap. 23. affirms Essentiale fuit, quod ex Dei ordinatione perpetua, necesse fuit est & erit, ut Presbyterio quispiam & loco & dignitate primus Actioni Gubernandae praesit cum eo, quod ipsi divinitus attributum est, jure. Peter de Moulin, Part. 2. Thes. 33. Episcopos Angliae, inquit, post conversionem ad fidem, & Ejuratum Papismum asserrimus fuisse fideles Dei Servos, ne debuisse deserere munus vel Titulum Episcopi. Monsieur Drelincourt in his Letters from Geneva, upon the happy Restoration of our King, 1660, saith, Quandoquidem Germania & Helvetia suos habent inspectores & superintendentes, Dania vero ac Suecia suos Episcopos, non video cur quis offendi debeat quod Angliae sui etiam sint Episcopi. Quod si eadem Regminis forma apud hujus Regni Ecclesias non obtineat, id ideo fit, quod non convenit cum rerum nostrarum statu, cui nihil aptius excogitari potest quam pastorum aequalitas: verum si Deus, apud quem omnia possibilia, & in cujus manu sunt Corda Regum, ac populorum Monarchae nostro, & omnibus illius subditis, aut saltem maximae eorum parti eam gratiam indulgerent ut reformationem Evangelicam amplecterentur, meo quidem judicio, impossibile esset inter tantum pastorum numerum aequalitatem retinere, compelleret que necessitas ad instituendos quosdam qui aliqua praeeminentiâ gauderent prae caeterîs, quique eorum moribus invigilarent. The great men of the French Protestant Church, though under the state of a severe Persecution, who follow the Institutions of Mr. Calvin, do at this time applaud the Constitution of our Church, and speak of it in terms of high esteem and honour, as may be seen in the Letters of Monsieur Moyne, Monsieur de l'Angle, and Monsieur Claude, written to my Lord of London, Published by the Dean of Paul's, in his Book called the unreasonableness of Separation. Dr. Durel, after he hath in the aforementioned Book, shown that Geneva was a Free City of the Empire, of most ancient time; That the Sovereign Authority was in the Senate of that City: That the Bishop was Chosen by the Canons and Citizens, and Swore Allegiance to the Government before he entered the City; and that the Consuls of the City did take his Oath. That Petrus de Balm, their last Bishop, Anno Dom. 1533. being detected of a design to betray the City to the Duke of Savoy, fled from the City; and at that time the City was, and for two years after continued, Roman Catholic; so that what wrong (if any was done to the Bishop) was done by the Papists. That two years after the Bishop fled from the punishment of his Crimes, the Authority of the Senate attempted the Reformation of Religion. After this, I say, Dr. Durel thus concludes, Confidenter dicam Genevenses cum Religionem emendarunt, Episcopalis regiminis ab Ecclesiâ Eliminatiomem, reformationis partem necessariam haud duxisse.  
Besides, all amongst us that have the name of Presbyterian called upon them at the pleasure of the Popish Faction, subscribe to the Nine and Thirty Articles, in what they declare of the Doctrine of the Church of England about Obedience to our King and Governors, and are therefore in profession as Loyal as any of those that boast themselves True Sons of the Church of England.  
Indeed Scotland hath been disgraced by a vile sort of Presbyterians, the only true Presbyterian Sectaries in the world, in any considerable body or union. These men have deservedly put that name under eternal infamy, by their turbulent and contumacious carriage against the Kingly Authority.  
But to speak the truth, this is not imputable so much to Presbytery, as to the barbarous Manners and rough Genius of that Nation. Though it hath afforded some men in all Ages of great Excellency in all sorts of the most commendable Qualities. That Nation was infamous for Disloyalty, and a barbarous Treatment of their Kings, before Buchanan and Knox were born. The Scots boast of One hundred and fifty Kings in Succession in that Kingdom: how many Names they have feigned to make out the boast of the Auncientry of their Kingdom, we do not know; but certain it is, they really Imprisoned, Deposed, and Murdered Fifty of their Kings at least, before the time of Mary Queen of Scots, whose prosecution was promoted and assisted by the English Bishops. A fine Kingdom that, to make Experiments and try Conclusions upon!  
There is little reason to charge the Gild of the unexpiable Murder of our late Excellent King, for which at this day we are doing most severe penances, upon Presbytery, which was not thought of here in England till the War was begun. The heats that produced that unhappy War, were from other Causes and Reasons, as every body may know. But when that War was once begun, (as no War can be managed by fore-established Rules and Measures) it did not stand within the reasons and first designs thereof, but was prosecuted and managed by such means and measures as were necessary and possible. This will always happen more especially in a Civil War, wherein though both parties share in the Causes, yet the Gild to be sure belongs to the Rebel's side.  
The Parliament in the Course of the War, in their distress, prayed Aid of the Scotch Nation, who was shortly before entered into the Covenant. They refused them any Assistance, except they would enter into that Covenant which they had passed upon their own people. By this accident that part of the Nation that was engaged in that unnatural War, of the Parliaments side, were imposed upon by the Scotch Presbytery. But after the Covenant was thus imposed, they still retained the English Loyalty, filled the Town with Protestations and Remonstrances against the Kings feared Murder; declared out of their Pulpits against the Actors of that detestable Tragedy; were continually contriving to restore our present King to the Government of his Kingdoms; and of their instrumentality in his Restoration, the King himself is very sensible.  
I wish the Church too were made sensible of the extinction of that prejudice the Scotch Covenant created against her; for though God be thanked she hath survived almost all of those deluded Covenanters, yet the apprehension of the danger, or the remembrance of the evil, at least, will return with the mention of that name, and render it very displeasing. I wish, I say, that prejudice was removed by their frank Declaration of their good liking of her Order in general; and by their humble desires to be spared in the matters whereof they yet remain in doubt, by the indulgence of the Church: That we may not incur the danger of losing our Religion and Government, by the scandal that is given to the Churchmen at the old remembrance of what hath been done here by some that were of the Presbyterian Name.  
For this matter of Offence they of the Popish Faction do with mighty advantage to their Villainous design cultivate and improve. They stigmatize all that oppose the Popish Plot, with the Name of Presbyterians, and thereby would denote them Enemies of our Church-Order.  
By this means they have brought many, too many Eminent men of our Church to at least a dead Neutrality, as if things were come to this pass, that they must perish either by that or the Popish Faction, and had nothing left them to do, but to choose which way our Church shall be destroyed: A cold comfort this would be, that whatever way they should take, they must assist to the destruction of their Order.  
Upon this rock we are like to be split, this makes our deliverance to stick in the birth, and upon this hinge the fate of our Religion and Nation will turn. Lord, what a prodigious thing is this, that is come to pass in our age. Religion itself must be the devoted thing to the rage and folly of the Priests of that Religion. Let them in the Name of God consider what iniquity it is to declaim against the faults of others, and not endure to hear of their own Crimes: To hate one-another for those very proceed that their own faults occasion: where the fault is in both sides, the fault is in neither, so as they may justly accuse one another: and yet they will both fall under a most severe Condemnation, to be sure, in the next world, if they do not both miss their aims, and be confounded with guilt and disappointment in this.  
I wish it were considered, that scarce any Nation ever yet perished, that was so blinded in her own concerns, that she had not discerning men enough to have preserved her from the destroying Evil, if many good and wise men did not persuade themselves, it was better to suffer it than to endeavour to prevent it: and from the fears of one Party, and the dislike they have conceived against the other, determine with themselves to stand Neuters, whilst they want Resolution to oppose the dangers that one side threatens, and think the disorders of the discontents incorrigible.  
It was a wise Law of Solon, That if the Commonwealth at any time should be divided into Factions, that the Neuters should be noted with infamy; by which every man was obliged to take a side or Party; and all the virtuous, peaceable, and modest, were engaged to appear openly in the concernments of the Government: he concluded assuredly, that by this means Peace would be more easily restored, and terms of an accommodation more readily invented and entertained; the Factious Knaves of both sides turned out of Office, their Evil Designs disappointed, and the ruin of the Nation by the Extremities of wicked men prevented.  
For the worst men are most forward in Factions, and the greatest beautefeus most honoured by their respective contending Parties, before the wise and good interpose.  〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. 
The Causes of the Differences would be better understood, be rendered clear and conspicuous, when the honest men (such as can have no interest but the public good, whose Authority is more prevalent with the people than the clearest Reason) do declare them: and those that are misled and abused into Extremes, would then unite and conspire against those who gave the first occasion to the Divisions, and promote them. As did the Factions of the Colonnois and the Vrsins, who having discovered that Pope Alexander the Sixth set them still at discord and variance amongst themselves, so by their Calamities and Falls to increase the strength and power of his Son Borgia, they fell to agreement among themselves, and made head against him their common Enemy.  
If all that are true Protestants, and true lovers of our Government, would declare themselves on the behalf of our Religion and Government, in such terms as befit honest men, and as the Exigency of our present state shall require; we shall find the numbers of Addressers reduced to the Duke's Pensioners & Creatures. The number of fanatics made so few, that the Papists would again become the Fautors and Defenders of Fanaticism, as they were about ten years since, lest the numbers of fanatics should not be big enough to make a Scarecrow for the Church of England, or the Schism not considerable enough to disgrace her.  
All discerning men see, that the late Addresses have been obtained by application: That the design therein was to make Voices for the discontinuance of Parliaments, and for a Popish Succession.  
If the people are pleased with these things, there is no wrong done them; and if we affect a change of our Religion and Government, it may be easily obtained.  
The King hath no reason to consent to disinherit his Brother, if the People rejoice in the hopes of such a Successor, or at least will acquiesce under that fate: but if we would avoid it, we must deprecate it in such applications to his Majesty, as consists with true Loyalty, and with such earnestness as the matter requires; and at the same time represent the smallness of the numbers of Addressers, and the inconsiderableness of their quality. Thus his Majesty would understand better the Sense of his People, especially when most of the Addressers themselves shall, by joining in such Applications, show what they meant by Lawful Successors in their Addresses: And that when in the same Addresses they did engage to serve the King with their Lives and Fortunes, they did not intent to subject themselves and all that they have, to his Majesty's absolute pleasure. In that they thank his Majesty for his Promise of frequent Parliaments, they desire them; and when they thanked him for his promise to maintain the Protestant Religion, they desired the continuance of it, and such a Law as is absolutely necessary for its preservation. Then it may appear that the Abhorrers themselves did not understand that the name of the Earl of Shaftsbury in the business of Abhorrence, is but like the name of John a Styles and John an Oaks, of Titius and Sempronius, in putting a fictitious Case: And that the only Question asked, was, Who are the most damnable Plotters at this time, the Protestants or Papists? And that this was the Question intended to be put to the People in the Solicitation of Addresses of Abhorrence, is evident.  
If we did dutifully represent to his Majesty these Proceed, as the Arts of our Enemies for dividing us, and the Methods of our designed Ruin, we should not be undone; and there is nothing more than this necessary for the preventing of our Ruin, since we have so gracious a King.  
Our King is duly styled, Pater Patriae; he will not suffer his People to be calamitous (as no good Prince can suffer his to be) from any cause whatsoever that is to be removed; no, not from their own Fears and Jealousies, if they are innocent, reasonable, and probable. The Affections of a Prince to his People, supersede his Affection towards any private Relation: So strong is the Tie of Duty upon him, from his Office, to prevent public Calamities, as no respect whatsoever, no not of the Right Line, can discharge; nor will he himself ever think, if duly addressed, that it can.  
By the Kingly Office, he is taken up from amongst men, and is made a God to us; he is not to suffer the passions of a private man, so as to be swayed by them. In this high capacity. In the matters of the Government, nothing ought to determine him, but the Common weal, to which purpose all Governments are instituted.  
Besides, the excellent humanity of our King, which hath made his Reign so clement, doth dispose him to a tender Affection towards his People committed to his care, and must powerfully incline and persuade him to do any thing that is necessary for preventing such Evils; which as they are greater than can be supported by his People, so if they come upon us, we shall never be able to emerge or recover from under their pressures.  
There wants nothing but a universal desire of being happy, to make us so; and nothing but a declaring our steady abhorrence of the Evils we cannot sustain, is further necessary for preventing them: Our Enemies will be destroyed merely by our uniting; they have no direct Strengths of their own, all their hopes and confidence is in our Divisions.  
We may evacuate their design, by making it impossible, without a Conflict with any of the Evils feared: We shall have no Enemies from that time we are at peace with ourselves; if we have courage enough to say we are not content to perish, we are immediately safe. Our Traitors would disappear, if we had no Neuters; and we cannot lose either our Religion or Government, if we have a just concern for them. If the Protestants would in time understand that the single Art and Stratagem they have to undo us, is by dividing us, we should not assist it by receiving false and hated Characters of the several Sects that are amongst us from the Popish Writers; and represent them to our selves as more detestable than the Popish Traitors, and alike Enemies to the Government. It is no more agreeable to a scrupulous man about a Ceremony of the Church, to depose and murder his lawful Prince, than to a man of a nice Conscience to be impiously wicked. Too true it is, all Nations and Religions have been sometime or other stained with the horrid guilts of Deposing and Murdering Kings, under a pretence of destroying Tyrants, and vindicating their Country from Oppression. The Bishops concurred with the Temporal Lords in deposing the second Richard: In an Address to that King they justified themselves therein, Ex Antiquo Statuto, from the Constitutions of the Kingdom; and Ex facto nuperrimè dolendo, by which they meant the deposing of Edward the Second. Knighton, one of the Decem Scriptores published by Mr. Selden, gives us the Address in terminis. Until the Collectors of Dissenters Sayings can justify the Bishops in this matter, let them not trouble the world any more with the farrago of some of their wicked Say, thereof to make a Character of a Dissenter: for it belongs no more to him, as such, to be a Traitor or Rebel, than it doth to the Character of the English Bishops to depose their King, and cause his most Sacred Blood to be shed and profaned as a common thing.  
But for removing the fears that our cautious Churchmen have of Dissenters, which hath cast them into a cold indifferency and inert neutrality at this time, when if ever the Applications of an active Prudence are required from all honest men, and lovers of their King, Country, and Religion, I wish they would weigh and consider the mischiefs on either hand: What the Popish Party designs, and what the Dissenters would have: What powers the Popish Party have, what endeavours they use to force their Superstitions upon us, and to change our Government: That the Dissenters have neither Power nor Will to destroy our Religion or Government: They are already of our Church, and it is expected that they should be Petitioners to the Bishops for their intercession towards obtaining some Indulgence in some little matters, that may bring them into an entire Communion with us. It may easily be known who are for the preservation of our Government, or dissolution of it, by their Desires or Abhorrences of Parliaments; (and who desires Parliaments more than Dissenters?) which would preserve our ancient Government in Church and State, and the true Religion established among us, and recover us into a firm Peace and Union, by just and necessary provisions for their support. Whilst the Government is preserved, the Church is safe and secure: for no man can fear that the King and the States of the Realm will ever give place to wild Fanaticism, and suffer so excellent an Ecclesiastical constitution as we enjoy, to be subverted, for any Extravagancies that shall deserve the name of Fanaticism. But the pretences of our Neuters for their Neutrality, are not more groundless than their reasonings are absurd, by which they oppose the only remedies to the Evils that now beset us, and the greater we fear.  
That absurd Opinion, Dominium fundatur in gratiâ, is charged upon those that are for the Exclusion of the Duke; and they think by pronouncing this piece of absurd Latin, they have at once put to silence and shame all the reasons of Nature, Religion, and State, that urge it and require it.  
That there is nothing can be more absurd than that Dogma, will appear, for that almost whole Dutch Systems of false and paltry Theology go to the making of it, in the most tolerable sense it can have; and for that it hath been improved into a most villainous sense, to give countenance to the vilest Outrages of the Germane Anabaptists.  
But Dominium signified Property, not Government and Rule, until our admirably accomplished young Divines of this last Age, out of their great skill in the Latin Tongue, would have it so, for the service of the great Defender of the Protestant Religion, and of the Church of England.  
All Rights, as well Natural as Civil, are forfeitable by Crimes, in such measure and degree as Laws appoint, and as good Government requires: Notwithstanding Grace be not admitted a good Title to any thing that the Saint will desire, though of the Roman stamp.  
I confess, Natural Rights, (but they are very few) are not controlable by Laws, but are by Laws to be defended, and the free use of them to be justified and allowed, most certainly not to be condemned by any Civil Authority.  
A right in Nature every man hath to live, until he hath forfeited his Life. Whatever he doth that is necessary for his preservation, is and aught to be justified by all Laws, though he kills, though he breaks the Civil Enclosure of Property; which cannot, and was never intended to shut out the Natural Right that every man hath in the last extremities. Every man hath a right to his plank in a Wreck, though the owner of the Ship perish by him for want of it.  
All the Authority of all the Legislators in the world united, cannot make unlawful any Act that is done in self-preservation: Sub moderamine inculpatae tutelae, where the man is innocent.  
But Civil Rights are without iniquity alterable and controleable by Laws, and by acts of Government ordainable to the public good.  
Nothing is so entirely, perfectly, and abstractly Civil, as Government, the perfect Creature of men in society, made by pact and consent, and not otherwise, most certainly not otherwise: and therefore most certainly ordainable by the whole Community, for the safety and preservation of the whole, to which it is in the reason and nature of it entirely designed.  
But we are told by some, that will not contest the lawfulness of Exclusion, That we trouble ourselves with the fears of an imaginary danger: That we are endeavouring a remedy against the Evil that may never happen: That we impertinently trouble ourselves about providing that which we may never want or need: That the Duke may die before the King: And if the Duke should survive, he neither can nor will change our Religion: That it is not lawful for any man, Occupare facinus quod timet, and to destroy the person whom he fears.  
I wish it were considered on the other side, That if the Duke die before the King, there is no wrong done to the Duke by Excluding him. It is only his hopes and expectations that are cut off, for the preventing our fears; a possibility of hurt provided against, by shutting out the possibility of effecting it; and that not by any hurt to his Person, but merely by disabling it: a Remedy proportioned and suited to the disease: we desire to be eased of our fears, by a just security against them. But if the Duke should certainly survive the King, and could and would change our Religion, they who thus discourse, seem to allow it lawful to exclude him. But for that they say the Duke, if King, will not or cannot change our Religion: let every man consider his present Will and Power, and how far he hath proceeded towards it, before he is entered into his Kingdom. These silly dreamers dishonour him, whilst they pretend to serve him. His Princely Virtues make him the more dreadful to a Protestant Kingdom. They who thus talk, make him a bad man of that bad Religion, weak in his conduct, and feeble in his power: But how can this be, when they have instructed the Nation into absolute obedience, and have measured the duty of obedience by the King's pleasure, and not by Laws: That the pleasure of a King is ; some of them will not allow passive obedience to be at all obedience?  
Besides, all caution is proportioned to the greatness of the Evils feared. No wise man ever left the sum of his Affairs to Chance. Where the Evils are not to be remedied or resisted when they happen, the caution is just that prevents them. If there be no remedy against the Evil we fear, but the Exclusion, the Exclusion is not only lawful, but commendable. And for this we have the Authority of the Illustrious Grotius, under his general Doctrine and determination, Lib. 2. Cap. 1. De Jure belli ac pacis.  
It is Engraven in Capital Letters upon the Foundation-Stones of all the Governments in the world, That any person unfit for Government, shall be Excluded from Governing. Though Fools cannot read it until the foundations be removed, and the Government subverted. That his Royal Highness hath rendered himself unfit for the Government, hath been declared more than once, by the unanimous consent of all the States of the Realm; and how far the King hath been of the same opinion, may be conjectured by those Expedients that have been offered in several Parliaments, by Privy-Councellors and Ministers of State, and the Duke's greatest Friends. Only such were those of the late Parliaments that opposed the Bill of Exclusion; but even these were for sequestering the Royal and Sovereign Powers and Authorities during the Life of a Popish Successor, and to leave him content with the Name of a King only.  
An Indignity this both to the Name and Office: a thing repugnant to the Fundamental Constitutions: This tends to destroy the Monarchy itself: It points directly to the Evils of the late times, and would make the Parliament Sequestrators of the Crown.  
But such absurdities those that appeared most his Friends would run us upon, rather than a Popish Prince should become our King: Such an abhorrence they themselves had against the mischiefs that would thereupon ensue to the Nation.  
Is it fit after this, that the lawful endeavours to Exclude him, should be accounted a Protestant Plot; and those that desire it, for that reason only, accounted Enemies to the Government, and Designers to change it? What madness is it, that his arrival amongst us should be welcomed with any tokens of joy! That Addresses should be made in his favour! That we should court that mischief, that the wisdom of all our Estates in several late Parliaments have consulted how to avoid. To turn so fond of a Popish Successor, as to be content to quit our Parliamentary Constitution, our Government, for his sake: for his sake we have had Parliaments Dissolved, and his presence will not give us leave to hope for a Parliament.  
But let no honest man be affrighted and put out of Countenance with any Imputations or Reproaches of Sedition, whilst he adheres to the Sense of all the Estates in Parliament, and that which hath been in some sort the King's Sense too.  
They are the Seditious, that propound deceitful Expedients, which tend to change the Government, and to Embroil His Majesty's Kingdoms; who are contrary to the Sense of the States of the Realm; oppose the voice of Nature, and the common Sense of the whole Rational world: That are contrary to the Government, and do, as much as in them lies, go about to dissolve it, by lessening the Powers of Parliament, exercised and declared in their Acts; and more especially in the Act of Parliament, 13 Eliz. Cap. 1. for that purpose was that declaratory Law made, to prevent our relapse into Popery, and the return of the Popish Superstition and the Roman yoke upon us.  
These therefore are the only Murmurers amongst us against Moses and Aaron, our Civil and Ecclesiastical Reformers, who brought us out of the Land of Egypt, and out of the house of Bondage, who though dead, yet speak, and their Authority yet lives in our Laws, and is to be obeyed by us: we have no rules of Obedience to our Prince, but the Laws, and the Authoritative Declarations of the Government, which are called the King's Laws, and the Kings Will and Pleasure (whensoever they were first made) in all succession of time. These Murmurers are saying one to another, Let us make a Captain, and let us return into Egypt; and yet they rub their foreheads and say, that they are clear of the gainsaying of Korah and Dathan, and are not of the company of Abiram. Though if they will consider the story, they will find themselves in that company: for those that were for a Captain to return into Egypt, Numb. Cap. 14. did continue their Murmur, upon what ensued thereupon against Moses and Aaron, headed by Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, Numb. Cap. 16. and both are remembered as one offence, Psalm 106.  
So miserably do these men abuse their Consciences first, and then abuse the Scripture to serve their turn. The unstable more than the unlearned, wrist the Scriptures, to their own destruction. These men against all congruity and analogy, do object the story of Korah and his Accomplices against the Adherers to Moses and Aaron, and reproach them with the Names of those Evil and unfortunate men, who do what they can to hinder our return into Egypt, and are not for this Captain of theirs.  
Quis tulerit Graccos de Seditione querentes?  
These are the most dangerous Schismatics, a most mischievous sort of Puritans. The malignity of Puritanism is, to pretend to be more righteous than Laws. Where no Divine Law interposeth, but the matters are left by God to the prudence of Governments, and to their appointments and directions: to pretend Religion for their Schismatical Separations: to disobey their Governors, when they have no command of God against their injunctions, though they have no Law of God for the matter enjoined. But the Church-Puritans have some pretence for their Disobedience, because Religion is certainly of Divine Institution in the Substance and Essentials thereof: they pretend they keep close to the Divine Institution, and they at the worst do but preposterously prefer Sacrifice to Obedience. But this Civil Puritanism which we complain of, is neither Obedience to God or man, nor yet Sacrifice. Sacrifice it cannot be, where Religion itself must be the Victim; not Obedience, but an enormous and monstrous sort of Disobedience: they disobey not to please themselves, but for mere mischief to themselves; these are sinners against their own Souls with a witness. By departing from the Rules of Government, they are about to betray Gods true Religion, and the Government; and they must become either Rebels or Slaves, either Apostates or Martyrs. But Martyrs if they be, it will be rather of their folly than of Religion, and God will take no pleasure in the Sacrifice of Fools.  
The wickedness and folly of these men, seems peculiar to this present age; it seems prepared by the Divine Nemesis, to punish our prevarications from the rules and obligations of that Religion, which we have dishonoured by our professing to believe it, that so it and we should perish and be extinct together; that we should then pretend to be conformable to the Institutions of his Holy Religion, when we are in a course of utterly subverting it.  
What impudent hypocrisy is this, to pretend to obey our Governors for God's sake, when they really are contrary to the Fundamental Constitutions of State, and by being so, assist to the Extirpation of God's true Religion Established amongst us by Law! Laws cannot be controlled by the Prince's pleasure; they oblige when his Personal Commands do not. King's cannot make their Governments other than an universal consent hath made them; and such we are obliged to continue them.  
A man may neglect his own private right without fault, for in that he is only accountable to himself. But the Rights of the Government, the Rights of the Community can never be lessened or neglected in their use, when the condition of the Nation requires their Exercise.  
Where we have a liberty or right to do an act, a supervenient necessity makes that act our duty. When the case occurs wherein that right is to be used, and for which that Authority was created, than they that have that right and that authority, are as much obliged to use it, as if there had been an express Law to enjoin them.  
To be short, I wish the haters of Puritans would consider for themselves, as well as others, that there is an obedience of Faith, as well as of Manners, due both to God and our Governors. That our judgements are to be formed by the rules of right Established by Law, as well as our actions to be governed in obedience to Laws commanding and enjoining them. By that Faith that every man owes to the Government, he is obliged to defend the Constitutions thereof: they are more properly Covenants than Laws, which yet Aristotle calls so; they are the Communes Reipublicae Sponsiones. If we do not form our actions in agreeableness thereto, and comport with them in our judgements, we do not only disobey the Authority of Laws, but are also false Traitors to the Government, by violating our public Faith.  
And now, O ye people foolish and unwise, ye stupid and perverse generation! will you still persevere to call that which is lawful, nay, necessary, nay, commendable and heroical, to which we are urged by necessity, to which we are obliged by the virtues of Religion to God, Loyalty to our King, the Faith that we own to the Community, A doing Evil that Good may come thereof? Your own Condemnation must be just, if you be detruded amongst the number of stupid Sots, reckoned amongst those that have lost their Reason, extinguished their Faculties, suppressed their virtue, and have no other use of their Reason left them, but what is to betray them to greater Evils, as a just punishment for their former abusing it. You perversely and absurdly misapply words without sense: To the purpose that you may give countenance to your impieties, your utter neglect of God's true Religion, the safety of your Prince, and the public peace, and become Traitors to God, your King and Country, without any sense or remorse.  
I have but one Observation to make, and one word of myself, and I shall conclude.  
The Observation is this: Scarce any Government hath been intestinely destroyed, but its destruction was from itself; which could never have happened, if the great men had not been guilty of connivance at, and sufferance of Evils that might have been timely prevented. And for that after the long continued stupidity of the upper and lower vulgus, which are moved by nothing but what they feel; they have grown impatient of the smart of those Evils they could not, or would not foresee. To this Histories do give ample testimony, as they do also testify, that Concussions in Governments, and Convulsions in State, proceed mostly from Flatterers, encroachments of power, attempts upon the Government, and decay of Faith and Trust in our Governors; and secondly, from Factious Demagogues. But these never appear, until the Flatterers and Projectors upon Government have first played their tricks: they wait as Owls for the twilight, and Woodcocks for the winter; they are only useful as revulsive remedies against the Evils of the other: but are without all manner of Grace, where the Government is uprightly and duly Administered. And thirdly, and principally, from the frailty of Humane Virtue. When some of better place, for the preservation of the Ancient Government, and Gods true Religion amongst us, will not endure to forego or lose some accommodations or advantages of life, which they may be well without, and perhaps do not deserve; how can it be expected that the generality of Mankind should suffer Martyrdoms in mere Loyalty, (that is) be contented to become miserable and and calamitous, and have no other payment for their miseries and Calamities they suffer, but that their Prince receives therein an imaginary pleasure, and a false satisfaction?  
When all is said, men will never govern themselves by the Doctrine of the severe Casuists: But their virtue of Loyalty will bear the same proportion as their other virtues do to the Canon of Morality.  
The best service that can be done to any Government, is to keep it true to its own Constitution, good and tolerarable to the People.  
To this all wise and good men should in their several places apply themselves with Heroical zeal, a busy care, manly and firm resolutions; and thereby prevent, if possible, those Evils that Mankind will not endure and sustain.  
If all that were disinterested from any Faction, would interpose with wise applications to such purposes, Governments would not be so easily dissolved, and Nations rendered miserable or ruined. If all that are enlightened, and truly honest, would thus dutifully behave themselves at all times to their King and Country, both Demagogues and Flatterers would soon be ashamed, confounded and forsaken, both by Prince and People, and Governments be of everlasting continuance.  
But that no man may wonder at my boldness, and the freedom I have used in these Discourses, I have only this true account to give of myself.  
That Loyalty and Religion, and the Prosperity and Peace of my Country, have therein entirely conducted my thoughts, and guided my hand. I have therein affirmed nothing but what is publicly known for truth, and which the Cause I defend requires to be said. It is the Cause of our Government, Religion, and Nation, that I advocate: The Cause is pleaded in its proper Court, before God and the King, Angels and Men; no other forum can take Cognizance of the Cause. To this the Writers of the other side hath invited us by, appealing thereto with their Reasons. I am free from any just imputation of malice and contumely against the person who is most concerned in the right disputed: I have consulted therein his true Interest, which cannot be divided from the Peace and Happiness of Three Kingdoms. Justice herself will acquit me from having done any thing amiss; and I cannot suffer in the Censures of honest and reasonable men. In these Considerations I am encircled as in a brazen wall, safe and secure; for as for the fears of Rage and Injustice, they shall never affect me.   

The POSTSCRIPT.  
SIR,  
I Now render you my hearty thanks for your free advice you gave me, concerning the publishing of the Argument for the Bishops Right of Judging in Capital Causes in Parliament, and for asserting their civil Honours and Rights in the Government. Because it hath given me an occasion, both of vindicating the most of the Inferior Clergy from those Imputations which you have remembered to me, and are commonly discoursed to their disadvantage, whereby they have lost their Esteem with the People; and also of rectifying the mistakes of some (for their number is not great) who have given too much cause therein of public complaints.  
You dissuade me from giving any assistance to the Rights of the present Bishops, for that the Clergy out of whom the Bishops must be made, have entertained Principles that are destructive to the Government. They affirm (you say) That it is in the Power of a Prince, by Divine Right, to govern as he pleaseth; that the power of the Laws is solely in him; that he may, if he please, use the consent of Parliaments to assist the reason of his Laws, when he shall give any, but it is great condescension in Kings to give a reason for what they do, and a diminution to their most unaccountable Prerogative. You say, That they are for a Popish Successor and no Parliament, and do as much as in them lies, give up our Ancient Government and the Protestant Religion, the true Christian Faith, to the absolute will of a Popish Successor, giving him a Divine Right to extirpate Gods true Religion established amongst us by Law, and to evacuate our Government by his absolute pleasure.  
Our Government by a King and Estates of Parliament, is as ancient as any thing can be remembered of the Nation. The attempt of altering it in all Ages accounted Treason, and the punishment thereof reserved to the Parliament by 25 Edw. 3. The conservancy of the Government being not safely to be lodged any where, but with the Government itself. Offences of this kind not pardonable by the King, because it is not in his power to change it. This is our Government, and thus it is established, and for Ages and immemorial time hath thus continued; a long Succession of Kings have recognized it to be such: And just now, when we are under the dread of a Popish Successor, some of our Clergy are illuminated into a mystery that hath been concealed from the beginning of Governments to this day, from the wisdom of all Princes and Ministers of State; That any authority in the Government, not derived from the King, and that is not to yield to his absolute Will, was rebellious, and against the Divine Right and Authority of Kings in the Establishment, against which no usuage or prescription to the contrary, or in abatement of it, is to be allowed. That all Rights are ambulatory, and depend for their continuance upon his pleasure. So that though the Reformation was made here by the Government established by Law, and hath acquired civil Rights not to be altered but by the King and the three Estates. These men yet speak (say you) as if they envied the Rights of their own Religion, and had a mind to reduce the Church back again into a state and condition of being persecuted, and designed she should be stripped of her Legal Immunities and Defensatives, and brought back to the deplorable helpless condition of Prayers and Tears; do utterly abandon and neglect all the Provisions that God's providence hath made for her protection. Nay, by this their new Hypothesis, they put it by Divine Right into the power of a Popish Successor, when he pleaseth, at once, by a single indisputable and  Edict, to destroy our Religion and Government. And these opinions, you say, they are the more inclined to entertain, for that they believe no Plot, but a Presbyterian Plot; for, of them they believe all ill, and call whom they please by that hated name, and boldly avow that Popery is more eligible than Presbytery; for by that they shall have greater Revenues, and more Authority and Rule over the Laymen.  
This is a heavy Charge, if true; but it is imputable (I am sure) but to a few, and not so generally, as some malevolent men of the Popish Faction are industriously busy to have it. For if it were, I confess it might choque the constancy, Resolution and Zeal of the most addicted to the service of the Churchmen, and make them at least very indifferent in their Concerns. For these mistakes are so gross and inexcusable, that they ought, if they could perish by themselves, to be permitted to suffer the smart of their own follies, and to be corrected by the evils they are drawing down upon themselves, with their own hands. They deserve to suffer as betrayers of their own Country: To be prosecuted with greater shame and ignominy, by all of the Reformed Religion, than the Traditores were by the Ancient Christians: These their deserting of the true Christian Faith, being much less excusable than their fault that deserved that name, and of greater mischief, as of deeper malignity.  
How many of the Clergymen are thus misled we know not; but they seem many more than they are, because they are most in view, and come often under observation, frequent public houses, and talk loud, because they want the Compliment of their Preferments.  
But certainly, Sir, what you say to be the declared Opinions of some Clergymen, is the business now of the Papists to propagate.  
Hoc Ithacus velit, & magno mercantur Atridae.  
These are agreeable to, and indeed make up the most modern Project and Scheme of the Popish Plot.  
Since the discovery of their first Design of killing the King, and massacring of the Protestants, they have taken such courage, by observing how little power we have to prevent their Design, that they have us in scorn, and in the vilest contempt.  
They now think that we are not worth destroying, but by our own hands; that we are not worthy of their trouble, or the charge of Executioners of their providing. How entertaining is it to his Holiness, to find the Church of England, the impregnable Bulwark of the Reformed Religion, easily fall into his hands, by the unpresidented folly of some of her Sons, without the trouble of attacking her either by Force or Argument, which have hitherto wanted success, and such attempts always attended with dishonour, and mischief to his See. How pleasant will it be to him to see us perish, and our destruction to be from ourselves! With this he will answer all the irrefragable Apologies of the Church of England for her departure from the Communion of the Romish Church. Then he will say with triumph, our Church destroyed herself, and perished by a Divine Fate, for her unwarrantable and Sacrilegious Schism; for so he will call our Follies, and impute them to Divine infatuations. The manner of our destruction will be a better Argument, and of more force against the Doctrine of the Reformation, than all the Arguments of all the Doctors of that Church to this day.  
For this purpose, since the Discovery of the Popish Plot, it is, that Sir Robert filmer's Books were reprinted together, and recommended by the Title-page and the Public Gazet to our reading. Since the Discovery of the Plot, we have had variety of Books Printed to the same purpose; viz To prove that all Kings, as Kings, are absolute by Divine Right. Since the Discovery of the Popish Plot, we have had men employed to search all our ancient Records and Histories, to find out something more ancient than our Parliaments as now constituted, that it may serve as a pretence to take them away. Since the Discovery of the Popish Plot, we have the memory of our late calamitous War revived, to raise a Panic fear of another, and to make the King believe that the genius of the Nation is Rebellious, and that the Protestant Religion itself is to be apprehended by Kings.  
It is difficult to tell how that late unhappy War began, or how it came to issue so Tragically in the Death of the late King; though we know how it ended; viz. The Nation recovered within twelve years after the most deplorable Death of that excellent King, into a renowned Loyalty; and in spite of a great Armed Power, never before foiled, ever victorious, then kept on foot for the Interest of a very few men, restored our present King (may his Reign be long and happy) to the Government of his Kingdoms, without the least assistance of any of the Cavalier-party, and obliged a wary General in the head of a factious and republican Army to Loyalty.  
Nay, within that time also, the Nation had recovered out of their partial Lapse into Fanaticism, bred up great numbers of excellent Scholars, who mastered the prejudices of those times, were reverenced by the chief of the Presbyterian party, and are the beauty and strength of the Church of England at this time.  
The Presbyterians themselves were grown reconcileable to the Church of England, and had learned by woeful experience the mischievousness of Schism, upon no better pretences than what then might have been satisfied and accommodated.  
When the King and Church were restored, Fanaticism had expired, if some old peevish and stiff Churchmen had not studied obstacles against an universal Accommodation, and some crafty Statesmen had not projected that the continuance of the Schism would be of great service some time or other, to destroy the Church of England, and change our ancient Government; which is now apparently the Popish Plot; and if ever it be affected, it will be with this trick of affrighting the Church of England with the apprehension of Fanaticism, and making them suspicious of Parliaments. As many of them as are drawn into an opinion of the disloyalty of our late Parliaments, the illusions of the Popish Plot have passed upon them, and they are under the power of its fascinations. But both the Loyalty of the late Parliaments, and also how much it imports the Plotters to have it believed that they design upon the present Government, will at once be clearly understood, if it be considered what hath been done for the forging of a Protestant Plot, (which was intended at the first opening to extend to the House of Commons), Things so wicked, as would make a virtuous man ashamed of the Age he lives in. But after all endeavours to find witnesses for their purpose, powerful encouragements, and great rewards, they have drawn none into their assistance, but who are publicly known for Rogues, or who wanted Bread, or had no Reputation to lose. If the falsehood of this forged Plot had not been utterly improbable, they might have procured better seeming, and more credible witnesses. They might sure have found in this Age men bad enough, not already infamous, to have testified a probable Lye. But so necessary it is to the Popish design, that a Protestant Plot be believed, that they are not discouraged at the manifest detection of their Conspiracies, Perjuries and Subornations; but will still go on as if they had a power to work miracles of villainy for their Religion, which is no better. Our modern Politicians have been most observant agreeably to their virtuous make, how frauds, perjuries and violence have prospered and succeeded in some particular cases, and have brought about some designs; they imagine such means throughly multiplied, to be able to conquer all things which they design. But these Arts, which have had success by the permission of God, when one Villain hath been to destroy another, will not pass upon the Protestant Religion. Let them seriously in time despair, and give over such enterprises; For there is no Enchantment against Jacob, nor Divination against Israel, the Lot of God's inheritance, and his peculiar Care. If Mordecai be of the Seed of the Jews, Haman shall fall before him. It is matter of comfort to us, and despair to the Plotters, that not one of their Plots yet, but hath proved abortive, or they have been defeated by their very success.  
Besides, pray let it be observed how this Design of lessening our just confidence in Parliaments, is otherwise carried on and promoted. It is now become the principal business of the Mercenary Writers for the Plot, to pick up and cull out all the enormities and irregularities of those times, the Vitia temporum, and stories of wild pranks of some beastly Fanatical people, that exceed the common degeneracy of those ill times into which the Nation by undiscernible degrees so foully lapsed, to make thereof an ugly Vizard; and this they clap unduly upon our fifths of the Nation, upon all that love and adhere to our Government and Religion, to render them suspected of destroying again the English Monarchy and the Protestant Religion, even for those very proceed that they make for preserving both. For the service of Popery requires, that whatsoever opposes it, must be branded with Treason and Fanaticism; that such delicate persons as are fond of the name of Loyalty, though they understand not in what it consists; that hate the name of Fanatic, since it is become as common a name of reproach, as the Son of a whore, though they understand not so well what it means, may be sure so to behave themselves, as to be reckoned for Loyal and not Fanatical, by taking the measures of the one and the other, according to the new notion of the Plot-Writers, and so become theirs with all their idle prattle. But let them make their best of this foolish sort of men, if that was all they could effect by this project.  
But they design further upon the Nation, viz. to match the fears of Popery, with a fear as great of the like Evils to those of Forty one; as if these Plotters had power by their interest to raise a new War, when we have power and authority in our Government, if it were exerted, to destroy them by Justice. But these State-Mountebanks think it convenient, because the Nation was cast into a Frenzy in Forty one, therefore now, when in perfect health, we are to be cast into a Lethargy to prevent our relapse; and in the mean time they intent we should perish insensibly and quietly, that way they design to destroy us.  
It is since the Discovery of the Popish Plot, that Popish Mercinaries have been hired to write virulent Libels against the Church, and bitter Invectives against fanatics. Out of the same Mint came a villainous Libel, called Omnia Comestia a Belo, against the Church, apt to render the Churchmen suspicious of another detestable Sacrilege designed; and that loathsome Print entitled the Committee, or Popery in Masquerade. Many parts whereof hath no other reason of belief, but that they have been the Subject of some drunken Rhimes in former times; but it is in the whole an insufferable Libel against the Nation, by its application to this Age.  
These Mercinaries are the Authors as well of treasonable Libels against the King, which they form so, as they may seem to come from the Fanatic party, to render the King jealous of them, as they are of the Libels against the Parliament and their proceed, to breed misunderstandings between the King, Parliament and People.  
It is since the Popish Plot was discovered, that Fanaticism is represented more intolerable than Popery: That the Popish Plot, evident to the satisfaction of the King and several Parliaments, and of our greatest Judicatures, is yet told us not to be so certain, as that the fanatics are Traitors in their hearts, though they own no principles, as the Papists do, that warrant Treasonable practices. And these Mercenaries, as frankly as if they had for the dividing of the Nation a Warrant so to do, call all fanatics that oppose Popery, desire Parliaments, and expect they should use that power that is lodged in them, to keep out Popery, and preserve our Government, and to bring to punishment those wicked men that have notoriously designed to destroy it. The belief of the Popish Plot, in the mean time, is by scoffs and paltry Rhimes permitted publicly to be sung in the Streets, put out of Countenance, and those that believe it exposed as a sort of credulous Fools, or designing Knaves.  
Such a vile esteem the Papists now have of us, that they prosecute us with their scorn, and use us as if we were below their hate. They think our divisions, which they have made, have already destroyed us; and they now hire a sort of Scaramouchy Zaneys, Merry Andrews and Jack-Puddings to insult over us, and make a sport at our miseries.  
These pleasant Knaves cry with one side of the Face, and laugh with the other; but in the mean time they cry in jest, but laugh in good earnest. He that had the art of imitating a grave Spaniard with one side of his body, and a brisk Frenchman on the other side, rendered both Nations ridiculous.  
These vain fellows deprave every thing they meddle with; and whatever they say of Church or State, Religion or Policy, is raillery and abuse, and Pamphleting scurrility.  
Lord, under what seeming fatality do we labour, that it can be thought to the Service of the Church or State, to employ such Knaves!  
We are used like Samson, bound, and our Eyes put out, and made sport for the Philistims. By these pied Pipers, our young men are seduced, and danced down a precipice; though these merry Knaves have not skill enough to commend them for Rat-catcher's, if our City should be infested with that vermin, as they say the Town of Hammel once was. But the Daemon that appeared there a pied Piper, who destroyed their Children as well as their Rats, was not more mischievous to that Town, than these motley Knaves are to the Kingdom and Nation.  
It is an insufferable indignity, That the tragical State of our Nation should become almost daily the matter of a Rascally Farce; the very anguish and groans of the Nation turned into Laughter and Mockery, such a barbarity was never used to a Nation.  
It is an excess of Petulency, to make abstract misery in the very form of it, mimically represented matter of Mirth and Laughter.  
These men were born out of time, and were fit for no Age but that of Nero, of whose consort they should have been, when he played the Destruction of Troy, to the Burning of Rome. But I do not doubt but His Majesty's Justice will e'er long overtake the Incendiaries, that are so pleasant at the embroilment of his Kingdom, when it shall be duly represented to him what beautefeus they are, and unmerciful deriders of the Calamities of his People, which they occasion or promote. Tho they think they may pass any thing of this kind upon the Nation, made vain with trifling false wit and Buffoonery.  
It is now Twenty years since our Nation was infected with this sort of wit, and now we are to die of the disease. We have a Fiddle provided for us that have been bit with this venomous Tarantula, to dance and frisk us to our destruction, not to our cure; and yet we pay the Fiddler.  
This thing Wit, the greatest debauchment of this Age, hath depraved not only the Manners, but the Judgement and Understanding of the Nation too. It hath been accounted the best accomplishment of men in place, the best part of the Learning of this last Age: It is not the reason of the Leviathan, so much as the vanity of Wit, that hath propagated Atheism, and corrupted our Manners. This hath made our Judgements insincere and trifling; our determinate resolutions in matters of the greatest moment, slight and Fantastical; introduced idleness and neglect of solid Learning, which requires labour and application to obtain, while this extemporary faculty has been accounted an admired accomplishment.  
There is a sort of Wit very commendable, which Tully calls celeritas in verbis, and the Greek Epigram, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, which is a pleasant entertainment in conversation, and a commendable refreshment, where our minds are tired with anxious and graver business, and the troubles and cares of humane life; but this aught to observe its times, its proper subjects, it ought to be confined to Table-talk an evening-compotation, and the hours of mirth, and the relaxation of our mind: It may be used decently in a Comical Farce; but it is not allowable in satire, most undecent is the use of it in Tragedy. But yet it hath insolently interposed in our Politics, governed public Counsels, sometimes determined debates in Parliament; hath made our Pulpits contemptible, our Theology trifling: It is admitted to resolve the greatest Questions, and determine Cases of Conscience, to establish and refix Church-Government; hath usurped an authority to alter and pull down Governments, and to render them tottering, when they are as firmly established and fixed as a Rock.  
That Wit that is abhorred by all men that are wise and honest, is that versatile shifting, squinting, distorting of the Understanding, that it views nothing truly, and represents things not according to their true nature, but under false Fantastical Schemes, which they affix to them, to abuse the judgements of others: a man can never arrive to any perfection in this faculty, until he is become false, and lost his truth and modesty: none but weak men are entertained with it, and such who do not desire to understand truth, but to serve a turn, and love to be deceived, and who deceive themselves for advantage. It is in perfection in old Knaves, and admired by young Coxcombs. It is the Hypocrisy of the Tongue, a plausible mode of lying and slandering; and at best, but a pleasant Knavery.  
It will render ridiculous or culpable, by false representations, the most noble and heroical actions, and put false colours upon most detestable Villainies. It can discredit a man by honouring him, and make a thing incredible by the very mode of believing it; making a man ridiculous, it concludes him at the same time unworthy; and to confute the most avowed Truths, there needs no more than to raise a sit of laughter upon it; which has the same effect with the men of wit, and their vain admirers, as reducing a false proposition to an absurdity: Thus the reason of this Age is governed by our risibility. The Popish Writers have thus tickled us with their Wit, that we are ready to die and perish laughing, and we know not, nor care to consider or judge of what does truly concern our preservation. And by improving the vanity of some youngsters, they have drawn them to question the Truth of the Popish Plot; and some can believe every hour of the day, when they meet with a merry Popish Pamphlet, that there is a Protestant Plot on foot; though they believe it, I am sure, not much longer than they are reading it.  
I will not grudge my pains in furnishing a short Demonstration of the Popish Plot, since it is of such importance to the saving of these men and the whole Nation, which possibly may fix their minds (notwithstanding so vain they be) into a belief of it; which I have made short, that it may be the better remembered; which I do in kindness to them, since it was lately (and may be so again shortly) a criminal matter to bring the truth of it into question; and they are by all honest men reckoned as Plotters themselves who doubt it.  
The Plot has been declared by the King's Proclamation, and four Parliaments, one of them consisting of Pensioners and Dependants on the Court, which for eighteen years together, were giving Demonstrations of their Loyalty to their Prince, almost forgetting the public Weal: A solemn National Fast has been Indicted by the Civil and Ecclesiastical Authority of the Kingdom, for averting the mischiefs thereby designed, and solemnly Celebrated by the whole Nation; in which, certainly, they did not mock God, and deride his Providence.  
Many unparallelled Villainies have been committed, for the stifling, concealing, and suppressing the discovery of it, which (however wicked the Papistical Sect of base, false and degenerate Christians are) we cannot without breach of Charity towards them, think they would commit cheaply, and without cause, and to no purpose. They have murdered a Minister of Justice, because he had the knowledge of it, and left nothing undone that they thought necessary to Assasinate another for strenuously opposing it. They have attempted upon the Lives of our Witnesses. By perjuries and forgeries they have endeavoured to charge them with the most infamous crimes, to destroy them in their Lives and Reputations too, in a form of Justice. They have attempted by fears and rewards upon the integrity of all our Witnesses, to draw them to retract their Testimony against the Plot; for which some of their Agents have been judicially censured; One Gentleman to the Pillory, Fined 1000 l. and Condemned to a years imprisonment: so evident and notorious was his offence, and by the Court thought so heinous, that it provoked the passion of the Court, and they seemed to exceed the ordinary Rules of Justice, for that they judged the Case to be of an exorbitant and transcendent nature.  
The Plot of the Meal-Tub is a sublimated piece of wickedness, the last accomplishment of villainy; it hath outdone all former, and Will never be outdone in after-Ages. The Papists by the Discovery of the first Plot became less hopeful in a Massacre, and of effecting their purpose by force: They dare not now kill the King, for that the World would not now believe it to be done by Mr. Claypole and his feigned accomplices; which must have born the blame from the Papists, and he and they long since Executed as Traitors, if that part of the Plot against the King's Life had not been prevented by being detected.  
I say, the first design of the Plot being rendered less feasible by the discovery; They keep the King alive with care, as well for their avoiding the rage of the Nation, as to lessen the credit of the Plot: But contrive to destroy as many as they thought fit to be Massacred, in form of a legal process, and to charge them with a design of raising Rebellion against the King. They had made a List of a great number of considerable persons, whom they intended to charge, principal Nobles and worthy Gentlemen about the Town; had prepared witnesses to swear the charge against them, and would certainly with more ease, after the first Conviction and Execution, have sworn all that they had a mind to destroy into the same guilt. And thus all the truly Religious, the Noble, Good and Virtuous of our Nation, that had courage enough to own, assert and defend the true Christianity, and our Government, must, to the eternal dishonour of our Nation and Religion, have suffered the execrable death of Traitors.  
We have reason to think them humane, when they only designed a Gunpowder Treason, or a Massacre. Our abhorrence of this usage dischargeth in us all reluctancy to Martyrdom: Let them bring us to the Stake as Martyrs, than we shall bear our Testimony to the truth of the best Religion, and our Lives will not be cheaply lost; but by this means we must be forced to dishonour this Religion by our deaths. By a Massacre or a Gunpowder Plot, the vileness, cruelty and treachery of that Apostate Church, had been declared to all the World, and that false Religion, as well as the professors of it, had been rendered detestable, for which end a good man would scarce refuse to die. But by this means they would have forced us to personate their own proper Crimes and Villainies, and dishonour our own peaceable and holy Religion. A man of Honour prefers his Honour to his Life, and would redeem it by his Death: But by this means we were, though innocent, to lose our Lives by dishonour, and to fasten a stain upon our Memories by our death. The Priests, their impudent Lies at their deaths, in denying the matters of the Plot, of which they were upon clear evidence Convicted and Sentenced, must have passed for truths; and all our worthy men dying with protestations of their innocence, must to the everlasting infamy of our Religion and Nation, been accounted false and impious at their last breath. There is no reason to be assigned of the patience of God or Man towards such miscreants, but that they may have time to add one impiety to another, until an easy vengeance triumphs over them.  
And though this last mentioned Plot is cleared beyond all exception, their Faces are hardened, and they are not yet ashamed; but they have since contrived and suborned Witnesses to swear the very Discovery of the first Plot to be a false contrivance of a Plot against the Papists. To this purpose they suborned a Son by perjury to commit parricide against his Father; this the greatest Sin against Earth, the other the greatest affront against Heaven. What a Religion is this, that must be thus supported!  
Nay, as if they did not fear or care to lose the favour of their most indulgent Prince, which they have possessed since he used Papists in making his escape at Worcester; they have contrived these two last Plots with such Art, as to bring them under his Majesty's Observation, and represented them as things fit for his encouragement. Sure if they were not urged with the fears of a real guilt, and a restless Conscience of the Plot, they would never have adventured thus to have interested the honour of the King, and to tempt him to abandon them to the public Justice of the Nation; which gins to grow impatient, by the delays of it against this Hellish Plot.  
For we have had four Parliaments dissolved since the Discovery of it, one a darling to the Crown. The bringing into question the Dissolution of that Parliament in the House of Peers, upon the reason of an unnatural Prorogation, was not long before censured, and some great Lords imprisoned therefore; proceed so unwarrantable, that it was after thought fit by that House to obliterate the Memory of them; so necessary was that Parliament then thought to the service of the Crown. The Dissolution of that Parliament, gave us reason to fear that the King had no more business for Parliaments. By these Dissolutions, no public ends that are intelligible are served, no Interest but that of the Plot is gratified; no persons of any sort receive their satisfaction but the Plotters, who are respited thereby from public Justice, and gain time to bring their Plot to effect.  
This is the end the Papists have served; but the King our great Physician of State, had another reason that hath g●…ned him: for he knew the strength of the Pl●…, our Disease, and that a Disease that is dangerous, is sometimes to be palliated, until the season comes to make a thorough Cure; for it many times kills the Patient to precipitate the Crisis. All these Demonstrations of the Plot are passed under every man's observation.  
But that we know so little of it after all this time: It is now above three years since the first discovery. That the Plotters now ordinarily escape Justice. That a great Judge did abate his first Zeal in punishing the Plot, lest he should exasperate it; and Reason of State might thus require it. These things prove the greatness and strength of the Plot, as well as the reality of it; these declare the Plotters interest is great, that the Plot is yet unbroken, staunch and hopeful.  
Therefore we are not to believe ourselves well, and live fine Regimine, as the Physicians say, but to expect, address to, and desire our Cure.  
That the Papists think it yet hopeful, is evident from the Priests and the Lawyer abjuring their guilt with their last breath. We had the honest Confessions of the Convicted Priests and other Traitors of the Popish Treasons of which they stood Convicted, in the time of Queen Elizabeth; and in the time of King James, of the Gunpowder Treason. What then could induce our Plotters Convict, to utter most solemn Perjuries the next minute before they were to appear to God? nothing sure, but that they then hoped that the Plot might be executed; they did it for the interest and service of their Church, and for the better bringing that Plot to effect for which they died; and for which at their deaths, to conceal, they adventured Heroically upon lies and perjuries; which if confessed, would have been frustrated and become Abortive: For it must not be believed that even that Church is so degenerate, as to permit and allow men to such impieties, for the punctilios of honour, though of the Church itself. But while they are not done for the sake of him that commits them, but for an important interest of their Church, (such as the carrying on of this Plot) they say they lose their nature by the direction of the intention, they become a pure piece of mortification and self-denial, an adventure to trust God in what they do for his sake, and for his service; and their Casuists will no more call them in this Case lies or perjuries, than Abraham's offering up his Son Isaac (though that was at God's express command) was murder. But the God of Truth, that God who hath declared, that when he himself in any intercourse with Mankind interposeth an Oath, that the matter under that Oath is irrevocable, peremptory and absolute, cannot licence or dispense with perjurious falsehoods for any end whatsoever.  
But I must remark one thing more, and that is, touching the credit of Dr. Titus' Oats, and Capt. William Bedloe, viz. That they have been incurious in their conversation, have followed their own natural course, allowed themselves in their passions, have been apert and unreserved, have not cared who they offended, have sought no man's favour, seem to care for no man's opinion, have valued and supported themselves only by their veracity, and have seemed to set all the world at defiance to find a flaw in their evidence, and have had little of friendship or esteem, but for the sake of their discovery. Besides that so long a time hath not afforded a possibility, by all the Artifice, Interest and unhallowed frauds of Rome, to falsify any one part of that evidence. But numberless events have given credit and authenticness to their Testimony. Did ever any feigned Testimony bear itself up with so much Confidence, Bravery and Assurance? was there ever any false witness that did not endeavour to render himself acceptable, to bespeak favour, which draws after it credit, and to appear of the most unexceptionable behaviour? Their faults and imprudences, such as they have been, we would not have wanted, to make their evidence beyond all exception.  
The undoubted truth of their evidence alone, hath given them the civil respect of all honest men, and will give the Doctor the public honours of the Nation in due time. I will not recite the innumerable Sham-plots contrived against the Protestants, every one of them a Demonstration by itself of the truth of the Popish Plot, because I have no design to exasperate, but awaken these men that are asleep and secure in this storm.  
This trouble of demonstrating of the Plot, may seem unnecessary to the judicious, nay, to the plain sort of honest, upright, and well-meaning men; and so it would certainly have been, had not some young Gentlemen, by this paltry thing called Wit, been corrupted in their judgements, and brought into a Scepticism, and wild undetermination in a matter of so great concernment.  
This despicable faculty hath made a famous Gentleman, who hath a liberal Dose of it, a Writer of Books, caused him to waste so much Paper, and abuse so many Readers; but in all that I have read of him, there is nothing true and sincere, or truly and sincerely said; his Judgement is made false by his Fantasy, or he hath served a turn by his Versatile wind and Wily conceits. That dangerous faculty that he indulgeth, hath imposed upon him, which the severe and honest enquirers after truth are concerned to mortify and suppress. And I do earnestly recommend to all ingenious Gentlemen, that would be rightly instructed and informed, neither deceive others, nor would be deceived themselves, as they love truth and virtue, wisdom and sober thoughts, to despise this sort of wit in others, and repress it in themselves. And never allow it to be used, but in the hours of mirth, in the Relaxations of their minds from serious Contemplations and matters grave and weighty, where this profane thing Wit ought always to be shut out with care.  
Enough hath been said for rectifying the mistakes of any true Protestant, especially any Clergyman of the Church of England, which you have objected against them about our Government or Parliament, Dissenters from the Church of England and Popery. Especially, when it is made apparent that these mistakes are made serviceable to the Popish Plot, and the means which the Popish party prosecute to compass and bring about the ruin of our Church. But that nothing may be wanting, that lies in my poor power, for pulling their Foot out of the Snare, I shall more distinctly consider them.  
First, I shall desire them to consider what our Government is, and where the true knowledge of it is to be found. And where can it be found, but in our Statute-Books, the Commentaries of our Law, the Histories of our Government, and of the Kingdom? Search them if you be at leisure; if you are not, consult those that have read them, and whose business and employment it is to understand them, and you cannot fail to be informed.  
That the King hath no power to make Laws, that both Houses of Parliament must join with the King in making a Law.  
It can with no more reason be concluded that the King hath the Legislative Power, because his Assent makes the Bills in Parliament Laws, than it can, because the third Unit added to two makes a Triad, that the other two do not go to the making of that number.  
When a matter's moved from the King in Parliament to pass into a Law, the Commons consent last. The Letters Patents of Ed. 3. for making the Eldest Son of a King in Succession Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, 
Sir E. Cook 8. R.  was confirmed (as they must have been, otherwise they would have been void) by the House of Commons.  
And yet we will not say, that the House of Commons can make a Prince of Wales or Duke of Cornwall. And yet upon no better reason than this, some men will talk as if they believed themselves, that the Legislative power is in the King, when no King of England yet ever pretended to it; but by their process of Law have punished such officious and mischievous Knaves.  
They also will tell you that, the Laws are the measures of our Allegiance, and the King's Prerogative, and declare the terms of Obedience and Government.  
That a Legislative authority is necessary to every Government, and therefore we ought not to want it; and therefore Parliaments, in which our Government hath placed the making of Laws, cannot be long discontinued, nor their Conventions rendered illusory and in vain, which is all one as to want them.  
That to Govern by Laws, implieth that great fundamental Law, that new Laws shall be made upon new emergencies, and for avoiding unsufferable mischiefs to the State.  
By the Statutes of 4 Ed. 3. c. 14. 36 Ed. 3. c. 10. it is provided that Parliaments be holden once every year. The Statute of this King required a Parliament every three years; which being an affirmatory Law, doth not derogate from those of Ed the 3. But if the King doth not call a Parliament once in a year, he neglects these Laws; and if he delays calling a Parliament three years, he neglects the other Law of his own time too. And for that he is by the Law entrusted with the calling of Parliaments, he is at liberty to call them within the times appointed.  
And that Laws ought to be made for Redress of mischiefs that may ensue, appears by the Statute of provisors, 25 E. 3 cap. 23. In which we have these words:  
Whereupon the Commons have prayed our said Sovereign Lord the King, that sigh the right of the Crown of England, and the Law of the said Realm is such, that upon the mischiefs & Damage which happeneth to this Realm, be aught and is bound of the Accord of his said People in his Parliament thereof, to make Remedy and Law in avoiding the mischief and damage which thereof cometh: which that King agreed to by his Royal Assent thereto given.  
I dare be bold to say, that never any Bill in Parliament was lost, and wanted the Royal Assent, that was promoted by the general desires of the people.  
If Popery therefore (which is the greatest mischief that ever threatened this Kingdom) can be kept out by a Law, we ought to have such a Law; and nothing can hinder such a Law to be passed for that purpose, but want of an universal desire to have it. I desire these Gentlemen to consider, how they will answer it to our Saviour at the last day, if they suffer his true Religion, and the professors of it, to be destroyed and persecuted, when nothing but their desires of a thing lawful to be had, and of right due, was requisite to prevent it. Their sufferings will be just and righteous from God, if their sin occasioneth it, and very uncomfortable to themselves.  
The extent of the Legislative Authority, is nowhere to be understood, but by our Acts of Parliament, in which it hath been exercised and used, and by such Acts that declare the extent of its power. By the 13 Eliz. cap. 1. it is made. Treason during that Queen's Life, and forfeiture of Goods and Chattels afterwards, To hold, maintain & affirm, that the Queen by the Authority of the Parliament of England, is not able to make Laws and Statutes of sufficient force and validity, to limit and bind the Crown of this Realm, and the descent, limitation, inheritance and Government thereof.  
And this authority was exercised by Entailing the Crown in Parliament in the times of Richard the 2d, Henry the 4th, Henry the 6th, Edward the 4th, Richard the 3d, Henry the 7th, thrice in the time of Henry 8th. and upon the Marriage of Queen Mary to King Philip of Spain, both the Crowns of England and Spain were Entailed, whereby it was provided, that of the several Children to be begotten upon the Queen, one was to have the Crown of England, another Spain, another the Low-Countries. The Articles of Marriage to this purpose were confirmed by Act of Parliament.  
Those that are truly Loyal to our present Sovereign, have reason to recognize with high satisfaction, that such a power of altering and limiting the descent of the Crown, is duly lodged in the King and States of the Realm: For under the Authority of an Act of Parliament of the Kingdom of Scotland, we derive ourselves to the happiness of his Government, and He his Title to the Crown of Scotland, which drew to him the Imperial Crown of England. For Robert Stewart, first King of Scotland of that Family, lived in concubinate with Elizabeth Mure, and by her had three Sons, John, Robert, and Alexander; afterwards he Married Eufame. Daughter to the Earl of Ross, and after was Crowned King of Scotland: He had by her Walter Earl of Athol, and David Earl of Straherne. When Eufame his wife died, he Married Elizabeth Mure. After that by one Act of Parliament, he made his natural Children first Noble, that is to say, John Earl of Carrick, Robert Earl of Menteith, and Alexander Earl of Buchquhane. And shortly after, by another Parliament, he limited the Crown in Tail Successively, to John, Robert, and Alexander, his Children by Elizabeth Mure in Concubinate, and after to the Children of Eufame Ross his Legitimate Children; who are to this day in their Issue by this limitation, by authority of an Act of Parliament in Scotland, barred from the Crown; and we hope ever will be, by the continuance of the Line of our most Gracious King.  
Note, that though a subsequent Marriage by the Civil Law, which is the Law of Scotland, in such cases, doth Legitimate the Children born before Marriage of a Concubine; yet it is with this exception, that they shall not be Legitimated to the prejudice of Children born afterwards in Marriage, and before the Marriage of the Concubine. Besides, the reason of the Civil Law in Legitimating the Children upon a subsequent Marriage, is this, viz. a presumption that they were begotten affectu maritali; which presumption fails, where the man proceeds to Marry another woman, and abandons or neglects his Concubine.  
But I desire these Gentlemen that are so unwilling to be safe in their Religion, which I believe is most dear unto them,  
That if any Law should exceed the declared measures of the Legislative Authority, though in such case they may have leave to doubt of the lawfulness of such a Law, yet if it be not against any express Law of God, they will upon a little consideration determine it lawful, if it be necessary to the Commonweal; for that nothing can be the concerns of men united in any Polity, but may be governed and ordered by the Laws of their Legislature for public good: for by the reason of all Political societies, there is a submission made of all Rights, especially of the common rights of that Community, to the government of its own Laws.  
But all this, and a hundred times as much, will not satisfy some Gentlemen of the lawfulness of our Government, and the extent of the Legislative power of Parliaments, since they have entertained a Notion, that Monarchy is jure divino, unalterable in its descent by any Law of man, for that it is subject to none. That all Kings are alike absolute. That their Will is a Law to all their Subjects. That Parliaments and the States of the Realm in their Conventions, can be no more than the Monarch's Ministers, acting under and by his appointment, which he may exauctorate and turn out of office when he pleaseth: For there can be (say they) under the Sun no obliging Authority but that of Kings (to whom God hath given a plenitude of power) and what is derived from them. That this divine absoluteness may govern, and exercise Royal Power immensely, and that it is not subject to, nor to be abated or restrained by any humane inventions or contrivances of men: (however necessary and convenient Kings have thought them in former Ages) by such methods and such Offices and Officers (of which number the States of the Realm may be, or not be, as Kings shall please) as they shall by their absolute Will order or appoint. Our Parliaments, say they, are Rebellious, and an Usurpation upon the unbounded power of Kings, which belongs to every King as such Jure ordinario, and by Divine institution: That a mixed Monarchy, as ours is, is an Anarchy; and that we are at present without a Government, at least such as we ought to have, and which God hath appointed and ordained for us: That we by adhering to the present Government, are Rebels to God Almighty, and the King's unlimited Power and Authority under him, which no humane Constitution, no not the Will and Pleasure of Kings themselves can limit or restrain, for that, jura ordinaria & divina non recipiunt modum: That the Legislative Power is solely in the King, and that the business of a Parliament (if they would think of being only what they ought to be) is only to declare on the behalf of themselves and the People (that send them for that purpose certainly) the obedience that is due from them to such Laws as the King shall make, and that they may be laid aside wholly when he pleaseth. And after all this, what matter's it with them what we say our Government is, hath been, or where the Legislative Authority of the Nation is placed, or how used?  
But I desire these Gentlemen to consider how they come to these Notions, upon what reason they are grounded. How a Government established by God and Nature for all Mankind, should remain a secret to all the wise, good, just, and peaceable men of all Ages. That Kings should not before this have understood their Authority, when no pretences are omitted for increase of Power, and enlargement of Empire. I desire them to consider that this secret was not discovered to the World before the last Age, and was a forerunner of our late unnatural War; and is now again revived by the republishing of Sir Robert Filmer's Books, since the Discovery of the Popish Plot.  
I wish they would consider, that the reasons ought to be as clear and evident as Demonstration, that will warrant them to discost from the sense of all Mankind in a matter of such weight and moment.  
That to mistake with confidence and overweening in this matter, will be an unpardonable affront to the common sense of Mankind, and the greatest Violation of the Laws of modesty. I desire that they would consider, and rate the mischiefs that will certainly ensue upon this opinion, and whether a probable reason can therefore support it.  
That they would throughly weigh, ponder, and examine the reasons of these bold and new Dogmata. For their inquiries ought to be in proportion diligent and strict, as the matter is of moment; and if they are not, their error and mistake will be very culpable, and the sin of the error aggravated to the measure of the mischief which it produceth and occasioneth.  
Where is the Charter of Kings from God Almighty to be read or found? For nothing but the declared Will of God can warrant us to destroy our Government, or to give up the Rights and Liberties of our people. If they are lawful, I am sure it is villainy to betray them, since all Political Societies are framed, that all may assist the common Rights of all. I cannot imagine they can pretend an umbrage from the holy Scriptures for such unheard-of Opinions.  
The Jews indeed had a Government and Laws of Gods framing and appointment, and a King of their own choosing; and such a King as they desired, by God's permission they had: But their form of Government ought with less reason to be the rule of all kingly Governors, because it was a Government chosen by themselves: then the Laws of the Jews ought to be the Laws of all Nations (which they are not) though made and enacted by God himself.  
Christ would not make himself a Judge in a private Right submitted to him: He determined the right of the Roman Empire by the possession of Sovereign Authority; and such as the whole world had made it, his Disciples were obliged to acknowledge it, by their obedience and submissions, which is the sum of the Apostles Doctrine in this matter.  
The Christian Religion instituted no form of Governments, but enjoins us to be obedient to those we have, not only by express command in the case, but by its general Rules of a most refined, improved, and extensive morality.  
But though I said the Scriptures have not prescribed or directed any universal Form of Governments, yet the Scripture hath declared the falsehood of this new Hypothesis of Kingly Government to be Jure Divino, or by Divine Right: For St. Peter, 1 Peter 2.13 and 14, styles Kings, as well as the Governors under him, the ordinance of man; which cannot have any other sense, but that men make them, and give them their powers. By St. Paul the power of Governments indeed is called God's Ordinance, Romans 13.2. but that is for this reason, because in general God approves of Governments as necessary to the well-being of Mankind, for the improvement of humane nature, for the punishing of Vice, encouragement and security of Virtue; without them it being impossible to live honestly and in peace. And he hath made them the under-Ministers of his providence and care over Mankind, and expects of them, that they should promote his true Honour and worship in the world, which will be always accompanied with the exercise of all civil virtues.  
These two different places must be so understood, that they may be both true; and by no other interpretation can they be reconciled and made consistent.  
It is impossible that any thing can be of man's appointment, which is of God's Ordination; there can be no such thing as a Co-legislative power of Men with their Maker. Government therefore is from God, as he hath made Governments necessary in the general order of things; but the specification thereof is from men. The best definition that can be made of Government, is in the words of both the Apostles put together, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, and such Governments which men make, God approves, and requires our obedience to them, upon all those reasons which make Governments necessary.  
The natural and easy consequence and result of these Scriptures, is this; which I desire those Gentlemen to observe: That whatsoever is not lawfully established by men, no Law of God, not the Christian Law, doth oblige us to obey.  
The Christian Religion doth equally condemn, in the reason of its Institutions, Usurpation and Contumacy. Where the Apostle admonish us, that if we be free, we should not become Servants, he hath by virtue of that Admonition, made it commendable not to suffer the encroachments of Power over us. Most certainly therefore, as the Christian Religion doth not prejudice the Sovereign Rights of Princes, such as they are in the several Forms and Models of Monarchical Governments, non eripit terrestria, qui regna dat coelestia, as Sedulius; so doth it not enlarge them: when by the Gospel God made us free from his own positive Laws to the Jews, sure he did not intent thereby, de Jure, to render us Slaves to the Arbitrary pleasure of men.  
No man intends by any thing in the Scripture, that all Mankind is obliged to any one Form of Government, and therefore all men are left to their own. It hath not therefore altered the terms of Government and Obedience that every Nation hath established for themselves, but hath confirmed, and strictly obliged the observance of them.  
To Obedience to Government, we are obliged by as many ties as there are Christian Virtues; and he must disown his Christianity, that departs from his due Allegiance, And since our Saviour is declared King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, all Christian Kings are to govern in imitation of his mercy and goodness, and in subserviency to the interest of his Religion and Kingdom.  
Regum timendorum in proprios greges,  
Reges in ipsos imperium est Jovis,  
cuncta supercilio moventis.  
Whence then is this absolute Authority of Kings, if it come neither from God nor man?  
Give me leave now to inform you, that these opinions render you all Traitors, guilty of Treason of State, perduellionis rei, obnoxious to be punished as Traitors by an Authority lodged in Parliament, in the Constitution of the Government.  
You yourselves must needs condemn yourselves to have forfeited all your own, who hold such Principles that tend to destroy every man's Right, by resolving all things into the absolute pleasure of a Monarch; in which you mostly disserve the King, and are contrary to his Majesty's late Declaration. The men of these Principles, the less of the Government they are entrusted with, the better; for the less they have to give up and betray. I confess, if I could believe that this Doctrine was become Orthodox among them, and the prevailing opinion of the Clergy. I should conclude us to be the most unhappy people under the Sun. This is an Hypothesis indeed, that will bring on new Heavens and a new Earth; but such wherein no Peace or Righteousness can ever dwell. But I deem all such as are Defenders and Promoters of it, do deserve a civil Excommunication, more smarting than their Ecclesiastical: and to be condemned to live upon, and only feed themselves with their thin and crude Speculations. To be excluded from any share of that Government that they professedly in their Principles betray. To be punished as seditious persons, and most mischievous Schismatics, far more intolerable in this matter, than the scrupulous Brotherhood, for their boglings at an indifferent and insignificant Ceremony. For that to the ruin of our Religion, and destruction of the public Peace, they divide from that Polity, to which by drawing here their first breath, they made Faith; and to which the condition of their birth doth oblige them; they falsify that which Arrian in his Epictetus calls the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, than which nothing is more sacred and inviolable.  
By creating themselves a new Allegiance, and obtruding it upon their fellow-Citizens, and Members of the same Kingdom, they set up a Kingdom within a Kingdom, more dangerous and mischievous than the Papal Imperium in Imperio; which certainly will be introduced, if this Modern and monstrously-extravagant opinion can prevail by a general Credence.  
It is criminal, and no less dangerous to the being of any Polity, to restrain the Legislative Authority, and to entertain Principles that disable it to provide remedy against the greatest mischiefs that can happen to any Community. No Government can support itself without an unlimited power, in providing for the happiness of the people: No Civil establishment but is controulable and alterable to the public weal. Whatever is not of divine Institution, aught to yield and submit to this power and Authority.  
The Succession to the Crown is of a civil nature, not established by any Divine Right. Several Kingdoms have several Laws of Succession; some are Elective, others Hereditary, under several Limitations. All humane Constitutions are made cum sensu humanae imbecillitatis, under reasonable exceptions of unforeseen accidents and emergencies that may happen in humane affairs; and so they must be intended, and so interpreted. The several limitations of the descent of the Crown, must be made by the people in conferring the Royal Dignity and Power, which is more or less in several Kingdoms. And the descent of the Crown in particular cases, is governed according to the presumed will of the People; and the presumption of the People's will, is made by measuring and considering what is most expedient to the public good; whereas private Estates are directed in their descent according to the presumed will of the Decedents. And this is the reason tha● the descent of the Crown is governed by other rules than private Estates. Only one Daughter, and not all, as in private Estates, shall succeed to the Crown, because the strength of the Kingdom is preserved when continued united, and the peace and concord of the people better established. A son of the second venture shall inherit, which is not allowed in private Estates; because a son of the second venture is equally of the blood of the great Ancestor, upon whom the Crown was first conferred by the people, or after he had got into the Throne obtained their Submissions, and may equally participate of his virtues.  
If the Royal Family be extinct, it belongs to the people to make a new King, under what limitations they please, or to make none; for the Polity is not destroyed if there be no King created; and consequently, in case of this cesser or discontinuance of the Regnum, there may be Treason committed against the people. By all which it is evident, that the Succession to the Crown is the people's right: And though the Succession to the Crown is Hereditary, because the people so appointed it, would have it so, or consented to have it so; yet in a particular case, for the saving the Nation, the whole Line, and Monarchy itself, it may be altered, by the unlimited power of the Legislative Authority. We have been more just to the Royal Succession, than the wonderful Sir Robert Filmer; for his Hypotheses will not allow at all of Hereditary rightful Succession: For he, establishing the right of the universal Empire of the World in Adam's right Heir, since this Illuminato hath enlightened the world in this secret, no Successor can, according to his Doctrine, derive any hereditary right from his Predecessor. His title can be only his own possession; for no man can claim by descent the Usurpation of his Father, but he that is not conscious to the wrong, and is bonae fidei possessor, under the presumed right and title of his Father. I would be understood to speak as the matter can be considered in a free reason, not under the prejudice of any positive municipal Law; for to such Laws the right of Crowns, as the renowned Knight will have it, are not submitted.  
So that here in this matter their Knight fails them, and can give them no help. Their other friend, the great Leviathan-maker, is so far from establishing an Hereditary Succession, that he leaves Kings to be rightfully assaulted, deposed, and destroyed by any person that can, who stands in danger of being destroyed by the King, though justly condemned to death; Leviathan, Part 2. cap. 21. Those (saith he) that have committed a capital Crime for which they expect death, have the liberty to defend themselves by Arms, as well as the Innocent. But I mention him only to render him detestable; for I take his Books to be the dehonestamenta humani generis.  
But I desire them to regard the sense of all Mankind, in the words of Isiodorus Pelusiota, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. This governed the Judicious and Learned Dr. Falkner; for when he had carried Christian Loyalty as high as he could, to the honour of our Religion and the benefit of the world, for which we are all extremely beholden to him, he concludes thus in his excellent Book, called Christian Loyalty, (viz) That if any Prince undertakes to alienate his Kingdom, or to give it up into the hands of another Sovereign Power, or that really acts the Destruction, or the Universal Calamity of his people; Grotius thinks that in his utmost extremity, the use of a Defence, as a last refuge, ultimo necessitatis presidio, is not to be condemned, provided the care of the Common Good be preserved. And if this be true, saith he, it must be upon this ground, that such attempts of ruining do ipso facto include a disclaiming the governing of these persons as Subjects, and consequently of being their Prince or King. What unreasonableness is there then in shutting the Door upon him, and making it fast against him by an Act of State, who hath excluded himself by his principles and designs? For the truth of the fact, I shall only refer you to his Secretary Coleman his Letters, wherein he saith, That his Master's interest, and the King of France his interest, is one and the same, and their design, their glorious design, the same, (viz) the extirpating the Northern Heresy. How far the King of France hath complied with the design, the cruel Persecution and Exiles of his Protestant Subjects (who at the time of that Letter were under the security and protection of the Laws of that Kingdom, and the Faith of that Crown) do declare to the world. And by what secret influences I know not, he is made so great, his Conquests so easy and expedite, that he is like to do the work himself here in England too, and go away with all the Glory. But if the work must lie upon our hands, let no man think with himself that Popery is not to be introduced here, because the numbers of Papists are few; for that will not render the design impracticable, but the execution of it more cruel and barbarous; a whole Nation upon the matter must be corrupted from the Faith of the true Religion, or destroyed. One single arm of an ordinary strength, not resisted, may assassinate a whole Nation.  
Let no man betray his Country and Religion, by pretending the example of the patience and sufferance of the Primitive Christians for our rule.  
The Reformed Religion hath acquired a civil right, and the protection of Laws: if we ought not to lose our Lives, Liberties, and Estates, but where forfeited by Law, we ought much rather not to lose them for the profession of the best Religion, which by Law is made the public National Religion. And it is strange that some men of the same Religion in profession, can think (that notwithstanding) it makes no matter what is done to men if they be Religious; but if they be not so, the least public injuries and injustice threatened or done them may be resisted, vindicated, remedied, and by right defended by old Laws, or new ones to be made for that purpose.  
The Christian Religion was published when the whole world was Pagan, and therefore it was submitted to such usage as the Governments would give it. But when the Christian Faith had by miracles of patience declared itself to be of Heaven, and of a divine Original; according to the Prophecies on that behalf, it took possession of the Empire; Crowns and Sceptres became submitted to the Cross; The Christians acquired a civil right of Protection and Immunity, which they ought not, they cannot relinquish and abandon, no more than they can destroy themselves, or suffer Violence and Cruelty to destroy the Innocent. Such as thus perish, shall never wear a Martyr's Crown, but perish in the next world for perishing in this. This will be interpretatively Crucifying Christ afresh after he is received up into Glory, i. e. after his Religion is exalted into Dignity, and Honour, and civil Authority. If the Senate of Rome had been Christians, they would never have given up the Government to a Pagan Augustus, with a power to him and his Successors to make Laws for extirpating the Christian Faith.  
What is said of the Christian Religion and Paganism, holds between the Reformed Religion and Popery.  
If any man is so vain, as to say, that an unalterable course of Succession to the Crown is established amongst us by Divine Right: I say, he is a man fitted to believe Transubstantiation, and the infallibility of the Pope; he is deeply lapsed into Fanaticism, he dreams when he is awake, and his Dreams are Dreams of frenzy. There are some things so false, that they cannot be disproved, as some things are so evidently true, that they cannot be proved. This Proposition hath no colour to ground itself upon, no medium to prove it, no argument for it which is to be answered; nor is there any thing more absurd than itself, to reduce it to. But if any shall add, that this Doctrine is the Doctrine of the Reformation, and adventure to tell the people so; they are the most impudent falsaries that ever any Age produced; when there is scarce a Child but hath heard what was done, said, and maintained by the Clergy of England in the Case of Mary Queen of Scots, a Popish Successor, in the earliest time of our Reformation here in England.  
Our Age is blessed with a Clergy renownedly Learned and Prudent: By the Providence of God, and the Piety of our Ancestors, they possess good, though not to be envied, Revenues and Honours.  
It is scarce possible they should have many among them that can countenance a proposition so wickedly impious and sacrilegious, That we cannot have new Laws for the preservation of our Religion, but must lose the old at the pleasure of a Popish Successor, against not their own interest, and the Rights of the Church, but against the Rights and Liberty of Religion itself. For she is capable of Franchises and Immunities, which ought above all things to be most zealously asserted and defended by her Ministers. Can they themselves with their own hands ever pull down her Hedge and destroy her Defensatives, and expose her helpless to the rage of her implacable Enemies, and suspend all the Legal security she hath for her preservation, upon the Life of our present King, whom God long preserve? If Kings be admitted to have a power to make Laws, one Proclamation may establish the Popish Religion amongst us; which the Papal Bulls, so long as that See continueth, will never be able to effect.  
Next to Religion herself, the Revenues of the Church challenge their faithful care, for they are at best but Usu-fructuary trusties of her Endowments for the Succession, which they will wretchedly betray to an Arbitrary Successor, if they do not repress such Opinions that pretend to change the Government into an absolute jure Divinity Monarchy, which will leave nothing jure divino but itself and the Popedom. Kings for their so doing have the authority of Sir Robert Filmer, who affirms in his Treatise called the Power of Kings, Fol. 1. That the Laws, Ordinances, Letters Patents, Privileges and Grants of Princes, have no force but during their Life, if they be not ratified by the express consent, or at least by the sufferance of the Prince following, who had a knowledge thereof. This is but the necessary consequence and result from the Doctrine of the absolute power of a Prince: for in such Government the Concessions of a Predecessor can no more oblige the Successor, than he can Govern when he is dead; and the Successor must be absolute in his time, as the Predecessors were in theirs. But in vain is the Net spread in the sight of any Bird; this deceit is of so gross a thread, that it cannot pass with the common people, much less upon our Clergy.  
But I will not dissemble what may be the true reason of the seduction of some young good-natured Gentlemen of the Clergy.  
It is thus they persuade themselves, that if these principles and opinions of the Unlimited Power of Kings had been received, the late Wars had been prevented: Not rightly considering, that if such opinions had never been broached, or Universally rejected, that War could never have ensued; and we should together with peace have enjoyed our ancient Government which our Ancestors transmitted to us, without that miserable inter-regnum.  
I would not be perversely understood by any man, as if I went about to justify our late War: This is all I say, that every Government once established will continue for ever, if all the parts of it would unalterably consent to preserve it, to which their natural Allegiance doth oblige them: And never any Prince endeavoured to change the Government, but where part of the people were first willing, or content to have it so.  
Those false flatterers that go about to remove the boundaries of power, and change the Government, are the greatest enemies to the quiet and happy Reigns of Kings, and the peace and prosperity of Kingdoms.  
And if they do adventure to call their fellow-Subjects by any opprobrious names of disloyalty, because they will not join with them in such change, they are as absurdly impious and insolent, as any Prince or State would be, who should challenge another, as free and absolute as himself, for his Tributary and Vassal; and traduce him for a troubler of the World, because he would not Compose the Quarrel, thus injuriously sought, with the surrender of his Crown and Dignity.  
I desire these Gentlemen to consider, that the happiness of a Nation is best supported with Truth and Justice: This new Doctrine is not true; and whosoever entertains a belief of it, is not only barely mistaken, but will be led by the mistake, into the most mischievous, impious, and sacrilegious injustice and treachery.  
It is very agreeable to a good man, to embrace a proposition with an easy belief, that offers the least seeming probability of a security against the miseries of War, by all means to be avoided. But this Doctrine of the Divinity of Kings, is most dangerous to the Peace of Kingdoms, for it is pregnant with Wars: Besides that it will give bad Princes, which sometime hereafter may be Born into the World, (for such there have been now and then) power to make their Reigns worse than War, and Plague and Famine to boot.  
The Panic fear of a change of the Government, that this Doctrine occasioned, and the Divisions it made among us, was the principal cause of the late War.  
It is not without reason, that, together with these new principles, revived since the Discovery of the Popish Plot, we have a perpetual din and noise of Forty one.  
Then that fatal War began, which proceeded to the destruction of the Prince, and ruin of the Church and State: The remembrance of it is the principal matter, that stuffs our weekly Pamphlets; and it is brought into common discourse, and grown so trival, that it is mentioned and heard without abhorrence and regret: And what Service this can be to His Majesty, I do not understand; much better it were, that the memory of it were utterly extinct and abolished for ever, except only in the Anniversary of that great Prince that so fell. Then, I say, and then only, is it fit to be remembered, when we are on our Knees to God Almighty, and in his presence affecting ourselves with sorrow and remorse, deprecating the like Judgements, and bewailing the National Sins that occasioned those: For notwithstanding, the Glories of that Great Prince his unhappy death, and the admired Devotions of the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, The story of the Calamities of his people, (all his three Kingdoms involved in War during his Reign) and the remembrance of them, will be with some Men not very Loyal, a stain and diminution to the Glories of the Royal Family. In Princes, their Calamities are reckoned amongst the abatements of their Honour; and mere misfortunes are disgraces, and have the same influence upon the minds of the common people, as real faults and male administrations.  
How then can this tend to the peace of the Nation, or the Honour of the King? what satisfaction is it to have our almost-healed wounds, thus perpetually rubbed and kept green?  
— Quis sua vulnera victus  
commemorare velit—  
Why should any of our Nation insult over the miseries of his own and neighbour Kingdoms, when he must be the most barbarous villain, and have devested himself of all humanity, that is not deeply empassioned at the remembrance of them? If a Thuanus, or a Philip de Comines were to pass a Judgement of the condition of our late times, upon the consideration of our late Tragedies, and the Preludium's to it in the Reigns of King James and the late King; it would be form and pronounced in these words of Tully, upon another occasion:  Mihi quidem, si proprium & verum nomen vestri mali quoeratur, fatalis quoedam calamitas incidisse videtur, & improvidas hominum mentes occupavisse, ut nemo mirari debeat humana consilia divina necessitate esse superata. 
But this is not all, 
— Nec Dum finitur Orestes.   
We are affrighted by the weekly Pamphlets, with the expectation of another Parliamentary War; and this is the true reason of the mention of the late War, that we may forgo our Parliaments for fear of another. So it is written in our public Prints, which are published under permission, as if Parliaments are designed to be rendered hateful, and to be feared as Plagues, Famines, or Inundations of the Sea.  
But who is to begin, who designs this War, the Pamphleteers, or those that set them on work, best know: We had never heard of any such thing, if the Mercenary writers of the Popish Faction had not told us of it, as they do weekly: and hitherto we cannot find any Colour for this affrightful Lie; they are impudent so to talk of it as if they believed it, and have brought some as weak men, as they are false Knaves, to a belief of it: But to do them no wrong, those may best know what is to come to pass, who have the power of contriving and designing.  
Qui pavet vanos metus veros fatetur.  
The vilest Traitors cannot contrive a greater prejudice to the King and his Family, than by advancing such a dismal thing into credit and belief: for fears, though but upon imaginary and false grounds, produce real effects, as well as they are in themselves really afflictive; and that almost equally, if of continuance, to the evils feared. Do these men speak like true Loyalists, that are mentioning perpetually the Calamitous War in the time of our King's Father, and fright us with another now ensuing; after those Universal, Solemn, and hearty Joys of the whole Nation for his Restauration, after so many Millions of Money most dutifully issued out of the affections of his people from time to time at His Majesty's Royal pleasure, and nothing complained of, but that they have not opportunities of issuing ten times more, to the service of His Majesty's Glory? Nay, they speak of this ensuing War, as if the Royal Standard was already displayed, and the Rebels had made their Musters; which must certainly affect the Royal Family with the greatest danger.  
If there were twenty Trajans derived from one stock, that had Reigned in an uninterrupted Succession, Two immediate Successors, that should have their Reigns successively attended with civil Wars, were enough to efface their own, and the glories and merits of such Ancestors. But base Caitiffs, you can no more truly believe the last Parliaments designed upon his Majesty's Crown and Dignity, to make War, and change the Government, than you can believe that every Mother's Child of them, before they came up to the last Parliaments, set his House on fire and burnt his Wife and Children.  
But these impudent Forgeries against the House of Commons, are contrived to make the people afraid of Parliaments: that this new model of Government in process of time, when we have an enterprising Successor, may take place, for the service of the Popish Religion. For upon the strength of Dr. B— s performance, who hath with great labour found out (which is hard for any man acquainted with our English History to be ignorant of) that our Parliaments were not always such as now constituted: This blessed change of our Government will never be achieved. The Nation will never be persuaded, by any thing that he hath found out in his diligent research, that the House of Commons is an overgrown Wen, an unnatural Accrescency to the Government, and fit to be cut off, if that which is offered in the Argument to consideration be duly weighed. Neither can the most insolent Paradox of Sir Robert filmer's Patriarcha, contribute much to this purpose. But for that I have in my Argument too forwardly despised it, considering that many have conceived a favourable opinion of it, that it may be able to deceive but a very few for the time to come; for the sake of such Gentlemen who have not chosen their side, are glad of the least Colour or dream of a Shadow, a single opinion of any body, it matters not whom, to relieve their modesty in their notorious defections from Truth, Justice and the Government; I shall here consider his Hypothesis, especially for that it was reprinted, and is magnified by the Factors for the Popish Plot.  
And first, I will draw it out shortly, in all its strength, and make it more argumentative than he hath left it, (for he hath left his willing Readers to find out the Argument, and to make the Conclusion.) Adam, saith he, was the Father of Mankind; that to him as Father, belonged an Absolute dominion over all his descendants; that all Men being so born, are born under subjection to such an Authority: This Authority so reserved upon us by God, and the condition of our birth, and the manner of coming into the World, is to be submitted to, in the person of the present King, who by becoming King, is for that reason vested with this Absolute Authority. This power, and the duty of our subjection to it, results from our being Born, and coming into the World, after the manner of men. This power of Kings is grounded (by him) merely upon this natural resultance, and not from any positive and express Revelation from God, for such, neither we, nor he, yet ever heard of.  
We will now then consider, what there is of weight in this fictitious Reason of Government, in which the World is so lately illuminated by this Speculator; what force there is in it to unravel all Models of Government that are framed in the World, to confound Kingdoms and Nations, and to give Warranty to the bringing upon us all the miseries that are designed by the Papists for us; which we are to be prepared to suffer, with most conscientivos patience, from the comforts and supports of this insolent and vain pretence.  
I appeal to the Reader of him, whether in thus stating his Doctrine, I have not made it more Argumentative and concluding to his purpose than he left it: I will take this method of remonstrating the futility of his Hypothesis,  
By considering what a Father is, and what his Duty towards, and Power over his Children; in which it will be found, that nothing of Empire belongs to him as Father; that no more belonged to Adam over his Children, than did to any of his Children over their own.  
That the Authority of Parents over their Children, continues together with Sovereign power, and is not at all abated by it; and that it cannot be the same, because it continues entire with it.  
That there is no footsteps in the Records of the Old Testament, to verify his Hypothesis; that we could not have wanted some Declarations about it from God, (if true) it being a matter so necessary for us to know. That no claims were made, (that we know of) to any such authority in the earliest times, when the Right was unprejudiced, and must have been best understood, and could not have been forgotten, as now it is utterly.  
Besides that it was never used. The first Histories Recorded in the Bible, make every Child of the common Ancestor alike independent and absolute, and so it would for ever have continued: And to this day we should have been in the state of Nature, and not United in any Government, and so no King yet in the world, notwithstanding the Paternal Authority. That his Instances of exercising Sovereign power by the Fathers of Families, are not concluding, and to his purpose.  
That admitting Adam had while he lived been Universal Monarch, (yet if there be no other reason and Foundation of Monarchy in the World, but this of Sir Robert Filmer) Adam's right Heir not being known, (and if he were, might perhaps be an Idiot or Lunatic, some Cobbler or Butcher under a Stall, or mean Person unfit to govern) we can have no rightful King in the World: for certain it is, that there is nothing in the World so personal as Relations, and the duties and Rights that do result from them: For they are neither assignable to, nor can be exercised or exacted by and between any persons, but the Relatives themselves: So that this power of Sir R. F. hath no foundation of reason in the nature of things, was in Fact never exercised, and is now utterly fallen to the ground, and all Government with it. A more puzzled, vain, senseless and unlearned Paradox, was never yet offered to the world, nor a thing more mischievous ever received. For first, the absolute Power of a Prince over his Subjects, is not at all connatural to the dutiful Care of a Father over his Children.  
It was the good pleasure of God that this part of the immense world should be planted with men endowed with a Capacity to admire his Power, Wisdom and Goodness, and therefore to render him praise and worship: He designed that we should be happy in our own enjoyments, and promote the happiness of each other; which is not to be performed, but by a mind serene, beneficent, and loving. He provided that the disseminations of Love should run parallel, and be under alike necessity with the propagation of our kind. For the planting Love in our Nature, he instituted Marriage for Procreation, that we might owe our Being to the state of the greatest and most agreeable friendship, and tenderest affection. That for many years we should be educated by a pure, single, and undesigning love of our Parents: and the friendship of that conjugal State, should be maintained by, and principally exercised in, their common care of their Issue.  
Every Act of Love of either of the Parents to the Child, being the best instance of love to the other of them; an endearment of a reciprocal love, and a provocation to the like love and care of the Child. And for this love the Children naturally pay a return of an affectionate honour to their Parents; and by that honour which we so naturally render our 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, our Earthly gods, we are initiated, trained up, and instructed devoutly to worship our heavenly Father. God did likewise ordain, and so it was, that all Mankind should derive from one stock, be made of one blood, and every Man every Man's Brother, of the same Family and cognation. By this it was provided by the Father of us all, that we should be born into the World, under the tenderest care for our preservation, and improvement of our Nature; be powerfully inclined to love and beneficence; whereby we may be pleased with ourselves, and at Peace and Amity with our whole kind; and disposed to celebrate the infinite Wisdom and Goodness of our almighty Creator, with most affectionate Praises.  
That the Generations of Mankind might certainly proceed, God planted in our Nature's powerful and irresistible instincts to procreation, which the Jews call a Precept, though after this no Precept seemed necessary, for increase and multiply they make a Command. But we follow our own propensions, and have no conscience of obedience to a Law, when we observe and follow them; which are so strong, pleasurable, and entertaining, that if God had not planted a restraint of Modesty in our Natures, and a sense of decency, we should  the business, and degrade ourselves from the dignity of our Natures.  
Thus far the Parents are fulfilling Gods appointments, and gratifying their own Natures. What from all this can give them a right over their Child? All men coming into the world this way, are no less free, than if they had been formed in Lucretius his Bottles, and dropped out of his imaginary matrices, and we were all 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 & Aborigines.  
In this they are only executing the appointment of God, are but his Instruments to bring us into this World, and are all along rewarded and entertained, and caressed by the order of Nature. Adam owed this duty to God his Father; and so ordered it was, that he owed it to himself, and to his own natural propensions, pleasures and satisfactions to propagate.  
The several succeeding generations of men, as soon as they are men, have as much Right to the enjoyment of themselves, to the freedom of their own Will, and to live by their own measures, as Adam himself had. Our Parents do not give us life, but hand it to us from the Fountain of being, the Universal Father of all things.  
Vitai Lampada tradunt.  
And this is allowed, acknowledged by all Mankind: for assoon as Children can Govern themselves, we declare them free, that they are sui juris, they are extra familiated, and become themselves Fathers, and acquire to themselves.  
The Jews, who had a Kabala of the truest and most ancient Theology and Morality, best understood their own Laws, and were furnished with the knowledge of what Power and Authority Fathers had over their Children, whether by nature, or by virtue of the fifth Commandment, did take their Sons to be ipso jure, Emancipated and suoe potestatis, as soon as they were pubertatis plenoe: The time of which they reckoned, at the farthest, when they were 13 years, 3 months and one day old. And therefore whereas it was one of the Laws of Moses, Deut. 21. v. 18, 19, 20, 21. That the stubborn and Rebellious Son, at the Complaint and prosecution of the Father and Mother, was to be judged to be stoned to death; They say a Son was not under this Law until he was 13 years and one day old: for until that time he was not Filius proecepti, not bound to any Laws: As not until that time presumed of competent discretion, consideration, or conscience, to make him a Transgressor, or Breaker of a Law. But three Months after, they reckoned him completely adult, upon a general Presumption: when (and sooner, if he were sooner adult) he was free from the Power of his Father, and could not incur the mentioned Law, which condemns the rebellious and stubborn Son to be stoned to death. Maimonides Tract. Memarim. But the Father who struck the Son, after he was adult (the Jews tell us) incurred Excommunication, for that he offended therein against the Law, Levit. 19.14. Thou shalt not put a Stumbling-block before the Blind: By which Precept they understand all things indecent and dishonest to be forbidden. By which it doth appear, that the Jews did not take their Children to be longer under the authority of their Fathers, than until they commenced, in the soon account, Men. Besides, that Law of Deut. Chap. 21. seems to be only a permission of an unnatural kind of severity to the offended Parents, at whose suit only the punishment of that Law could be inflicted; such a sort of permission and liberty it was, as was indulged to them in the matter of Divorce.  
But that which hath imposed upon this Gentleman, I believe, is, for that while they are to be educated, Parents exercise an Authority over their Children, which a sour Father may imagine to be Power. This I believe gave the Gentleman his mistake, because he saith a Child and a Slave doth not differ; which is a shrewd indication that he was something too masterly over his Children. But all equal parents know and understand, that the Education of their Children is duty and care; and it may, not improperly, be called a Sort of Generation-Work.  
For I pray let it be considered, That the foetus is not perfected assoon as it is extruded the Matrix, no not until it be able to perform, unassisted, all the Actions of its proper life. That the life of a man is a life of Reason. That he cannot do the Acts of a man until he hath it in the exercise of it. He is not a perfect foetus, so as to be neglected by his parents, as soon as he can feed himself: the man after this may miscarry; and after this, if exposed by his parents, and not continued under their care, be abortivated. Education is a kind of Incubation. Our faculties are to be form and drawn out into use, as well as our body to be organised, before we can be denominated men. While this is accomplishing, the parents are but executing the natural instinct of propagating their like; until they have made them men, they are not begotten in their own likeness. They therefore with an easy propension, and a natural care, do apply themselves to offer things to their observation, to furnish their Memories, to try their judgements in little Essays, to render them discursive, to draw out their faculties into use, until by little and little they arrive at discretion, and a power to form true judgements of what belongs to them; and to govern themselves in such Affairs and businesses that are to employ them.  
But while this is a doing, they are under a Government of love and care, by the Arts of Discipline to be trained up to perfection. Several freakishnesses and caprices are to be cured, and the strength and luxuriancies of several natural Appetites are to be abated and restrained; and they are to be held to attention and observation, and made patiented of instruction: Correction is to be administered to these purposes, and by these measures: But this duty of Correction doth not participate any thing of the Nature of Civil Government. It hath nothing of the Nature of punishment, exemplarity, or vindicative Justice.  
It is not for the gratifying of the Parents displeasure to secure him against wrong or injury, to deter others, but to amend, improve, and better the Child, and always terminated to, and directed to that end; and by those measures it is tenderly and affectionately administered.  
It will not be impertinent to observe, that our Common Law had no opinion of any Sovereign Authority in a Father. And also that the Statute of 25 E. 3. which declares petty Treasons as well as high Treasons, doth not declare the Sons killing the Father to be Treason, though Treason it is for a Servant to kill his Master. In which we have the Authority of our Parliament, and of the constant opinion of our Judges. That the nature and relation of a Father and a Son, doth not favour any thing of Government, or of a servile or Political subjection; For that they have not made Parricide Treason, though it is the most unnatural and most detestable Crime, and a far greater sin than that of killing a Master.  
But further, to clear the true notion of a Father's Authority, that it is duty and care, not Empire and absolute will; Let it be considered, that God by his right of Creation hath an absolute, plenary, and direct dominion over us; we are more his than we are our own, or than any thing can be ours. Yet when he was pleased, of his gracious condescension to our capacity, to quiet our fears of his power, and to invite our love, and assure our hope, he did declare himself our Father, thereby to assure us, that he would not rule us pro imperio, and according to his absolute right he had over us. That stile he himself delights to use, and gives us leave to call him our Father; by which we all understand, that he will not proceed with us according to his Right of absolute domination, no not in the terms of strict Right and Political Justice: But that he will consider our frame, pity our infirmity, correct us as his Children, but not punish us with an exterminating Justice.  
Amongst the Romans anciently no man was admitted a Judge in Criminal Causes, but he that was a Father of Children; that the severities of a Judge, might be abated by the tenderness of a Father; that he who had Children of his own, might have the more pity to those of others; so different is the Office of a Judge, from the natural duty and tenderness of a Father. It is the greatest violence that can be done to Nature, to compel a Father to sit in Judgement upon his Son. Next to that of obliging and compelling a man to execute himself, to make it the Father's duty to pronounce a capital Sentence upon the Son, is the most unnatural thing in the World. The Father and the Son in this consideration are conjunctae personae; and when the Sin of the Father is visited upon the Son, the Son is afflicted, but the Father is punished; and when the Son hath the Question, the Father is taken to be confessed in tormentis silii.  
But for a further instance to make it appear how incompetent the duty of a Magistrate is with the Nature of a Father, I will observe, that notwithstanding a Law was given to Adam and all his Sons, to establish Judicatures according to the Tradition of the Jews, as may be seen in Mr. Selden his Book de jure Gentium secundum Hebraeos; which Law by the way had been supervacaneous, if the Power of a Prince did belong to Adam in the right of his Paternity, and a Government had been provided for them by their Birth. Yet, I say, notwithstanding that, there was such a Relaxation of Justice in the World before the Flood, because it could be only administered by a Father, or such who participated of the stock of love lodged in the common Father, from whom his Children did derive their tenderness one to another, as they themselves sprang from him. That the World was grown so wicked within two ages (as men then lived) from the Creation, that a Universal deluge was brought upon the World, by the just Judgement of God, for the outrageous and insufferable Wickedness that had spread itself universally over mankind, 8 persons only excepted. The overflowing deluge of Wickedness, that caused the deluge of waters, can't be imputed to a more probable cause, than to the indulgence and impunity that the observed and understood nearness of Kindred, that all men stood then in to one another must naturally occasion.  
This is a sad consequence of that natural Love in Parents towards their Children, which was intended for the propagation and advancement of Mankind. But since that now we are estranged one from another in remote and unknown degrees, and that prejudice is over; here is a Gentleman, to destroy the World another w●… and to undo us by unreasonable and un●…d power, (which is alike apt to make 〈…〉 fit for another Universal destruction, if it be not without more destroyed by it) doth endeavour to turn the exercise of such power into a Right, and to give it warranty from the Reason and way of our propagation; and by this means to destroy us faster than we can be born and bred, and impair the Generations of Mankind, to render them extremely miserable, or wicked, which is much worse; extinguish the light of the World, which is Love and Amity; and destroy the encouragement and reason of almost all relative Morality.  
What a Saturnine Father have we got, to make a golden Age! who ever would have thought, that the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, the most moving, kindest, most tender, pleasing, and beneficent instinct in Nature, planted by God the Father of us all, for the propagating, educating, and improving humane Nature, should ever be made use of to found a right of Tyranny, and Arbitrary domination, the greatest destroyer and depraver of Mankind? What Monster hath this last Age produced! a Christian, a Father, seriously endeavouring to persuade all Mankind to offer up their Children to Moloch the Saturn of the Easterlings, who was but the Devil of Tyranny, as the name imports!  
This 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, the true Origine and Fountain of Love and Amity, and the social Virtues which render men humane, from whence flows all the happiness of Mankind, will by this Doctrine be corrupted and rendered unsincere and self-designing. For when a Father performs an Act of Generation, it seems now he designs to add a slave to his Retinue; and when a Child is born, there is another Item added to the Inventory of his Estate. If this Fountain be corrupted, there can be nothing sincerely kind after it in Humane Nature. The Leviathan is outdone by this Gentleman, and hath not performed half so renownedly in the great Work of depraving Humane Nature, as our Patriarchal Knight will do, if his Admirers can bring him into vogue and esteem.  
For the Author of the Leviathan allowed something good in Humane Nature, several equal propensions, which he terms her Counsels, and sometimes adventures to call the Laws of Nature: But he concludes they are not practicable, and they are only fools who govern themselves by them.  
But this Gentlemen will not allow Nature to be good in her first institution and designment; though in this I think they are near agreeable, that Mr. Hobbs made the Pourtraicture of Humane Nature in an agreeableness to his own evil Ingeny; and this Knight did set himself: when he made this his draught of a Father, he could have no other Original but himself, or the Idea of the morose and sour Dr. P. H. his admired friend; but by his Character he had at least misfigured his understanding, and made it his own Nature by liking it.  
2ly. No more of authority belonged to Adam over his Children, than does to any of his Children over his; for that this Authority proceeds from Nature, and Nature is alike in all men. The duty of their education, and the Authority over them that is competent to that purpose, is as much belonging to them, and incumbent upon them, as upon the Protoplast. The duty is so personal, consisting 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, that it cannot be transferred, or permitted absolutely to any other person by the Parents; nor can any man challenge a right to it, or discharge the Father from it, or require the same affection, submission and reverence that is due from a Child to his Father.  
To expect relative duties without Relation, is most unnatural; it is as impossible as incongruous. We may as well love and hate, rejoice and grieve, without the proper object and incitements of those passions. The fundamental Rule of all morality, is that of Epictetus, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, (that is to say) by the State and Condition in which we stand, the relations and respects under which we are considered, our duties are determined, measured, and adjusted: upon which see Simplicius his Excellent Discourse, wherein many things are said agreeable to our purpose. This moral Aphorism is as certain as any proposition in Euclid, as the Doctrine of proportional Triangles, and received as such by all the Masters of Moral Philosophy. There is no other foundation of our duty to God or Man, or towards ourselves: This Rule, whatever it is, must declare it. Whatever is measured and allowed by this Rule, is commonly called, (which is comprehensive of all that is honest, just, and fit) 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. The application of this Rule is called by St. Paul 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, which when a man observes, he is perfectly moral. A man may as well pay his debts by giving away his Money, be grateful to his benefactor by being beneficent to strangers, as perform that duty he owes his Father, to any but he that is so: It is as impossible to separate the shadow from the Substance, as to make that subsist by itself, which grows by resultance from the state and condition of the person; or that without that state of the person, from which it doth arise, it should ever accrue.  
3ly. Admitting Adam had a Sovereign Authority over all his descendants, which must grow (if there was any such thing) from some positive institution, and not from his paternity, yet the natural Authority and Duty of Parents towards their Children, continues entire together with Sovereign Power, and is not at all abated by it, and therefore cannot be the same. No Sovereign Power can extort the Children from their Father's Authority and Care: This is a duty in Nature before Governments. They cannot belong to the Government, before they are filii praecepti, and capable of the Conscience of a Law. It is a duty in Parents to educate their Children, and a right they have in consequence to govern them, that cannot be taken from them. It is the Parents duty to form their Consciences. They are appointed by God, the great Ministers of his Providence and Grace to the Children. That they perform this Office, he hath tied them to it by the sweetest constraints and almost violences of Nature, by an  love and ties of Endearment that cannot be broken. This declares their Right of Authority over their Children, against any interposings of Sovereign Authority to its prejudice, let or hindrance. Thomas Aquinas positively determines, that it is not lawful for Christian Kings to baptise the Children of the Jews against the will of their Parents, for that (saith he) it is against the course of natural justice.  
4ly. Thereis no footsteps in the Records of the old world to verify this Hypothesis. That such Authority was so much as pretended to, used or exercised by Adam; but we find instances against it in the short History before the Flood. Cain received no sentence from Adam his Prince and Sovereign Judge, but from God himself, or rather from his Shecinah, or some visible Representation of his presence.  
Thence he obtained some degree of impunity, and his life protected. No mention here at all of Adam his taking the Tribunal, or cain's arraignment, or of any pardon or indulgence granted by King Adam. Lamech that had killed a man by mischance, did not allege his case at his Father Adam's Court, and the matter of extenuation of the Man-killing; we hear of no pardon of Course to be allowed, when the circumstances of fact had been first judicially considered.  
How could a thing of such importance be omitted in the story of the old World, though so short? It was of more concernment, than to know that Tubal Cain was the first Smith, and Jubal the first man that made a Musical instrument, to know the original nature and reason of Government.  
Besides, we find all the grandchildren of Noah becoming Princes of Countries, and the Sons and grandsons of Esau alike Dukes and Princes; that is, at least absolute Fathers of their own Families, and ruling over such as were their slaves and dependants.  
And the 12 Sons of Jacob are all called Patriarches.  
When Nimrod played the Tyrant, we find nothing said for his justification, upon any Patriarchal right.  
But if we consult the Traditions of the Jews, they will inform us of another original of Government, and that is this: They say that God gave several Precepts to Adam and his Sons, and Noah and his Sons, and one amongst the rest, that they should erect Governments, which his Sons could not have performed without Rebellion against their King-Father, if Adam had been so, as Sir Robert Filmer first dreamt.  
Also besides that of making Governments, there was a Precept given them of honouring their Parents, Selden de jure Naturae secundum Hebraeos, fol. 792. And therefore the Precept of honouring Parents, is a distinct duty from that of obedience to Governments. By this Precept they had Authority in general to establish Governments amongst themselves, in the specification of which, they were left to their own liberty and discretion, and therefore were not obliged to any single form of Government. It must be understood, that the Precept which required the Sons of Adam and Noah to establish Governments, required also every man's Submission to their Orders, Laws, and Decrees, when established.  
Lastly, We will consider of the instances he gives of the Exercise of Sovereign Power by Fathers of Families, which are as impertinent to his purpose, as his Doctrine is groundless and precarious: But they are these: Abraham's War, and Judah's Judgement upon Thamar.  
As to the first, of Abraham's making War; We say we cannot allow that making War doth argue any Sovereign Authority: It is sufficient, that he who makes it is under none to make a vindicative War lawful. For an injured Person may, in the State of Nature, vindicate wrongs by an Authority derived from God and Nature to a just satisfaction: Because there is no competent Judicature to appeal to for right and redress. But see how unhappy the Gentleman is! This very instance of his production, is clearly against him: For if Sovereign Power had been Patriarchal, Abraham had been guilty of Treason, in making War without a Commission from Melchizedech the King of Salem, who, as the Learned men conjecture, was Shem his Patriarch and Chief, and known by him for such. But because Abraham, the best man perhaps in any Age, did not take a Commission from Melchizedech his Patrialchal chief, and yet he was blessed by Melchizedech when here turned from the War; We may conclude, that neither Melchizedech nor Abraham knew of any such Patriarchal Sovereignty. And also from this great Example it appears, that it is lawful for him that is not a Sovereign, if he be not under any, to make War.  
I will not enter into a discourse, whence and how is derived the Authority of making War and capital Sentences, (for the same reason must warrant both) which hath puzzled some great Divines. Dr. Hammond, that great man, was at a loss in this enquiry, and thinks that nothing but a Divine Authority can warrant them, which hath put them upon strange extravagant Hypotheses of Government, and sent this Knights brains a Woolgathering. But this may satisfy any man of sense, That whatever is necessary for the general happiness of Mankind, and for preserving peace in the World, and protecting the innocent, and disenabling the mighty oppressors, is more commendable to be done, than the kill a man in his own defence is simply lawful.  
As to his second instance of Judah his Sentence pronounced upon his Daughter-in-Law Thamar, which the Knight would have an exercise of Patriarchal Sovereign Authority; we say, how could Judah do this by a Patriarchal Power, when Jacob his Father was then alive, and for all that appears, Judah his Son was not extrafamiliated? Besides, which is very unlucky, Thamar was then none of his Family, or of the Subjects of his Domestic Empire; for his Son her Husband being dead, she was free from the Law of her Husband, and ceased to be a Subject of his Paternal Kingdom. But Mr. Selden, under the Authority of some Rabbins, which he citys in his excellent Book before mentioned, fol. 807. saith, That Judah might have the Office of a Prince or Magistrate in a district in that Country, and by that Authority might judge her according to the Laws of that Country. But what the Law was, and the Nature and Reason of her Offence, by which it became Capital, is not understood, as he tells us in the place before-cited. I shall not trouble the Reader with unfolding the matter.  
But why doth he trouble himself to make Kings Fathers of their Countries? Some cannot be so, and some have no mind to be so; and yet they ought to be Kings. And some that have not been Kings, have been so, and so styled; as the great M. Tully, for defeating the Catiline-Conspiracy, was by decree of the Senate called Pater Patriae. Those are with reason truly called Patres Patriae, which either relieve their Country from miserable pressures, which is the civil death of a Nation; and for this reason our King hath the honour of being called Pater Patriae, and we hope that he will wear that honourable Title, upon a second deliverance of us from a most deplorable condition.  
Or else such are called Patres Patriae, who bring the Nation to an exalted state of happiness, so much beyond their old state of things, that they seem to give the Nation a new civil Life, Being, and Birth.  
For his etymological argument from the notation of the Word, it is too putrid to be insisted upon, though not more ridiculous than his Hypothesis.  
But for that the reduction of our duty to our King to the fifth Commandment, may seem to give some advantage to this Hypothesis, with Fathers who know no bounds of their power over their Children; It must be obsered, that the Decalogue is not a complete Rule of Morality. The Decalogue comprised the Principal Laws of that Commonwealth which God their Lawgiver by a most Solemn Act of his Legislation, did more awfully oblige them to observe.  
God that time was their King; Rebellion was as Idolatry; and the sin of Witchcraft, and the Defection of one of their Cities to Idolatry, was punished as a revolt and Rebellion, Deut. 13. v. 15. He had provided for his Honour and Worship, and their Allegiance, in the first Table; and did design by the fifth Commandment to lay the Foundation of all positive morality, by providing for a Reciprocation of kindnesses, by enjoining the gratitude and fitting returns of Children to their Parents, and by putting Children under obligations to be taught and instructed by their Parents. But our duty to Governors is more duly referred to all the other Commandments, because Government secures the observation of those Laws to us, by which we enjoy ourselves and ours, freed from the Volations of Lust, Appetite, Fraud and Violence.  
We do not honour our King by relief in his fortune, which is commanded to be done by our Parents in the precept of honouring them; our subsidies and Aids are not to that purpose, but contributions to the charges of the Government; they are the just price of our immunity and protection, from fraud and violence; for which cause pay we tribute.  
But whatsoever he be, that hath more respect for this Knights Works than I have, may find him more gently treated by a very worthy Gentleman, in a very candid and judicious Book called, Patriarcha non Monarcha.  
But what is the meaning of these flattering Books? they cannot but be nauseous to His Majesty, who is a very wise Prince, and knows how senseless such Books are: and besides, they make the People afraid, and the Nation unquiet, from the apprehensions they give, that the Government will be changed. Notwithstanding the King hath given such solemn assurance to the Nation by his late Declaration, That we shall have frequent Parliaments, and that he will govern by Law.  
They would have had a better market for the Divinity they bestow upon Princes, with Alexander after he had lost his Virtue, and with those vile Emperors whose Names are Regum opprobria, for such the flatterers of ancient times Deified: those who had ceased to be men they made Gods, and when they had left nothing about them that was tolerable, they magnified their power, which was already most intolerable.  
If the Kings hereafter would but read the History of Kings, under that conclusion, that a wise observer of Humane Events made after a long observation and experience, and would make Experiments of the truth of it in their own reading, Kings would be glorious, and the Nations they govern happy and full of peace. They would find therein so many effectual Documents to fear God and regard men, and govern them righteously. It is this: 
Si Vitam spectes hominum, si denique Mores,  
Artem vim fraudem, cunct a putes agere.  
Si propius spectes, fortuna est arbitra Rerùm.  
Nescis quid dicis, sed tamen esse putas.  
At penit us si introspicias, & ultima primis  
Connectas, solus rector in orb Deus.  Alciat.  
People can be no happier than Government and Laws design to make them, though they do not always answer the good designments of the Government.  
To what purpose then are these new Hypotheses framed and published? King's are exempted by their Office, and the sacredness of their persons, from all fears, but the fears of Nature, and these can never be discharged. Those who do ill, will fear ill eternally, though their power were made little less than omnipotent; for the frame of Humane Nature hath made it necessary to be so. Besides, God hath made one thing against another: There is a divine Nemesis interwoven in the nature of things. And God will always govern the World.  
Omne sub regno duriore regnum.  
The great  at his Inauguration swears, That his People shall be at peace at home, and victorious abroad, afflicted neither with Plague nor Famine, but enjoy Health and Plenty all his days.  
This seems extraordinary Pompous and Arrogant; but it means no more than this, that he will govern them so virtuously, that God's Providence shall be always propitious to his People; and is no more in plain English, than what our Church offers up in her public Prayers for the King, (viz.) That he may govern us in Wealth, Peace, and Godliness; that he may live long, and so govern us, aught to be every honest man's Prayers. But after all these vain Hypotheses contrived for making Kings Absolute, it will be more easy for Kings to make their Reigns unquiet, and turn their Kingdoms into Fields of blood.  
But lastly, to revive the ancient Zeal of the true Members of the Church of England against Popery: To rectify the mistakes of some Gentlemen of the Clergy about the Dissenters: And of our late Parliaments, and their proceed in reference to them;  
Let it be considered, how unreasonable their apprehensions are of any danger to the Church of England, from the desires of the House of Commons, of some indulgence or toleration in favour of the Dissenters at this time; especially when the Protestant Religion is so shrewdly beset: she hath reason now sure to take all such for her Friends, that are hearty Enemies to Popery, though not so skilful as they should be to ward off its assaults. Since the Papists presume to call them fanatics, though exactly conformable to the Church of England, that will not assist to bring on the Popish Plot by dis-believing it; and put us in fear of the fanatics, by taking all the courses imaginable to provoke and exasperate them, and to increase their discontents (which they maliciously heighten, and by falsehood and forgeries misrepresent:) To graft thereupon a Pretence of a Protestant Plot, for a pretext to extirpate Protestantism and introduce Popery, which they impudently pretend to be of a more firm Allegiance to the Government than the Reformed Religion.  
I pray let it be considered, that that which is tolerated is put under disgrace, even for that it is tolerated; and that which tolerates, even for that it tolerates, hath the governing Authority; and in so much as it indulgeth, it obligeth to modesty and reason; and if that indulgence should be abused, it may and will be retracted. It was never intended by the House of Commons, that the Church of England should be altered or modelled to an agreeableness to any form or sect of the Separation, or prescribed to by any of the Dissenters; or that she should be made subject to any of their rules or opinions, or her Liturgy laid aside for Directories, or, which is worse, undervalved to the profane way of extemporizing: For as generally used and exercised, it deserves no milder a stile. That the Church should always govern by her own Wisdom in her own Province, and in those things that appertain to her, can never be denied her.  
No man hath reason to say, though he hath great cause to dislike the Separation, and to have a bad opinion of the Dissenters, that he had rather submit to Popery, than to any form of the Separation, for he need do neither except he pleaseth. No man that thus expresseth himself, but will be suspected to seek an occasion and pretence to become a Papist, and to make a defection from the Church of England.  
But if these Gentlemen have such a displeasure against Schism and Separation (which certainly is the worst disease any Church can labour under, and at this time threatens the destruction as well of the Protestant Religion itself, as it doth to the Professors of all denominations) let this sharpen their Zeal against Popery (which by its unhallowed arts hath occasioned and exasperated our Schism,) and put them upon the use of all means to reconcile, if possible, the Schism, (that the Papists have already made, and by all means endeavour to continue) and take away, if possible, the occasion of it for the time to come: And thus defeat the Arts of the Priests and Jesuits for supplanting our Church.  
It is a most deplorable thing, that our Church should be kept rend and divided, in danger of being lost, between Rituality and Scrupulosity.  
Though the Scruples of the Nonconformists, which I always thought, and do still think groundless, and unreasonable, have often moved me into some passion against them; yet upon consideration, I think this their Scrupulosity may be of God, and that some men are by him framed to it. That he hath provided it, as a bar and obstacle in the Natures and Complexions of some devout men against any Innovations whatsoever, that dangerous ones may not steal upon the Church, for the better maintaining the simplicity and purity of the Christian Religion and Worship. But in saying this, I have said nothing that is apt to give them a conceit of themselves, but rather to humble them: For the best men are not governed by their Temper and Constitution, but correct them by their Reason, and determine themselves by a clear and him Judgement.  
What affrightment, all this while, either to Church or State, from this weak and pityable Scrupulosity? Where lies the Treason or Sacrilege, nay or so much as contumacy against our Ecclesiastical Governors, which is so much upbraided to them?  
The Christian Religion may be prejudiced by addition to, as well as substraction from her rule: The Church of Rome by her additions hath almost evacuated the Christian Faith.  
Besides, there may be a fineness in the outward mode of Religious Worship in itself very justifiable, which may be not congenial to men of a course make. The Worship of God will always favour of the manners of the people; men of dull capacity can scarce admit of any Ceremonies without danger of falling into superstition, or hardly escape being vexed with endless and incurable scruples about them, until for ease of their minds they throw them off.  
But the wisdom of the best Lawmakers hath considered in giving Laws, what the people would bear, and not what is best to be enjoined; and many things have been tolerated by them which they did not approve, Ne majoribus malis detur occasio, aut etiam ne vilescant sine moribus leges.  
There is nothing more exposeth the Authority of Government to contempt, than a public and an open neglect of its Injunctions. But where obedience to Laws is exacted under severe penalties, where it doth not greatly import the common good to have them observed, that Government is unequal, and useth its Authority unjustifiably. Leges cupiunt, ut jure regantur.  
The consideration of the sad effects the Schism in our Church hath occasioned, the contempt that it hath brought upon our Ecclesiastical Governors. That Religion itself is thereby made the scorn of Atheists. That the Papists are thereby furnished with matter of objection, reproach and scandal to the Reformation. That every Age since it begun hath heightened the malignity of the Schism. That it seems now to despise the Cure of the greatest Cassander's. These considerations, I say, make it infinitely desirable to have it utterly extinguished.  
There seems to be now left but one way of accommodating our Divisions, and that is, that we do not hereafter make those things wherein we differ matter and reason of Division.  
That the Children of the Light and Reformation, be at length as wise in this matter as the Church of Rome, which is at unity with itself, under more and greater differences than those that have troubled the peace of our Church; which is sufficiently known to all Learned men.  
Had it not been happy, that this Schism had been prevented by the use of the power of the Church in Ecclesiastical dispensations? If no Law had been made touching the matters that gave the first occasion to the Schism, it had been in the Power of the Church to have prevented it. No good Bishop but would have relaxed the Canons that enjoined these Ceremonies (about whose lawfulness there hath been so much Zeal misspent, and unwarrantable heat and contention raised) for the sake of peace, and preservation of the Unity of the Church, to men peaceable, and otherwise obedient to her injunctions. So dangerous it is to make Laws in matters of Religion, which takes the conduct of Religion in so much from the Guides of the Church.  
The beginning of contention is like the breaking out of waters, saith the wise man; and they are assoon as begun, more easily ended. Before the Contenders have exasperated one another with mutual severities and contumelies, which at every return increase, until both sides lose either their Virtue, or the Reputation of it.  
Can any man imagine that any prejudice can accrue to the Church of England, if she did enlarge her Communion by making the conditions of it more easy? especially if this may be done without annulling any of her institutions, which the better instructed Christians will always, and the Weak may in time devoutly observe. But till they can, they may be received and retained of her Communion, and not be rejected by her censures, though they do not submit to all of them at present. Will it be any prejudice, that the Number of her Bishops be increased, and that Suffragans be appointed or approved by the present Bishops, in partem sollicitudinis, as was enacted by the Statute 26 H. 8. cap. 14. Which Law was repealed by 1, 2 P. M. and revived by 8 Eliz. cap. 1. These Suffragans were not intended to participate of their Honours or Revenues. Had it not been much more eligible to have dispensed with invincible Scruples, rather than a Schism should have been occasioned, which the longer it continues will be more incurable, and with greater difficulty accommodated, as it grows likewise more mischievous? Is it fit that the peace should be hazarded, or the Nation put with reason or without reason in fear of it: Or a Kingdom turned into a Shambles for a Ceremony, or a Ritual in our public Worship, which if omitted would leave the exercise of it solemn and decent? For no man knows the obstinacy of inveterate prejudices, founded perhaps in the very Complexions and Natures of the Dissenters, hardened also in their way by observing how little effect Laws have had for reducing their Numbers, and also how unpracticable any Severity is in the present broken and distracted state of the Nation. Why may not Standing at the Sacrament be tolerated, (though Kneeling is the devoutest gesture, and to me most agreeable) when it is a posture of Prayer enjoined in the Primitive Church, in their solemn Meetings for Divine Worship, between the Feasts of Easter and Whitsuntide? Why may not the signing of the Cross in Baptism for the sake of Peace and Unity, be dispensed with where desired, when the Sacrament is entire without it? Why may not our public Liturgy be changed and altered, though it may be defended as it is, and as it is, entertains the devotions of the best men, merely for this reason, because it is not liked in some parts of it by some men, yet truly devout? Besides, it is the wish of some excellent persons of the Church of England, that our public Offices were more, and those we have not so long; and that the Church had a greater Treasury of Prayers, and by variety of Forms for the same Office, were enlarged in her spirit of Prayer, and her public Devotions heightened. Why may not the Rubric be altered as general scruples shall arise, by the Authority of the Church? this would not lessen her Authority, but advance the esteem of her Wisdom in the exercise of it, when she useth it for edification.  
It is much better sure to give place to an innocent opinion, when entertained by considerable Numbers, though a mistake, than to keep up contention and strife. Peace in the Church is better than precise and nice Orthodoxness; and Union is to be preferred before unnecessary Truth, which is of no more importance to our Salvation, than one of Euclids Propositions, though to be sure not so certain, and of less use.  
The business of the Church is not to make men great Clerks, to improve us to the subtlety of the Schools; but to build men up in the Faith and Love of God, by which they may be instructed to every good Work. Her aim is not to make men courtly in their behaviour in our Churches, but truly devout: and true devotion will never fail to make the Public Worship solemn, and advance it beyond a decent formality.  
But I would not be mistaken; it is not the Dissenters I intent to befriend, but the Church of England: for as for them, I declare I have no liking to any thing they say or do; and am especially dissatisfied with their very bad manners. It is difficult to abstain from an invective, but that I think it would be thrown away upon them, and that they are at present incorrigible. This is not the season for instructing their Wisdoms; we must wait for the mollia tempora fandi. I thus conclude, since that excellent person the Dean of Paul's hath been treated by them with such petulancies and rude insults, for his Sermon of the mischiefs of Separation. If a discourse managed with almost  reason, candour, temper and Address, be matter of exasperation, and they turn again, and are more hardened in their obstinacies, and become more confirmed in their separating way, nothing but their own thoughts, and the consideration in what a desperate condition they have brought the Reformed Religion by their Separation, will reclaim them.  
But it is expected that Governments should be wise, that they manage and control the Follies and Weaknesses of those committed to their care, that they may do the least mischief to themselves and others, and by prudent and practicable methods amend and reform them. The most froward, weiward, and stubborn Children give their Parents the most care, and opportunities of exercising the most tender love for them, though they can take no complacency in their awkerdness. The Church of England is concerned to retain all her Children in her Family, to shut out none by abdication; that their numbers be not few, and she be ashamed when she speaks with her Enemy in the Gate. Not to provoke any of them to wrath, lest they forsake her, and turn against her when distresses shall come upon her. She hath reason at this time sure to make her Discipline easy, and to learn of the Church of Rome to be more comprehensive. Their Doctrine of comprehension is so large, that it destroys the Religion to increase the number of Professors: but I mean no more, than that positive and alterable institutions may give place to the peace, security, and preservation of Religion itself, to whose service they were first framed and designed.  
It hath been heretofore, of old it hath been said, Mores Leges in potestatem pertraxerunt suam. Plato form an Idea to himself of a Commonwealth, without respect to the manners of men; but he writ another, which he calls, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is to say, accommodated and fitted to the manners of the people, and such as they would bear. Origen, in his Book against Celsus, applies to Moses the Answer of a famous Lawgiver, who asked, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, i. e. whether those Laws he had given to his Citizens were the best? the answer was, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, i. e. not simply the best, but the best they would bear. And we all know what God permitted to the Jews, in the matter of Divorce, for the hardness of their Hearts. When all is said, People must be governed as they can.  
But in the mean time, it is pity any of our zeal and indignation should be misspent, when we have use for it all against the Church of Rome, the source whence all our Divisions spring. To which we own the first Separations that were made in our Church; which appears by undeniable Records, published by Dr. Stillingfleet, in his Book called the unreasonableness of Separation. How they have propagated, multiplied, exasperated, and promoted our Divisions, to tell you, would make a Volume; besides, no Protestant is now to know it. I have only this further to observe, that the Church of Rome at first only designed by the Arts of dividing us, and breaking us into several Communions, to disgrace the Reformation, to make our spiritual Governors, Pastors, and Teachers, lose their Authority with the People: To deprave our Religion with licentious opiniastre, and absurd dogmatizing; to load our departure from that Church, with the mischief of innumerable Schisms; and to make us reconcilable to the Tyranny and Impostures of that Church, from the vain opinions and licentiousness of the Sectaries, who have been seduced, managed, inflamed, and made wild by their imposturous Arts and Deceits.  
This, I believe, was only at first designed by the Priests, but now they apparently design by the Dissenters to destroy the Church, or by the Church to destroy the Dissenters, that they more easily come to rights with her. They imagine the Dissenters are very numerous, and that the Nation is fallen into two great parts; that the Dissenters numbers are vast. But God be thanked, they neither make our Grand Jurymen, nor the common Halls of the City of London, for choosing the Lord-Mayors or Sheriffs. And I challenge any man to give me a List of all the Names of Dissenters that were of the House of Commons in our two last Parliaments: I am sure they will not make a Number: but they reckon the Numbers of Dissenters, by the care they have taken to increase it. They used great art to continue the Separation when His Majesty was restored: Since, Laws have been made to raise the Animosities of Dissenters, but scarce ever executed for repressing them. If for any reason of State the Laws here and there, and for a spurt, have been exacted, secret comforts and supports have been given to their Preachers of greatest Authority with them. And when they have seemed to preach with the courage and zeal of Confessors to their Auditors, they have not only been assured of indemnity, but have received rewards. How prosperously did the work of Separation go on by these Councils of our Achitophel's! by these means they concluded it would be heightened, that it would admit of no terms of an accommodation. How insolent were their Harangues! more taking with their deluded Auditors, while they apprehended them acted with an invincible zeal of Religion. What Animations did their People receive to defy the Church and her Authority, when their Preachers despised Fines and Imprisonment, to their seeming, out of pure zeal against her Order!  
It is well known, several of them were in Pension; and no men have been better received by the D. than J. J. J. O. E. B. and W. P. etc. Ringleaders of the Separation. Besides that Popish Priests have been taken and executed for preaching in Field-meetings in Scotland. They have raised there a sort of Enthusiasts more wild and mischievous than any we had amongst us in the times of licentiousness. They have had, notwithstanding, great Lords that have patronised them, who were always well received in their applications in their favour, at St. James'; and several of their Preachers, who were not Priests, have received Exhibition and Pensions for their encouragement. It was necessary that the Fanaticism planted in Scotland, should be very loathsome, to make that Nation abate any of their zeal for the Protestant Religion, or to neglect their fears and apprehensions of Popery, or to make the least step towards it.  
Awake, you drowsy Sleepers, open your eyes! the Sun is risen, there is light enough to fill your sight, if you would look up, and were willing to see. Can any thing be conceived more apt to bring the Church of England into contempt and scorn with those of the Separation, than to have Laws made in her favour, penal Laws which are thought to be of her procurement, and not executed? Vain and ineffective anger is always returned with contumely, scorn, and hatred: Cupid conculcatur nimis ante metitum. And so it hath succeeded in this case; nothing hath been more passable than the basest scurrility upon the Church, the Bishops, and the Clergy. The Atheist, the impious and profane, have listed themselves fanatics, that they might have the greater Liberty of reviling Religion itself with impunity.  
Consider how the Church of England is used, which is truly the Bulwark of the Protestant Religion. About ten years since, they designed to slight her works, and demolish her, by a general Indulgence and Toleration: And now they intent to destroy her Garrison, those that can and will defend her against Popery. By one of their Pamphleteers, the Separation is called an Usurpation upon the Government; and all the Dissenters (as such only) Rebels, and Traitorous to the King. The same Gentleman would persuade the world, that the ready way to extirpate Popery, is by rooting out of Fanaticism; whether (saith he) the fanatics bring on the Jesuits Plot, or the Jesuits the fanatics, is not a farthing matter: But in the mean time, that the Papists have a Plot on foot, needs no proof. That any sort of Protestants are engaged in a Plot, cannot be proved: But all honest Protestants of the Church of England, think it more righteous to punish the Deceivers, and pity the Deceived, and wish them only cut off that make Divisions. It is one way of curing, or rather of extinguishing the Disease, to kill the Patient; but no Prince did ever yet provide Cut throats for his People, in epidemical Diseases, instead of Physicians.  
But if the Papists could arm other Protestants against Dissenters, there would be the less work for Papists to do: And they will be sure to requite them for this Favour with Polyphemus his Courtesy.  
For, to give the Devil his due, they are not themselves so fond of Massacres and destruction of Heretics, as to envy that employment to any other that will undertake it. They had rather any other party of men should do the drudgery for them. Besides, what one sort of Protestants shall execute upon another, will give them better pretence and more hardiness (if they wanted either Pretence or Resolution to destroy such as they call Heretics) to execute the like destruction upon the Church-Protestants, who certainly differ more from the Papists, than the Separatists do from our Church. Surely there is good reason they should be more sharply treated by the Papists, than they treated the Dissenters. And if they are in such sort used, they must lay their hands upon their mouths, and be silent before their Persecutors, and acknowledge the righteous Judgement of God, in bringing such tribulation upon them, from their Enemies, wherewith they troubled their own Brethren.  
But there are better ways sure of putting an end to the Popish Plot, than by putting it in Execution for them; That is to say,  
By suppressing that contumacy that is grown so rife in the Dissenters, against the Church of England, by putting the revilers of her Establishment and Order under the severest Penalties.  
By the Church her condescension and indulgences to those that are weak and scrupulous, and the peaceable Dissenters, such Condescension will not abate, but magnify her Authority.  
The Church of England will not be by this means lost, but her Governance preserved, especially if the Relaxation that shall be made proceeds from her ex mero motu, and is not imposed upon her by any secular Authority. Nay, she will become by this means more ample and venerable. What Glories will then shine upon the heads of the Bishops! We shall all rise up and call them blessed. They will attain an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 here, and receive divine Honours while they live. Their Order will be recovered into the highest Veneration, and it will never be after a question in the English Church, whether the Order of Bishops be Apostolical.  
The Parliament will make all Laws yield and comply to such happy, peaceable, and gracious Intendments. All the people will honour them as their common Saviour's, that shall thus snatch us from the very brink of Ruin, and render the designs of the implacable Enemies of the Church, ready to take effect to the destruction of our Religion and Nation, utterly defeated.  
But what punishments can we think too severe upon any, that shall be guilty of such insolent Iniquity, as not to allow that Liberty to the Church, which they seek as a favour from her to themselves; that will not let the Church escape their Censures, when she graciously exempts them from her Censures, and pities their Errors and Follies? What Fines and Imprisonments, Pillories and Scourge, do they deserve, that persecute the Church with Revile, when they themselves are tolerated? Their condemnation must be just, whatever their doom be, themselves being Judges. They will suffer as evil doers, and disturbers of the peace, not for their Religion, but for a most extravagant and intolerable unrighteousness. They who will not tolerate others, are themselves for that reason most intolerable: Against these our Laws are to be sharpened, and their iniquities to be punished by a Judge. But the Statute of 35 Eliz. which punisheth dissatisfaction, and peaceable withdrawings from the public Worship with Exile and Death, declares how oddly the business of the Separation hath been managed, and with what disadvantages to the Church; as it doth also the impracticableness of Laws, that make perhaps invincible prejudices, and modest and peaceable dissatisfactions, capitally criminal. The execution of this Law is scarce possible. It is by no means agreeable, either to the Christian temper of our Church, or his Majesty's great Clemency, of which he hath assured us in the general course of his Reign. And especially for that, that Law hath been very rarely proceeded upon. A Gentleman that lay in Cambridge-Goal, under the Judgement of that Law, was reprieved by his Majesty, with a great dislike expressed by him against that and such like severities. Whatever extravagances of a few wild fanatics of that Age occasioned that Law, the state of the Separation and of the Nation being quite altered from what it was then, the execution of this Law now, would be something like a Sheriffs serving a Writ out of date in another County, which can have no effect but mischief to himself.  
While our Dissenters are thus reasonably indulged, and strictly obliged to their peaceable behaviour, they can give no apprehensions to the Government, either in Church or State. This is all that is designed, and all that they ought to have. This certainly would be readily yielded them in this present juncture especially, if the Evils of the late unhappy times did not stand upon their score.  
But I persuade myself, that as this course, if it had been heretofore taken, would have prevented one great cause of our late Troubles; so it will in such measure prevent them from returning, as the Separation can be accounted the cause of them.  
As for the Sacrilege and Spoil which was then made upon our Church, it could never have happened, but upon the dissolution of the Government, nor can it even happen again.  
That War would have been impossible, if the Churchmen had not maintained the Doctrine, that Monarchy was Jure Divino, in such a sense that made the King absolute; and they and the Church in consequence perished by it.  
But God be thanked, we see the Church again restored to her endowments, grown wiser than to desire to hold that precariously, and at pleasure, she doth enjoy by an unmovable legal Right. Of the three Estates of this Kingdom (for to suspect any such thing of the King, would be unpardonable Blasphemy) there can be no reasonable suspicion: Though of the House of Commons it is become now lawful to suspect, and say any thing that is evil. But no man but the Villains that design by dishonouring them to change the Government, hath reason to entertain such a thought. The Members of the House of Commons in our latest Parliaments, were all, upon the matter, entirely conformable to the Church of England. They were persons of the best Estates, Reputation, and Honour in their Countries: And they, or such as they, are like to make our succeeding Parliaments.  
I have leave to put them under the imprecation of the severest Curse, if ever they do sacrilegiously impair the Church of her Revenues. And I desire it may be assisted with the hearty and passionate desires of all good Christians, that so the Curse I now pronounce may operate upon them who shall incur it. He that designs, contrives, or consents to spoil the Church of any of her Endowments: May a secret Curse waste his Substance; Let his Children be Vagabonds, and beg their bread in desolate places.  
Besides, I know it is meditated, and designed by many, and the best men, that use to be sent to Parliaments, to redeem in part that infamous Sacrilege that was committed in the times of H. 8. Then Rectories appropriate to Religious Houses, which had by Appropriations the cure of the Parish, that aught after the dissolution of the Monasteries to be presented to, were vested in the Crown; whereby not only the Church was rob, but the People cheated of their Tithes, which were theirs to give, though not to retain, their Proemium for the Priest's Ministrations; which are now often most slenderly, and sometimes scandalously performed. As also to disincumber her Revenue of the Charges and Impositions of First-fruits and Tenths, which were imposed and exacted by the Pope, upon his pretence of being the ecumenical Pastor and Highpriest of the Christian Church; and at that time likewise conferred upon the Crown, and are as unreasonably continued, as any thing can be that hath a Law for a pretext.  
But for this, a Compensation may be given to the Crown; and some way will be found out for augmentation of Vicaridges and reindowment of Churches that lost all in that unparallelled Sacrilege, committed by the unsatiable Avarice of that haughty and luxurious Prince. These designs employ the care of a great number of our principal Gentlemen, to purge the sin and dishonour brought upon the Nation by that extraordinary King.  
But if there were reason for any fear, that the Nation could again incur the guilt of Sacrilege, What warranty can this give to any of the Clergy of our Church to slack or abate the Zeal that is due for the purity of her Doctrine, prudence of her Discipline, and her commendable, decent, and intelligible Devotion? Are they worthy to be named of her, that are ready to dissert her, out of fear of a remote possibility that she may not always have such Largesses to give as she now bestows upon her Sons? Will they prefer the gift to the Altar, and declare all their Godliness to be Gain? To suffer Popery for such a consideration to be induced upon her, is a far worse and more detestable Sacrilege than that they pretend to fear. This is to make the Anathemata of the Temple to inserve to the dishonour of the Numen. To desecrate the Altar for the sake of the gift: And will by the just Judgement of God (I fear) bring the abomination of desolation again into our holy places.  
Let none of her Sons, for the obtaining a Dignity, or a capacity for a double Benefice, betray her by neglecting her interest, thinking with themselves that she will otherwise be supported; for this their do is no less than the sin of Judas, who took money to betray our Lord, imagining that he would by a Miracle rescue himself from the hands of those to whom he sold and betrayed him.  
The honest of our Clergy will have little satisfaction when that day comes. When they shall be reduced to Prayers and Tears, if they are failing in any thing that they may lawfully do to prevent that miserable state, their Tears will be as water spilt upon the ground; and their Prayers will never find acceptance with God, nor be returned into their own bosom.  
Disce Miser pigris, non flecti numina, vot is.  
Praesentemque adhibe, dum facis ipse, Deum.  
But above all, those fine men are not to pass unreproved, who are preparing pretences for their Revolt to the Roman Church. They tell us, that the Reformation is depraved, and Popery itself is much amended since the Reformation; that it is not so grossly superstitious, (though her Superstitions are still enough to stifle Religion) nor so fabulous in her Legends, (she need make no new ones, since she gives authority still to the old) nor so imposturous in her cheats (for her Priests have not been Hocus-pocusses of late, used so many tricks of Legerdemain, and presented their Puppet-plays of moving and squeaking Images) since the Reformation, as before.  
But they may know, that the reason why we have not maintained the dignity of the Reformation entire, is this; for that Popery hath not been utterly extirpated from amongst us, though their frequent Treasons, and their notorious seductions have deserved it.  
By its continuance amongst us, and the resorts of their Priests hither, it hath created and fomented Divisions amongst us, and corrupted her Children from their obedience to her guidance and instructions: But she herself is still the same she was, the Reformation of the Church is still entire. She hath made good her departure from the Church of Rome; her Adversaries have not been able to convict her of any fault therein, and by an easy victory she hath triumphed over all their oppositions and contradictions.  
And though Popery appear not altogether so deformed, by her Priests artificial Dress, and the Representations they make of her to seduce us, and entice us to come again under her Yoke; yet we know she hath more established her Tyranny by the Council of Trent, and more corrupted her Morals by her modern Casuists since the Reformation, and thereby hath rendered herself more detestable, and for ever to be avoided.  
But though it may be true, that the Popish world is beholden to the Reformation, and Popery itself is thereby amended in some overt things, and reform in those Countries that have not reform from her. For in the Light of the Reformation they have seen Light, and have been ashamed of some of their works of darkness, and do not bring into present use some of their most gross Impostures, and some worse than Pagan Superstitions. Yet when this light is extinguished, it will be a most dismal and eternal Night upon the Christian world. If we return to her, our Ears will be bored, and we shall be irredeemably enslaved.  
The spirit of Popery, if it returns and possesseth us again, that hath been walking in the reformed Countries as in dry places, seeking rest and finding none, and finds us thus swept and garnished, will bring with it seven Devils more wicked than itself, and our last estate will be worse than the first.  
The Pride, Cruelty and Avarice, Domination and Luxury of their Priesthood, will be aggravated upon us, and the minds of the Laity more lowly depressed by Superstition and Ignorance. The Gospel of Cardinal Palavicini will be the Canon of the Christian Religion, or it may be something worse; for who can tell what will be the Religion that that Church will offer in process of time to the world under the Christian-Name? When the Pope by his pretended infallibility may make the Christian Religion what he please, by interpreting, adding, altering, or detracting with an  Authority. For us therefore to become Papists, to return to the Church of Rome, acknowledge the Pope's Infallibility, (there is no other way to become Papists) is virtually to betray the Christian Faith, to renounce our Allegiance to our Lord Christ, to prefer the Bulls of a profane Pope, to the holy Oracles of God, and the Revelation of Jesus, God blessed for ever.  
With this Religion therefore we can never make an accommodation; we may as well make a Covenant with Hell. This (as Dr. Jackson, one of the glories of the Church of England, in his Book called The Eternal Truth of Scriptures, vehemently admonisheth us) admits no terms of parley for any possible reconcilement: whose following words to this purpose, I shall here transcribe.  
The natural separation of this Island from those Countries wherein this Doctrine is professed, shall serve as an everlasting Emblem of the Inhabitants divided Hearts, at least in this point of Religion: And let them, O Lord, be cut off speedily from amongst us, and their Posterity transported hence, never to enjoy again the least good thing this Land affords: Let no print of their Memory be extant so much as in a Tree or Stone within our Coast. Or let their Names, by such as remain here after them, be never mentioned, or always to their endless shame: Who living here amongst us, will not imprint these or the like wishes in their Hearts, and daily mention them in their Prayers.  
Littora Littoribus contraria, fluctibus undas,  
Imprecor arma armis, pugnent ipsique Nepotes.  
Which he thus renders.  
Let our, & foreign Coasts, join Battle in the Main,  
 this foul Blasphemy Great Britain ever slain.  
Where never let it come, but floating in a Flood,  
Of our, our Nephews, and their children's blood.  
I shall only subjoin my hearty Desires and Prayers, that we may all fear God, and be zealous for his true Religion. Honour the King, and firmly adhere to the Government, and in our several places steadily oppose and resist those Villains that are given to change. That by our Union we may defeat the crafty designs of our cruel and implacable Enemies, who if they can continue those Divisions they have made amongst us by their wicked Arts, will certainly at length destroy us; who are bend upon our destruction, though they themselves perish with us, we cease to be a Nation, and our Language be forgotten in a foreign Captivity.  
Sir,  
Now I have given you my Answer to your Reasons, to dissuade me from publishing the Argument for the Bishops; by representing how few of the Clergy can with reason be thought guilty of Opinions so mischievous to the Church and State, which you charge to have generally corrupted them; and how easily and with little consideration they will be laid aside by them.  
I will make no other Apology for the publishing this, than that I have communicated these thoughts to no Man alive, either of the Church of England, or any other denomination, or consulted any man's advice about it. That I can serve to design of no party of men herein, nor any particular design of my own: I wish they can be serviceable in the least degree to public good. I have had them by me a great while, and have considered them under the several varieties of temper that our bodies are disposed to, which induce different thoughts, and various apprehensions in most things, under the several passions that the fluctuation of public affairs have occasioned; under the Ebbs and Flows of Hopes and Fears in reference to the state of the Kingdom, for some length of time. And finding them to have the same appearance, and to give me the same satisfaction in all their several postures, and the views that I could take of them. I assure myself I was sincere when I thought, and that they result merely from my Judgement (such as it is) uncorrupted. That I am not perverted or biased by any secret passion or desire of any sort, which many times lurk and steal upon us, deceive us unawares, and undiscernedly abuse us. Sir, the sum of my Apology is this; that I know myself sincere, of honest Intentions, moved by nothing but a hearty love and affection to our King, Religion, and Country: And for what any man shall think of me, I am not Solicitous.  
Yours, T. H.   

The Great and Weighty CONSIDERATIONS Relating to the Duke of York, OR Successor of the Crown, Offered to the KING, and both Houses of Parliament: CONSIDERED.  
WITH An ANSWER to a LETTER from a Gentleman of Quality in the Country to his Friend, relating to the Point of Succession to the Crown.  
Whereunto is added, A short HISTORICAL COLLECTION touching the same.  
LONDON: Printed for the Author, and are to be Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster. 1682.   

TO THE READER.  
I Have in the Postscript offered Reasons of the Lawfulness of an Act of Exclusion, which to all true Protestants must needs be desirable, if it can be lawfully obtained. Yet for the farther satisfaction of unthinking people, and Men of weak Minds, (who are never certain, (especially in great Matters) where Men of Note are divided in their Opinions; but for that very Reason, where they have no direct Reason to guide them in forming their Judgement, remain scrupulous, if not doubtful; and for that they doubt, they must therefore conclude the Matter, as to themselves, at least unlawful) I have Reprinted these Discourses, (that were Printed near three years since, in Answer to two Books, written by two Eminent Persons; the first supposed to be writ by a great Secretary, the other by a notable Lawyer thereto employed, under promises and expectations of great Preferments. This man's Book especially, is highly applauded by the Ducal Party; his very words made the stile of the Act of Parliament in Scotland for the Recognition of the unalterableness of the Descent of the Crown, and his Book accounted unanswerable, and the whole Cause, by the Asserters of this Doctrine, put upon the force and consequence of his Reasonings. And indeed, I have seen nothing so considerable, made public and offered to the World, for the defence of the unalterable Right of the Descent of the Crown, as are the reasons of these two Books which we have considered in these following Discourses.) To the end that the reasons against the Bill of Exclusion, as well as the reasons for it, being duly examined together, no honest man may from a doubtful Conscience be any longer under a necessity of suffering the Mischiefs of a Popish Successor, which will be more intolerable when they come to be felt, than any imagination can suggest, or any words can express.  
True it is, the Most cannot consider duly of a Matter, and determine upon it, by their own proper Reasonings and Discourse: and yet they have so much reason as to think, That where Doctors differ they have respectively their reasons for their different opinions, though they themselves do not apprehend them; and consequently at least doubt, and of what they doubt they conclude unlawful.  
Yet even the Most may judge what weight and moment the reasons and arguments upon which each party ground their Conclusions are of, if they are truly, clearly, and nakedly propounded, reflected upon, and made fit for their Judgement and Capacity: and they may thereby be brought to discharge their doubt, and determine with clear satisfaction, in any matter so discussed, if they will honestly and duly consider.  
I persuade myself, I have by the reflections I have made upon the Discourses of these two renowned Authors, prepared their Reasonings for the judgement of the ordinary sort of men, if honest. To such, their Arguments must appear so frivolous, as they will conclude these Author's downright Advocates for the Popish Superstition and Cruelty, under the thin pretences of defending, That a Successor to the Crown, by an ordinary and common right, cannot be Excluded by an Act of State. Such a Successor, who (if he be not a Papist, yet) hath openly departed from our Church, in which he was born, and for which his Father suffered Martyrdom; and for the preserving the Peace of Three Kingdoms, disdains to tell us he is a Protestant; and neglects the direful Imprecations of his Grandfather; though no Curses are so operative, as those of Parents upon their Children, upon weighty causes solemnly pronounced: These can kill at the Root the most flourishing and prolifical Families, make their Root rottenness, and their Blossom to go up as dust; Omnem vastant stirpemque domumque.  〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. 
And therefore I have caused these reflections to be Reprinted, if happily they may conduce any thing towards a full information of my doubting honest Countrymen, in a matter so weighty; and consequently, towards the prevention of the effusions of English Blood, in Wars, Massacres, and Martyrdoms, and of the lawless, violent, and bloody attempts to be made for the Extirpation of the Reformed Religion Established amongst us by Law, by the Romanists. And lastly, towards the re-establishment of our Government and Nation in Peace and Tranquillity again, which are now most miserably distracted, by the fears of a Popish Successor, and by the Doubts about Excluding him.  
If we did not doubt without reason of the lawfulness of Excluding a Popish Successor, we should have no reason to fear him.   

The Great and Weighty CONSIDERATIONS, etc. CONSIDERED.  
WHatever is the subject matter upon which we exercise our thoughts, or whereupon we make our Enquities, doth not make the Considerations of slight and vain Men GREAT and WEIGHTY. A man of slender Endowments doth not commence to be Wise, as soon as matters of great Moment take up his Thoughts. But if he be of such a make, as renders him capable of being in any degree wise, he is affected with an ingenuous Shame, finding the matters too hard for his Capacity, and above his reach: He is displeased and dissatisfied with his own dark, indistinct, and confused Conceptions, in which he himself can receive no satisfaction: he suspends, and determines nothing, but that he doth not understand the matter, and resorts with deference to those who are wiser than himself.  
But there is a sort of Arrogant Fools who trouble the World, make it difficult to understand plain Truth, confound the Notions of things, blend things of remote distances in their nature together, or put one thing for another that have no affinity to each other; puzzle and perplex the minds of the Weak.  
These deserve the Indignation of the better sort of Judgements, who cannot but be empassioned while they see a great part of mankind abused to their hurt. By the villainous practices of some, designed to the endurance of the greatest mischiefs; and by a sort of silly Knaves attempted upon, for deceiving them into a permission of all the pretended evils to come upon them; who presumptuously use their little Wit to ensnare the Consciences, to perplex the Minds of the Multitude by Objections puzzling to the weak, by such Reasonings, as none but fools could think of, and none but bold Knaves would offer to the World: Such I take to be every immodest man who will adventure, not from his Understanding, and therefore from his Will, and consequently his Interest, to speak things that have no consequence, and are not induced by the Laws of Reasoning and Discourse; that have a tendency to dispose men to scruple of Conscience, and make them doubtful and unactive against the evils of the greatest size that are designed against them, and to neglect or resist the Counsels of God against themselves, and fatally fall under the designed evils, notwithstanding they are provided of a just and allowable Remedy against them.  
There are, and ever was, and ever will be, to the trouble of Mankind, a sort of literate Fools (who will always obtain some reputation with the stupid admiring Vulgar) made by Nature to little Understanding, and who have lost that little for want of using it; who by Books good of bad, it matters not much, become greater Fools than they could have been, if left to simple Nature; who by imperfect remembrances, and undue joining of things more imperfectly understood, make most perverse Judgements in all things they are conversant about. And if it happen that by their Complexion they prove forward, and are opinionated of their false Learning, they obtrude upon the World their unnatural, monstrous, and incoherent Conceptions. And if they chance to mix their Discourses with passages of Holy Scriptures, and thereby entitled Religion to their Absurdities, they more powerfully amuse, distract, and abuse the Consciences of the common People, and perplex them with Scruples and Prejudices, and that sometimes against the only means of their preservation. And this calls upon, and urgeth the Charity of such to whom God hath given a better understanding, to appear and come forth for the undeceiving and rectifying the Judgements of the most deceivable part of Mankind, and with just ignominy and scorn to beat down the assume and presumptions of such Pretenders and Smatterers in Letters; especially in such a Weighty Matter as this, when the poor people (if mistaken) must be mistaken to their Ruin, and perish by the Deceit, if deceived; which, I hope, is scarce possible for very many to be, by this frivolous Pretender and Offerer of Considerations, which none but he that deserves our pity could think of; but for that he dares to offer them publicly to the World, and under the stile of [Great and Weighty Considerations,] he most justly deserves our Indignation, a private Scorn, & a public Censure. For that purpose we will now produce him.  
HE gins his Considerations with a Consideration and Recommendation of himself, and would fain prove his Honestly; for he was with reason conscious that this undertaking would render him more than probably suspected: He proves, as well as any thing he undertakes, and as well as it can be proved, That he is an honest man. This he would have the World believe, because there is such a thing as sincerity in the World; and for that there have been some men that have owned an afflictive Righteous Cause against self-interest, and the displeasure of a prevailing Faction: but we know the Cause that he Patronizes', is the most unrighteous Cause that ever any man of Front espoused: but that should not trouble us. But that which afflicts us, and is the heart-aking of all good men, is, That this Scribbler with too much reason we know, presumes that the Brave men (whom he reviles for adhering to the only means of the saving of three Kingdoms) with the Gross of the Nation, are designed to be subdued by a party of men whose strength the King in his profound Knowledge and Wisdom best knows how to Calculate: but certainly this Addresser imagines very great, whatever he pretends, and that he is well backed by force. Otherwise he could not adventure publicly to despise the Interest of a House of Commons. If this Considerer and his Fellow-Conspirators had not some secret reserves of Strength, he would not advise the King as he doth, to Adhere to, and Govern with the House of Lords and his Privy-Council, and to lop off the House of Commons from the Government as an unprofitable Branch.  
In the next Paragraph he tells us, The Chiefest Principle and Maxim of the true reformed Religion in this Kingdom, is fully Epitomised in this excellent Precept, Give to every one his due. If there can be more nonsense spoken in so many words, It is this Patriot must do it; and you shall find him often performing what I have undertaken for him. And sure, after such demonstrations of his Honesty, and proof of his Understanding, you must take him for a True Patriot, and a fit Addresser of GREAT and WEIGHTY Considerations.  
In the next Paragraph he undertakes to commend and allow, chide and disapprove our leading Men; I believe he means of the House of Commons, but we want his Name; it's fit he should discover himself, before we can admit him to sit Judge of the Actions of the most excellent Persons of the late House of Commons. I persuade myself he would blush, (however immodest he appears in his Address) if he were drawn out and exposed to public view under such a Character; we might spare him the Pillory, rotten Eggs, and Turnep-tops, which is due to infamous Libelers against Governors; for he is a man of such fashion (I believe) that he would suffer too much of Shame and Confusion of Face, (if he were but known well enough to be pointed at) after we have done with him.  
In the fourth Paragraph, he allows it is a glorious thing to establish the True Protestant Religion; but he would not have it established upon Quicksands: neither would we, because it is impossible it should be so established; we would not have it depend upon lose accidents, exposed to Chance and Contingencies, and expect it should be supported by rare events, and morally impossible: nor to be left at Six and Seven, a chance that is not upon the Die, and hope that things should out of their Course and Nature unite and combine together for its support.  
That which is Glorious is so, because it is Excellent in itself, and difficult to be achieved; and whatever is difficult, is to be obtained by unusual and extraordinary means: to deny or condemn the use of them when lawful, is to deny us the end; and is so far in truth from allowing it to be Glorious, that he doth not allow it at all.  
That it is made difficult to support the Protestant Religion, we own to the Popish Conspiracy; and the design of this man is to make it impossible: to that purpose he requires you to lay aside Humane Policy, which is the same as true Prudence (which is the only Guide God hath given us, and the only Oracle he hath left us to consult in our Affairs, and is never repugnant (as he would have it) but always conformable to the Laws of God and Nature) lest we should be furnished with a Remedy against the designed mischiefs to us and our Religion.  
To this commendable sort of Policy, the design of the Bill will be made agreeable in the following Discourse. That we may admit the absurd Doctrines of the Church of Rome, we are required to abandon our Reason; and that we may more easily again fall unto her, we must (if we will be ruled by the Considerer) renounce our Prudence; and those that will not, must endure his slanderous Reproaches, with which he goes on to revile the Promoters of the Bill of Exclusion, whom he calls Hypocrites, Factious Spirits of the Fanatical Leven; that they make a Cloak of Religion to palliate black Designs; fierce Zealots, acting like the Rump-Parliament, Guilty of Antichristian attempts, repugnant to the Ordinance of God, and to the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom; a few turbulent Zealots, assuming to themselves a Sovereign and despotical Power of Deposing the DUKE of YORK: and says, That they impudently affirm, That this hath been the Ancient Custom of Parliaments, to Depose Princes, and dispose of Kingdoms; whereas the Crown hath been always Haereditary, and never depended upon the Suffrages of the Subject.  
Since this bad man presumes to say so many bad words falsely of the Excellent Members of the late House of Commons, reproaches their Zeal for the public Safety, most Heroically exerted in the time of the greatest Need, and most threatening Dangers; calls their appearance for the support of the Protestant Religion established by Law, Hypocrisy: And the prosecuting the Discovery of the Hellish Plot, and the best means of preventing the Plot from taking effect, black Designs. Since, I say, his Immodesty hath given him so much Licence, I wonder he had no more Scurrilities, especially since he is so impertinent as to call the Bill of Exclusion, an Antichristian Attempt, Repugnant to the Ordinance of God, (though God never yet made any Law or Ordinance in that Case,) and the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom; though no Laws of Men are so Fundamental but they are alterable.  
The Constitution of Government is indeed unalterable by Law, but no Laws but are alterable by the Government; for the Government was before Laws, and made and constituted most chief for the business of Legislation.  
That the House of Commons assumes a Sovereign Power, he knows to be false; and knows too, that all the world knows he is therein a Falsary. What can be expected of Candour or Sincerity from a man of such Effrontery? and to the making the Slander complete, he joins Despotical to Sovereign power, as if they were the same; an instance of his egregious Ignorance, except he flatters the King: and would signify to him that he hath despotical power, because he hath a Sovereign Power: and this commends him indeed for a true Patriot. A Despotical Power is such as Masters use over their Servants, that command what they will, because they will. Sovereign Power is exercised for the good of those that are governed; and the Commands that come from the Sovereign Power, are Laws that are deduced from public Reason, as they are the public Measures, and are always reasonable, or pretend to be so.  
No body ever affirmed, before this Addresser to the King, That it hath been the Ancient Custom of Parliaments to dispose of the Crown, or that it depended upon the Suffrages of the Subjects; which he falsely and maliciously adventures to say, to misrepresent the most Venerable late House of Commons, whose Proceed will justify themselves in true Story to all succeeding Generations, and will, we all hope, be seconded and outdone by the next; if the good People can keep themselves from being deceived by such Artificial men as this Addresser is.  
But this is said, and truly, That a Parliament, which is King, Lords, and Commons, have declared, and particularly, a Parliament in the Reign of that most Excellent Princess Queen Elizabeth, of Eternal Memory, (the wisest and greatest of the Princes that are Glorious for the Reforming the Christian Religion) did declare a Power in themselves, for Great and Weighty Reasons of State, to alter the Succession, otherwise than of course it is by Law appointed: and most reasonable it is; for no Government can want a Power to preserve itself, and obtain its great end, viz. the preservation of the Community and Polity itself; and no less Reasons than these, require and urge the Use and Exercise of this Power in an Act of Parliament for Excluding the D. from Succeeding to the Imperial Crown of England. In order to these ends, the Power of a Parliament is unrestrained, and unlimited; which this Consideration-Monger calls Scoffingly (Impiously and Profanely towards God, and irreverently towards the Government) Omnipotency.  
In the next Paragraph, he produceth his first Reason against the Excluding Bill. And by an execrable Argument, he adventures to prove, That the descent of the Crown is Sacred, viz. That an Attainder in Treason cannot debar the next Heir from succeeding in the Government.  
But if the Heir had died of that Attainder, the Argument had been spoiled. For cannot that Power that can inflict Capital Sentences, and that ought to do it against all in subjection that incur them, Banish instead of Kill? sure he is no true Friend to his Royal Highness, whatever he pretends; we will sooner admit him a true Patriot, for that he makes the condition of his presumptive Heir so hard, That he must either Die or Reign. A very judicious Advocate, and deserves very well of his Client, who will remember him, sure, when he comes into his Kingdom, for bringing him into such danger.  
I believe this considering Patriot shifted himself in this Consideration into France, where they have Princes of the Blood, against whom no Criminal Process can be form, nor no Attainder of Blood is admitted, to the purpose that the most enormous Crimes may not seem faults in those that participate of the blood of that haughty Tyranny. But the better to disguise himself, he criminates the Parliament, calls the House of Commons in derision Cunning Politicians, that would have a new Model of Government; he chargeth them with assuming a power to depose the King, and will conclude, because he will, (and hopes the People will take his Word for it) for no other reason in the world, that we may as well Depose the King, as foreclose a Presumptive Heir, which he will call deposing him: for this Ruffianlike man will not submit to the common use of Words, and is at defiance with the common Sense of Mankind; and will say it, That it is as lawful to Depose the Possessor of the Crown, as to make an Act of Parliament for preserving the Life of the present King, by disabling the next Successor that brings it in danger: And likens the late House of Commons, upon the score of their Bill of Exclusion, to the Rump. Oh! for a Discoverer that would bring this man to Light and Shame, and thereby to Reason and Sobriety.  
Upon this weak and slight colour of a Reason, see in the next Paragraph how he lays about him, with what vehemency and expostulation; and yet in his magisterial Rant, the trifler could no sooner name an extravagant Bill, but he thinks of a Box of Gilded Pills, which if he had been lately under cure by Mr. Hobbs his Doctrine of the train of Thoughts, they could not escape coming together. And yet this Thinking Addresser is not altogether so happy in dividing and opposing, as in compounding. For he affirms, that to go about to establish the Protestant Religion by a Bill to Exclude the Popish Successor, is inconsistent with the Government, and is to destroy the very Root and Life of Government.  
But, pray Sir, for the sake of Reason tell us; Doth the Government itself depend upon the person that Governs? or is the Government itself changed by the alteration of the Succession? may not Governments, for kind the same, have different modes of Succession? and are not the kinds of Succession, more than the kinds and forms of Government? Can the Government be safe without a Power to exclude a Person inhabil in Nature to support it, or of one Principled to destroy it? Can we imagine a Government which is of Humane Contrivance, to be without a Power to preserve itself; and an Authority, in Cases that threaten its Ruin, to interpose with apt Remedies for its preservation? That a Government made by men should be left merely to chance, and the contingency of Birth, whatever happens of inability in the Persons that come under the general Rule and Limitation of Succession?  
Doth the Exercise of this power turn the Kingdom from being Hereditary to Elective? is there no difference between the inconvenience of Judging of the several Degrees of fitness in several persons competently qualified, and the proceeding upon evident notoriety to exclude one that designs the subverting of it, and the destruction of those that are to be governed and protected and hath incurred a severer Doom? I well hope there are very few in this Nation so ill instructed, that doth not think it in the Power of the People to depose a Prince who really undertakes to alienate his Kingdom, or to give it up into the hands of another Sovereign Power: Or that really acts the Destruction or the Universal Calamity of his People.  
The Learned and Judicious Mr. Falkner, than whom there is no person of this Age with the Church of England in greater esteem; Who truly merits the high esteem of all men for his excellent Candour and Learning: In his Book called Christian Loyalty, cannot deny the right to be so upon those cases really happening, but is not willing to suppose such Cases can ever happen in Fact. He tells us, If any such strange Case as is proposed, should really happen in the World, it would have its great difficulties. Grotius (he tells us) thinks that in this utmost extremity, the use of such defence as a last refuge, ultimo necessitatis proesidio, is not to be condemned, provided the care of the common Good be preserved. And if this be true, saith he, it must be upon this Ground, that such attempts of ruining do ipso facto include a disclaiming the Governing these persons as Subjects, and conseqently of being their Prince and King; and then, notwithstanding his Proposition (saith he) would remain True, viz. That it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever, to take Arms against the King.  
All that Mr. Falkner offers in this matter, out of his commendable Care and Zeal to Peace and Government, is, to argue the Cases in Fact impossible, and that such suppositions may be the undue imputations of Factious persons against their Sovereign: He thinks that Princes may have a Consideration of the Account they must give in the other World of their Government here: That they have a regard to their Honour and Esteem, and a Respect to their Safety; To the quiet and serenity of their own minds, and will avoid the Diroe Vltrices, and the Tortures of mind that attend Cruelty, and the Actors of great mischief, and by such Considerations as these be contained in their Duty.  
But do these Arguments of his, that should reasonably, and ordinarily do, secure us against the Oppressions of Potentates, give us in this juncture any Security? are these Considerations dissuasives or Incitements to a Popish Prince to act our Fears, and give reality to the Suppositions? To any under the Principles and Counsels that guide such a Prince already entered upon the Design, and his party obnoxious, these Considerations would urge him to proceed, and make our Calamity certain: These Arguments of his applied to such a state of things, is like a Protestatio contra factum; and like the Sophistical Arguments of the Stoics, who would undertake to prove a thing acknowledged and existent and present to be impossible.  
How wild then and transported must this Patriot seem, who will undertake to argue the Bill guilty of the highest Iniquity and Injustice, Arraign the greatest and Best part of the Nation adjure them to answer it at his Tribunal, challenge us (for so his Expostulations and Inquiries of us doth import) with intentions to overreach Providence; and that we despair of the justness of our Cause, or the goodness of God. And he tells us, That God doth not want our Wickedness to fulfil his Holy Will.  
We answer: How far the Providence of God will assist us in this undertaking we know not, it is not new in the world for the most Righteous Causes to be unprosperous; we are only to do our Duty, and leave the Issue and Event thereof to his Alwise Providence. But we know, and are most assured of the Justness of the undertaking; and we have a good hope in the goodness of God, that he will succeed it, for that herein we are doing nothing that is evil, but fulfilling his Holy and Good Will: I mean, not that we are certain to obtain what we desire and pursue: But it is the will of God concerning us, (who hath left us in the hands of our own Counsel, and hath not told us, That he will save us by a Miracle) that we should be Loyal to our Sovereign, zealously love that excellent Religion and that excellent Government that his Gracious Providence hath established amongst us by Law: And also that we desire and endeavour by Law to disable (in the understanding of the representative of the Nation) a professed Enemy both to our Religion and Government, from getting into the Throne; that he be not by that advantage of Power, enabled to effect his purpose.  
But we are resolved we that will not call that Design Evil, tho' it do not succeed; nor think that we are not doing the Holy Will of God, tho' we should be unprosperous therein, and without success. If there was an Oracle to Consult, we would not know what the Success should be, lest our Virtue should lose its Glory. No brave man, but would despise all Auguries, when he is to contend for his Country, and things more precious to him than his Life. Sortilegis egeant dubij. This false Patriot takes Sanctuary in his Revolt from public Interest; and he thinks he is swimming to Shore with his Plank before a Wreck, and will fly the Danger before it approaches: but we will do our Duty, weather the Storm secure of the event: for the goodness of the Cause makes us hopeful, and we will Triumph in our Integrity tho' disappointed. Of any other Will of God, save what is his Will for us to do, as Citizens, Soldiers, or Martyrs, we are not so solicitous to know.  
The Noble Roman, when advised by his Friend Labienus to Consult the Oracle of Jupiter Ammon, as to the event of the War in which he was then engaged, Thus answered him, 
Quid Quaeri Labiene Jubes? an liber in armis  
Occubuisse velim potius quam Regna videre?  
An noceat vis ulla bono? fortunaque perdat  
Opposita virtute minus? Laudandaque velle  
Sit satis? Et nunquam successu crescit Honestum?  
Scimus & haec nobis non altius inseret Ammon.   
I do but right to my Countrymen, to bear my public Testimony, that their generous and godly Resolutions are agreeable to this Noble Roman. But that done, I will calmly tell him, That we are in a Legal method, allowed by the Government, contending for its preservation by the Bill of Exclusion; and that most certainly he can have no right against a Law (for such it will be, when that Bill hath the Royal Assent) to any thing that he shall forfeit thereby: And whether such a Law is not most righteous, let God, Angels and Men Judge.  
And here it will not be amiss to admonish this Patriot, That no man hath a Right to any thing from God and Nature (to use his Words which he useth, but doth not understand of what Import and value they are in this place) for the Rights of Property are of positive and civil Appointment and Institution. No man can have, or is entitled to any thing, but what, and as the Law allots it to him. They design what is Right, what Wrong, and what is Injury and Theft; and the Law of God, both in the Reason and Nature of man, as well as by express Revelation, forbids it. Nec natura potest justum secernere iniquo.  
Men make Governments, and God Commands us to obey them; yea, God Commands us in our Nature, to form ourselves into Governments. For that Mankind cannot tolerably subsist without them. What is greatly convenient, and promotes the happiness of men, therefore seems to be Commanded, and thereby a positive and affirmative Law of God in Nature is declared. What is or would be greatly mischievous to mankind, if generally permitted, is therefore understood by us prohibited. The Mischief declares the thing forbidden, and is the indication of a Negative Precept, or prohibitory Law. The pleasure and satisfaction of mind that men take in being beneficent and agreeable to, and deserving well of their own kind: The remorses, shame, fear and regret that men necessarily suffer from the sense of their own actions, when they are offensive, unequal and unreasonable, are the Sanctions of the Laws of Nature, and are truly the Rewards and Punishments of God in Nature.  
So that Anarchy, which is the most intolerable state of Mankind, a state of War and Violence, unreasonable Passion, and unbounded Appetite, seems to be the most forbidden thing by God in Nature.  
But Government, because it makes men equal and reasonable, just and peaceable, kind and beneficent, or finds them so, encourageth them to be so, and protects them in being so; seems to be the most principal Institution and Appointment of God in Nature, for that it is recommended to us by all that which conduces to our happiness. And thus, and for this reason, are Kings and Governors said to have their Authority from God, and therefore Government is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, Rom. 13.2. God's Ordinance. But the forms of Governments, the Persons of the Governors, the Order of Succession, their respective Powers and Ministries, are of Man's appointment: and agreeable hereunto, Government is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉, or a Humane Creature, 1 Peter 2.13, 24. to which the Apostle enjoins us to be Obedient for the Lords sake, and in Conscience of our Duty to God.  
Agreeable hereto is that Noble Tradition amongst the Jews of the seven Precepts given by God to the Sons of Noah, that is, to all Mankind, for from him we all secondarily derive, in which the great Titles of the Law of Nature are declared, and to which all the Nations of the World were obliged: one of which is De Judiciis. The words of the Precept, which is the Seventh, are no more, signifying that the Law of Nature, or the Will of God in Nature, doth command us to live in Politys and under Governments. This Law was given or declared to all Mankind, when they were in a State of Nature, before Governments were constituted; and by that Law of Nature, obliged to form themselves into Societies, to enter into mutual Obligations, to stand to and abide the common measures of Law, and to assist and submit to the Sentences and Decrees of common Judicatures. These were the first Oaths of Allegiance that were taken in the world: but when a single person was entrusted with the executive power of Laws, they swore this Allegiance to him. For in all regular Governments (as it is in this of ours) the King commands nothing but according to the Prescript and Formula's of Law: And the whole business of Government, as between those that are to be Governed, is making Laws, and executing them in a due Administration of Justice.  
As Corollaries to what is said, I shall add, first, That Mercenary Guards are very unnatural to Governments, as they seem, upon the foregoing Reasons, to be instituted and appointed by God in Nature, which receive conformation from the Tradition and Doctrine of the Jews (the best instructed Nation in the world in the Mind of God) for that the whole body and power of the Government or Polity are bound to see the Law, and Results of their common Judicatures obeyed, and are amply sufficient for that purpose. So that the head of the Polity, by the posse populi, being most powerfully instructed to execute the Laws, Mercenary Guards seem intended and designed, by those that employ them, to execute matters illegal and extrajudicial; or at best they make a very hard case upon the people, that they must support a great charge, and pay a great price for jealousies and fears.  
Secondly, That by the natural obligation of the ancient Oath of Allegiance, every Member of the Polity is bound to resist and subdue all extrajudicial Forces, riotous and riotous Assemblies.  
But the nature of Government, and its true original, hath been prejudiced by an unhappy mistake that hath long since invaded the World; men that understand nothing but Words; and Grammar-Divines, that without contemplating Gods Attributes, or the nature of man, or the reasonableness of moral Precepts, have undertaken to declare the sense of Scriptures; and infer that the Sovereign Power is not of Humane Institution, but of Divine Appointment; because they find it there written, that by him Kings Reign; imagining that when the Scripture saith, God commands, or doth this, that God commanded it by express Words, or doth it by an immediate position of the thing done. Whereas in Nature his Commands are nothing but the natural Light God hath bestowed upon Mankind: Likewise God's doing a thing is only the course of natural and second Causes, to which, because God gives the Direction or Motion, he doth both, and is said to do all that is done.  
Besides, all the Precepts that God gives us that are agreeable to the Law of Nature, must be understood as Nature and Reason doth direct. Videtur Lex Dei idem dictans quod natura, ita accipi quomodo ipsa natura accipiendum monstrat, nisi addatur aliquid Expressius; Grotius Comment. fol. 121. The Laws of God, that confirm the Laws of men, innovate nothing but a new obligation to observe them (but only) as commanded and intended by those that made them. All humane Constitutions and Governments must be subservient and obsequious to their own intentions. Omnes res conditoe famulantur vitoe humanoe: Every Form of Government is of our creation and not Gods, and must comply with the safety of the People in all that it can, without its own dissolution: and was never intended unalterable, or at least inflexible, but was intended and made under reservations, reasonable exceptions of unforeseen accidents, and rare contingencies in humane Affairs. And the Law of God, that comes in confirmation and establishment of humane Institutions and Laws, binds only according to their natures and intendments.  
How unreasonable therefore are the Tragical Exaggerations of the considerer, making it the most heinous wickedness, and the most crying Injustice, to alter that which in its own nature is alterable, and by an Act of the Government to exclude the D. from the Succession, as a person unfit and unsafe to be entrusted with the Government! (though in the general order thereof, he was thereto designed) besides that he hath forfeited that kind of right that he had by that general appointment.  
Is this, saith he, the way of establishing the Protestant Religion? he saith, this is exactly to follow the footsteps of that Monster of Ingratitude, the wicked Jeroboam, who after God of his infinite goodness had raised him from nothing, and established him Monarch of the ten Tribes of Israel, yet was he so mistrustful of God's Power in preserving his Kingdom for the future, that he thought nothing could secure it but his own accursed Policy.  
Our Considerer seems to have a high value for Rule and Domination, otherwise he would not have called the advancement of Jeroboam to rule by Usurpation, an effect of the infinite goodness of God. But these words were put in, to make that story of Jeroboam parallel to our case: and he intends thereby to remember us of the little power that the reformed Religion sometimes had, perhaps in the time of Queen Mary; and to charge upon the Protestant Religion, and reproach it with a Revolt and unjustifiable Schismatical departure from the Church of Rome in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the acquiring and possessing itself of the Government: And now, behold the man! now you know him and his Religion, and how fit he is to offer Considerations for the D. against the Bill.  
But shortly, to destroy his parallel, he may know, that the Reformation did only assert and reassume the Rights of the Crown usurped by the Bishop of Rome: We did reform the Religion of our Church to primitive Christianity, from which the Church of Rome had seduced us; but therein we used no other Power than what belongs to every Church to reform itself: we were never of right and duty subject to the Church of Rome, she never rightfully had any Authority over us, and therefore we could not Schismatically revolt from her; nor are parallel at all in this to Jeroboam, though this man will compare us to him, and thereby slily charge us with monstrous Ingratitude to God, and accursed Policies; because we will not again give up our Civil Rights to the Tyranny of Rome, nor lose again the true Christian Religion in the Superstitions and corrupt Doctrines of that Church; and because we will not forbear to use that power which is lawful to every Government.  
Except this be his meaning, and he himself a Papist, he might with as much pertinency have told any other story of Jeroboam, or of any other of the Kings of Israel and Judah, in the Books of the Kings or Chronicles; or of Belteshazzar or Nebuchadonozor, Zenacherib, Ahasuerus; or Holofernes, or Antiochus, or any other King or Name in story Sacred or Profane. Of all these he could not have found out any thing more unlike to have compared with us, to have remarked himself for a man of great Considerations. For Jeroboam corrupted the true Worship of God to support an Usurped Crown; but the design of the Bill against which he declaims, is to support a Lawful Government, and the best Religion by a legal Act of that Government.  
So that we will invert that Woe which he pronounceth against us out of the Prophet; Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong, into a Woe against himself Woe unto him that putteth evil for good, and darkness for light, and casteth a stumbling-block before his neighbour.  
But in what follows of this Writer of Considerations, I doubt me whether he doth not act the part of a scorning Atheist; for that he would persuade the World from all care and regard of Religion, by telling us, it is able to shift for itself, it being the work of Gods own hand. His Atheistical scorn and low valuation of the true Christian Religion, is further very notorious and remarkable, for that he makes the establishment thereof amongst us to be such a like work of the Almighty Hand of God, that established Jeroboam in the Kingdom of Israel. O thou Insensatus Galata! to return thy own Exclamation which thou usest against thy own honest and discerning Countrymen, upon thy stupid self: For who, I pray you, but a senseless man, would compare a providential permission of the revolt of the ten Tribes for the sins of David, and the sins and oppressions of Solomon (to which the People were prepared by the exactions, oppressions, and riotous Reign of Solomon and his Successor Rehoboam) to the work of the Reformation, which was the delivery and restoring to itself the Gospel of Christ, and his true Religion, (which was spoiled and depraved by the Church of Rome) for the benefit I doubt not of all the Ages of Mankind to the end of the World; against which the Gates of Hell shall not prevail; and which we in despite of the Roman Successor shall see yet flourish in this Land.  
But we must not expect, though God did first plant his Church by Miracles in Nature, and demonstrations of the Spirit of Power, by the wonderful Gifts of the Holy Ghost, and by the Spirit of Glory resting upon the Primitive Martyrs of the Holy Faith, and did restore the purity of the Christian Faith by a Miraculous Providence and the Spirit of Martyrdom, which we are now peacefully and Legally possessed of; I say, we have no reason to expect Wonders for our preservation, when it seems to be in our own hands: Nor ought we to subject the Professors of the True Religion again to Slaughters, Fire and Faggot, Tortures, Inquisitions and Massacres.  
Let us not think that our Government, as it lies in History, and our Laws in Books and Parliament-Rolls (which will easily suffer an Index expurgatorius, and make no complaint,) can defend us and it against the Instruments and Engines designed for its subversion in the Plot, and the powers that have been long addressing to that purpose, and are now at leisure to execute what we know is designed against us, better than we can make out and discover. This Expression, I know, would scarce pass for sense in any other Age or Matter, but we live in an Age of Mystery and Prodigy, producing things Monstrous and unnatural, and our Language must be agreeable to the things we speak of.  
The True Patriot proceeds and affirms, That it is an unwarrantable Attempt, and a point without example or precedent, to Depose a Prince for not complying with his People in Religion. I appeal to all that shall read him, whether he appears to be a man of Reading enough to warrant him to pronounce a general Negative in this matter? But by this time there is nothing so extravagant but you will allow agreeable to the man. I believe immodesty is the unhappy Vice and Fate of his Nature, for no man ever arrived to the like Degree in it before him: you must not ask what he means by a point without example or precedent, or why he puts us a point that is not in our Case, and still will be talking of deposing a Prince; for this man oweth no account of his matters. But, thou False Considerer; So Loyal I am, That I would not have that point in the Case for half I am worth.  
But pray why thus impertinent? Why dost thou send us to Asa and Maachah, Jeroboam, Rehoboam, Jehu and Joram, Asa and his Mother, and Azaria? we know little of the Constitution of the Jewish Monarchy, save that God after the Jews had rejected his Government, and desired a King, kept some remains of his Theocracy over them, which he administered by his Prophets, whom he commissioned to Exauctorate and Anoint Kings. Their Histories are short; but besides, every Nation is to be governed by their own Laws, and there are as many kinds almost of Governments as there are Governments; we are not warranted by their Precedents, nor to be Justified or Condemned by them; but we must Stand or Fall to our own Laws. But let this Patriot know, that our case will never be Cromwel's, (as he reproaches us,) & we will not, neither can we stand in need of any Apology that would serve either for the Rump or him; for we are preserving that Government and Church which they destroyed.  
Neither will we, O man of small Consideration, make use in our defence of the Papists excluding the King of Navarr, a Protestant King in France: No more than we will allow the French to murder a Protestant Minister, because we execute a Seditious Traitorous Roman Priest: No more than we can allow in others, or justify in ourselves to prosecute dissenting Protestants, whose Principles are peaceable and obedient to Governors: Because we duly sharpen our Laws, and exact the Severity of them against the Papists, the sworn enemy to all Religions but their own, and to all mankind upon the score thereof. How grossly therefore is that of the Apostle misapplyed, Whosoever thou art O man that judgest another, etc. For doth a public Executioner incur the Judgement of shedding man's Blood, for executing a Sentence against a Murderer. Thou man of Observation master possibly know what kind of Beasts we muzzle and tie up.  
He observes for our Imitation, That the Orthodox did not Depose the Arrian Emperors: we ought undoubtedly to imitate them therein: for that no man, much less a Prince, aught to lose any right for a Speculative Error, or mere mis-belief: But only for wicked practices and opinions that promote, excite and encourage them. But it is also very observable, which the Considerer, by his mention of Julian the Emperor in this place, gives me occasion to offer: That the Behaviour of the Church towards the Pagan Roman Emperors, was much different from that which they bore to Julian, who succeeded to Christian Emperors, was educated a Christian, and sometimes bore a place in the Church: for whereas the Apostles had enjoined the Christians to pray for the Pagan Emperors, though actual Persecutors of the Church; yet the whole Church did Curse and Anathematise Julian with an Anathema, quo Deus rogatur ut aliquem è medio tollat. In Julianum cum defectioni adderet machinationes evertendi Christianismi, usa est Ecclesia isto extremae necessitatis telo, & à Deo est exaudita. Grotius in Luc. Cap. 6. Vers. 12. I will not trouble the Reader with more Quotations to this purpose; the Authority of this Great man is more than ten Witnesses. And for what he lays down generally, that the Orthodox did not Depose the Arrian Emperors: I must remember him out of Socrates the Ecclesiastical Historian, lib. 2. cap. 38. Gr. when the Soldiers of Constantius the Arrian Emperor were by his command sent to enforce them to become Arrians, they took Arms in defence of their profession of Religion; how justifiable therein, I will not now discourse. But this may be said, that the Christian Religion with indifferency to all Sects, was made the Religion of the Empire by Imperial Rescripts, and all Christians had thereby a Civil Right to a free and undisturbed profession of their Religion in their several Persuasions: For Constantine the Great carried so indifferent an hand between the Contending Parties, that he endeavoured to make Peace rather by silencing the Disputes, than by determining the Controversy: Worthy of the imitation of the Guides of Christendom; and the only means of freeing the Reformed Religion from being depraved by the Jargon and Gibberish of the Sectaries.  
If the Crown should devolve upon the Roman Successor, it would require consideration, whether we could justify the Dethroning of him; though the French Papist could not be justified in rejecting the King of Navar.  
But this untrue Patriot shifts his Cause from what it is, to what it is not, that he may have some colour to inveigh against the true Patriots, far more excellent and righteous than himself; and have some umbrage to betray the best Religion and the best Government, while he pretends with false Hypocrisy to support them.  
But I am glad to find in him at least one grain of Sense and Honesty; he saith well (to do him right) that is the best Religion that gives every one his due. But he must consider farther, to the confusion of the Cause he Advocates, That to give every one his due, is to administer Defence to the Innocent, and by Authority of Law to subdue the aggressors of Mankind, how great and mighty soever they be; for they that are mighty Offenders, aught in proportion to be mightily punished: Fiat Justitia therefore, as he saith, Ruat Coelum: for, to punish, much less to lay a restraint upon evil Persons, is not to do evil that good may come of it; which he would impute to the proceed in Parliament against the Duke, for which he must be self-condemned, for I cannot take him for a Germane Anabaptist.  
And now we find this Considerer complaining of some Pamphleteers, that writ ridiculously Sophistical, and unreasonable Reasons; that tell stories (he saith) of Edgar Athelin, William the Conqueror, Arthur Plantagenet, and King John; that writ Antichristian and Fanatical Logic, never heard of, until the Spirit of Belial revealed it to Oliver and the Rump. I believe, if there be any such Pamphlet, this Pamphleteer is the Author of it, or some of his Complices: to the purpose that there might seem some one worse than his own; and that he might be able to quarrel with, and confute, and do advantage to his bad Cause by some worse Reasonings than he would seem to be Master of, or than his Cause is capable of, which is not capable of a good one.  
But what he says cannot possibly be true of any Pamphlet; but rather than he will not be slandering, he will slander himself, and belie the Devil: For observe, he saith, they use Fanatical Logic, and Antichristian Logic. The true fanatics, being impatient of the restraints of Reason, and to be confined to sober sense, call Logic and Reasoning by that which they would seem most to hate, Antichristian. The true Antichristians and Papists, being impatient of the light reproof and discovery of Reason, call sound Reason Fanaticism. But our Writer is so vengeancely angry with reasoning, that with the same breath he calls Logic, for the sake of reason, Antichristian and Fanatical too; and renders himself suspected of being an Antichristian Fanatic.  
And yet any one may see, that it is not the thing itself that he is thus angry with, but the name of Logic that he thus exposeth; for what it is he knows not, he seems to think it comes by Inspiration, and that there are two sorts of Logic; one good, but he is not acquainted (for all that appears to us) with the Spirit from whence that is derived; and another bad, which, he says, is inspired by the Spirit of Belial; whereas most certainly there is no such Devil amongst all the Orders of the Apostate Angels: Sons of Belial I have heard of indeed, that did evil without profit, without design, for evils sake; but these are such men as need no Tempter; for they will be wicked without a Tempter, according to the fatal propensions of their vicious Natures, and are not to be managed by the Devil himself: And to this sort of men doth our Pamphleteer seem somewhat to approach, for that he is an unaccountable Transgressor.  
No reason can be given of him, why he should with so much seeming earnestness concern himself to persuade the People to abandon to an utter neglect those things that of all others are of most value to them, their Religion, Government, Lives, Liberties and Estates. To persuade a whole Nation to lay violent hands upon themselves, to cut their own Throats, to burn themselves alive and their Houses; and to destroy themselves, their Wives and Children, Bodies and Souls too, for Conscience-sake. That there can be a Subject not subject to Laws; and that offences that cannot be rated, because their mischiefs are infinite, for that very reason must not be punished; and he would have us reckon it a sin of the most heinous nature, to punish the Offender with a diminution only in his power to do those evils which are most notoriously by him designed, and will be effected by means of his own making and causing, if he himself should relent and refuse to execute them. If in this Age of Licence, immodesty could entitle any man to be a son of Belial, our Writer of Considerations might fairly pretend to it, who is immodest for impudence sake, which spends itself in waste, and cannot effect any thing but the exposing itself. In saying this, I should think myself very severe, but that he hath published his own shame; and if I would, it is not in my power to cover it.  
But he hath not showed the worst of himself yet, he attempts further upon the Understanding of the People; he will have us believe that we own Allegiance to the Presumptive Heir; that we have as many Kings as Princes of the Blood; and that a Son hath a right to his Father's Estate before he is dead: For the probable Successor can have no more right to the effect of the Oath of Allegiance, than the eldest Son to receive the Profits of his Father's Estate without his leave in his Father's Life-time.  
If this Gentleman's Father had had any Land, he would have understood the difference between his right to the Land after his Father's Death, and his hopes and possibility only to have it during his Father's Life. The word Heir is joined with Successor in the Oath of Allegiance, to signify, that it means Heirs in the proper sense, which is such that succeed to the Inheritance; and not such as are in expectance or possibility of having the Inheritance, who are improperly and equivocally so called. And tho' the thing is so plain, that every man as well as the Lawyers agree what is said; yet my Lord Cook, for saying the same, is called by this Gentleman, Silly and Ridiculous, Fallacious and Impertinent.  
The Lawyers tell me, that it is a Rule in the Law, Non est hoeres viventis; that is, No man can have an Heir while he lives; and they likeways say of all the Reguloe Juris, There is not one of greater extent and rule than this; that it hath governed Ten thousand Cases near upon in the Common Law; and they withal assure me, that notwithstanding this man (amongst other civil terms) calls the Lord Cook Fallacious, they firmly believe, if a Fee had been offered to him of the value of his Estate, which is about 200000 l. he would not have signed an Opinion with a Videtur to the contrary; but he is resolved that all Mankind shall be mistaken, and he will call their reasonings in this matter what he pleaseth; New Machiavillian Logic, a word that dishonestly he took up, on purpose to expose the Bill to the Vulgar, imagining in his profound Consideration, that some of the Multitude will, upon the hearing of Machiavillian, fall thereupon into an unwitting dislike of the Bill.  
Nay, he will conclude an Heir Apparent to be an Heir, because he could not be Heir Apparent unless he were an Heir; when the word Apparent and the word Presumptive more especially joined to Heir, is a term of Abatement or Negative, and distinguisheth him from being a real Heir, and speaks him no Heir, but only one in a near possibility of being so. But, says he, it is a manifest contradiction for one to be Heir Apparent, and not to be Heir; as it is to be a Learned man and no man. Prius est esse, quam esse tale. I wish we had his Name, that we may mark the most absurd reasonings by it, for the everlasting Honour of this Pretender to Reasoning and Discourse. We all know that the word Heir is a Name to design a Person under such a relation and respect, and imports nothing of entity; and we may use our own abstract Terms properly or improperly, and without any correspondent reality, to an equivocal sense.  
But he adds Profaneness to his Levity, and as if the Holy Scriptures were writ to so trifling a design, as to be an Oracular Dictionary, and Infallible Nomenclature; he tells us how the word Heir is used in Scripture, when the holy Writers form their Language by the vulgar Idioms amongst the People of the Jews, and never intended to write Lawcases, much less to declare the Common Law of England, or imagined that their stile should be produced to expound our Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy.  
But now, thou vain Considerer, wilt thou hence conclude, that the Duke of York is Heir and Successor? That we now own him Faith and Allegiance? That he is already in the Throne, and that this Bill, though it pretends only to foreclose him, doth truly depose him?  
It is insufferable, that this man should impute to the House of Commons, and the best People of England, Diabolical Fiction, the worst of all Jesuitical Equivocations, and of endeavouring to make a colour to their perfidious and perjurious deal, for these reasons only, because we will not believe, or take ourselves to have sworn Allegiance to the Duke of York, when we swore it to the King: Because we will not allow that a Parliament of England, which is the King, Lords, and Commons, have no more to do with our Government than the Pope of Rome; or that the Pope hath as much power to depose one of the Kings, as the Parliament hath to punish a most obnoxious Subject: This he dares address to the King, and publish to the World.  
He proceeds to presume and tell us, that this at least must be granted, that whosoever is by Blood next Heir to the Crown, we are by our Oath obliged before God to bear him Faith and true Allegiance: nay, to defend him against all attempts, until he is disinherited by Act of Parliament; and therefore, says he, whatsoever we do against him, before this Act be fully established, is a violation of our Oath, and therefore the very attempt of voting and passing this Bill, makes the actors and abettors Perjurers before God and the World.  
Sure it will be allowed, that this Gentleman is mistaken; sure he doth not intent to speak Treason, but hath a way of speaking which he will use by himself, and will make Words stand for what he hath a mind to: which Will and Pleasure of his, this peremptory absolute man thinks himself not bound to explain, though to save his Neck, if he should be Indicted therefore of Treason, which I desire he may, and Arraigned too, for the better clearing the matter, if it be possible, how we are now bound to bear Faith and true Allegiance to the Duke: But he will sooner be Hanged, than make out how a thing may be done Lawfully, which is not Lawful to go about: That the Duke of York may be Lawfully Disinherited, but the Voting and Passing of the Bill must be Perjury. May not he that is bound by an Oath to pay money, desire a release from the Debt without Perjury? Cannot all Civil Debts, Duties and Contracts, though confirmed by Oath, be discharged by the Interested Person, to whom the Duty is to be performed, and for whose Benefit the Contract is made? May not Kings, by renouncing their Governments, make the Oath of Allegiance cease to all effects of Obligation? And cannot an Act of Parliament that shall disable a Successor, equally prevent it from passing any Obligation upon us?  
But shortly to explain of what Import, and for what reason the words Heirs and Successors are put into the Oath of Allegiance: and it is this, That in case of the Demise of the King, and the Devolving and vesting of the Crown upon the Heir and Successor, the Oath that we took to the Predecessor, by virtue of those Words lays hold upon our Consciences, and obligeth us to him from the first minute of his Reign, but not before; and so we are not one minute free from the Bonds of our Allegiance. This being the scope of the Law that requires it, and of the Oath itself, it must likewise be by that interpreted; for finis discendi est ratio dictorum, and an Oath doth not oblige as this or that man would interpret, neither according to the vulgar or technical use of the Word, but in such a sense as is adequate and agreeable to the Intent and End of the proposing and requiring it.  
But by what is said before, it appears that we are not yet under the Obligation of that Oath to the Duke, and that it is in the Pleasure and Power of the Parliament, whether we ever shall be; our Comfort is (whatever he thinks) that there is a great difference between Hopes and Enjoyment: And further, it appears that the Heir Apparent is but equivocally, and in a less proper sense so; and yet this Considerer (who if he be not a perfect Atheist, and serves a turn in this Paper, must be a Papist in his heart) according to the Modesty of the Gentleman, chargeth us with Jesuitical Equivocations in the Oath of Allegiance, while in the mean time he is equivocating the King out of his Throne, shifting the Duke into his place, by an aequivocal Abuse of the word: the coursest slight that ever was used by any Hocus Pocus, or any Pretender to Legerdemain.  
And yet upon the Confidence of these weak and mistaken Reasonings, he presumes to arraign the House of Commons of the greatest Injustice and Iniquity, and would have us apprehend Slavery the Arbitrary and Despotical Power of Parliaments. The loss of all Security either of Property or Liberty, by a prevailing Faction of Parliament; which he will be able to effect at the same time when he can persuade us to dissolve the Polity, and exchange the best and safest Government into an Anarchy. To be without Judges, for fear of unrighteous Sentences; and without a Power of Legislation, for fear of Laws of Iniquity. But it is not a new thing for obnoxious Criminals and Outlaws to turn Rebels against Government.  
What this man is, and what the Cause is he Espouses, is declared sufficiently, in that he hath no better ways of Advocation and Defence, than by Opposing and Reviling the Government itself; and he that dares revile the Government, would, if he had Power, Destroy it.  
In that he calls the major part of the House of Commons a Prevailing Faction, I challenge him Guilty of the Highest Treason, of a Treason not only against this Government, but of a transcendent Treason, of a Treason virtually against all mankind, for that we cannot subsist without Polities, and no Polities can subsist but by deference to the results of the Governing Power, which is Interpretatively in the resolves of the major part.  
But he proceeds to question, whether, by the Constitutions of this Government, the Parliament can extend their power to shut out the Duke from succeeding to the Crown; for admitting (he means) That it is Just, which we will not accept of as a voluntary concession of this Considerer, (for that it doth appear not only Just, but highly necessary, to exclude the Duke by Bill) he will then draw it into question, Whether there be any competent power in the Government for doing a thing not only just, but absolutely necessary for the preservation of the King and Kingdom? Whether there be any Subject too great for Justice, or any private Right that is not governable, and may not be ordered as to the Legislature shall seem necessary to the preservation of the whole? Whether that which is properly the Right of the Community (for so is the Succession) may receive no alteration in a single instance, for the Weightiest Reasons? and whether he that declares that he will not Govern, but Destroy, and doth virtually renounce the Government, may not be left out of the Succession? This is the true state of the Question; and the Question thus stated, gives its own solution; And who, except those of the Conspiracy, do not so state it, and allow it?  
As to his Question, Whence the Parliament derives their Power: let him know, that the Parliament derive their Power and Authority from the same Original the King derives His: The King hath not His Power from them, nor they theirs from the King: They both derive their Authority from the Consent of the People in the first Constitution of the Government, either tacit or express, or by their express or tacit Consent, in the insensible, and little, or great, and more remarkable alterations that the Government hath suffered in the course of Time.  
The King can make the Parliaments Power no greater than it is, nor they His. Though true it is, he may put an unlimited Trust reposed in Him, into Stated Laws, and Govern by Counsels established into Laws; which is not to alter or lessen His Power, but to make it more Safe and Wise, and impeccable in the exercise of it. He may ascertain the indefinitness of his Power, that it may not be abused. And that King doth best provide for a happy and wise Administration of his Government, who leaves the fewest things to fortuitous resolves, who reduceth his Prerogative to the measures of Common Right, and makes the Kingdom secure and safe, by leaving the Succession less Capacity and Scope to do mischief.  
It is mostly incumbent upon his Sacred Majesty to secure the Government committed to his Care, and keep it upright, and steady upon its own Basis, and to preserve all things in a due and Legal Course: To watch to prevent all machinations against it, and such as would destroy and subvert it; and by his executive power of the Laws, obtain to us the ends of Government, that we may live quiet and peaceable Lives in all Godliness and Honesty. For the sake of this High Trust, and the Dignity of this Office, his Person is most Sacred and Inviolable.  
The King and his great Council providing for the establishment and security of the Government in their proceed are not tied up to forms of Judicial proceed; but are to act upon such inducements, and in such methods, whereby the Wisest men govern their affairs; in which they are at perfect Liberty, and not under the restraint of Laws. They cannot do unjustly, whatever methods or means they use, that are prudentially and morally necessary to this End.  
This power can be no more wanting in Governments, than we can be without Government: That which establisheth the one (which is the Law of God declared in the Make and Frame of Humane Nature) affirms and allows the other.  
By the Authority of this Law of God so declared and promulgated, as I have told you, do Kings Reign, and Senators or Princes Decree Justice. By virtue of this Law, and in Obedience to it, is this Bill framed (against which this Considerer declaims like a speaking Brute.) From this Law of God, the said Bill when it passeth into a Law, will have its Approbation, Sanction and Establishment.  
But against this Bill, with his accustomed Truth, Candour and Modesty, he doth object, That if such an Authority shall belong to the Parliament, as to disable one successor upon such inducements as are sufficiently known; a Parliament some time or other may be corrupted by a King, and by mercenariness comply with him to sell the Succession of the Crown to a Foreigner. We all well enough know, that this Bill is designed to keep out the Tyranny of France, or at least the French Tyranny: But for this I leave the King to reckon with him and the Pensioners of the late long Parliament.  
The Gentleman continues to add the story of Ahab, contriving to possess himself of Naboth's Vineyard, by causing him to be falsely accused of Blaspheming God and the King; by which, if true, by the Jewish Laws, Ahab had been Justly entitled to it as a Royal Escheat. But if he had not been as stupid as a Block, he had not mentioned this story, which is a precedent and an adjudged case against himself; who, but a Line before, had so vilely Blasphemed so great a King, a far greater King than Ahab, though the Parliament divide some Authority with the King in the Government: But what were the Constitutions of the Jewish Monarchy, this Writer of Considerations, I am sure, knows no more than his Footboy. But let him know, that the Romish Religion is a Blaspheming God; and to bring the King's Life in danger, is worse than to Blaspheme him. See what wise Work this Considerer makes; when, forsooth, he would argue, That the Duke of York cannot be shut out of the Succession, no more than Ahab could take Naboth's Vineyard from him.  
The man of Weighty Considerations tells us in the next Paragraph, That God was Incensed against Esau for selling his Birthright; and therefore the Duke must not lose his, contrary to his Will, and all Justice, by a prevailing Faction of his Inferiors.  
Who ever told him, That God was Incensed against Esau for selling his Birthright? Did not God purpose the Birthright to Jacob, before the Brothers were born, and before they had done Good or Evil? Can God be angry with him for agreeing and executing his own Purpose and Decree? Did not Isaac and Rebekah both know and understand the Oracle, and in Obedience to it, Jacob was effectively Blessed by his Father Isaac's confirming the Blessing first gotten by surprise, and by the Solemnity of that Blessing, his Father Isaac transferred the right of the Promise made to Abraham, to be fulfilled in the Line of Jacob? Indeed the place he quotes in Heb. 12.17. is this, Let no Whoremonger or Profane Person be amongst you, like Esau, that would prefer a Sensual pleasure before the great things that were promised by our Lord to them that obey him. Wherein the mention of Esau's Story, is only to illustrate and set off what they fell short of the Grace of God, and the designs of his Holy Institution. Indeed, if he could prove to us, that his Royal Highness, being the younger Brother, had any such thing transmitted to him in his Generation, as the Jews called the Segulah (by which they mean some peculiarity, which did appropriate the Right of the Promises made to Abraham,) which Jacob had, and Esau wanted, they say; If he had any Divine mark upon him (besides the Contingency of his Birth) that designed him & marked him for a King, besides Roman Zeal, there would be some Consequence in his Discourse, and this would be the best Argument that he hath yet used (though the King would be little beholden to him for it:) But where God doth not interpose by express Revelation, Humane Affairs, Concerns and Interests of all sorts, must be Governed and Ruled by the Laws, Orders and Decrees of the respective Governments. I would not have been so long in animadverting upon this last passage, but that I think our Considerer hath taken into his assistance in these Considerations some Divine, by his abounding so much in Scriptural Allegations: And that hereby you may see the Size of the rest of the men of that Order, that are Chaplains to the Cause of the Succession, and that they ought to be of little regard in this matter, as they deserve none; it being not in their way: though in matters that belong properly to their Function, they may deserve much who are of the meanest of that Order.  
Our Gentleman next proceeds to his political Arguments; but those can be answered, I persuade myself, by every man who hath heard of the Plot. Though a man of his Size may frame puzzling Arguments that may perplex men's Minds with scruples and doubts; which a Fool may do, and a Wise man cannot remove; yet it is scarce possible for him to deprive men of their Senses, and make them insensible to all the Evils that they hear, see, and feel, and justly fear. If the Protestants are not (as he saith) very strong abroad, we have reason to be more united at home, and united by the awful Authority of a Law. If we are threatened with a great power of the Roman Religion from abroad, (which he affrights us with) we have no reason to retain the biggest power to hurt us within our own Bowels. But if it be in the power of such bad men as this Pretender to divide by slights and wiles the good People of England, and keep them from uniting in the only means of their safety, we must perish: But Woe be to them by whom we are thus destroyed.  
His last effort upon the minds of the People is to intimidate them, that by their fears they may fall under the evils they design upon us: he scatters his menaces, as if he were in the place of God against us, and as if he had the executing of the Plot in his Power, and tells us of sins that fit us for ruin. It is convenient to these Plotters to imagine us mighty wicked, that they may believe we deserve the Vengeance they design. Our Government itself, our Laws, our Religion must become wicked, when they arrive to a probable power to hurt us: They never contrive a Gunpowder Plot, a Massacre, or burning a City, but they dream the iniquity of the People is grown ripe; They would turn us into Sodom and Gomorrha (which this Considerer frights us with) if they could call for Fire from Heaven; and then publish us to all the world (if we were much better than we are) to be as wicked as the Cities of the Plain. If we cannot obtain this Bill, I shall then begin to think, that the Decree is gone forth, and our Fate is approaching, and that God will let these Villains have their will over us. By God's displeasure, not theirs, I shall take the true measures of our Sins; His displeasure will be remarkable and evident, if he seems to deny us the means of our Safety and Preservation, and which is the only means of the King's Salvation from their Traitorous design. If this Bill do not pass, they will take him for a wicked King too; and they will say, he hath no lawful Issue to succeed him, for his own sins (though our Considerer saith at present, that our Sins are the cause of it) and many other remarks of wickedness they will make upon him, when they find it convenient and for their interest to destroy him; at best he will be then but Tenant at Will to them of his Life, as well as his Crown, which this Considerer most slanderously chargeth to be designed by us: but if he will follow the counsel of that excellent Bill, he may live long, and see good days, and peace upon our Israel; to which let all good people say, AMEN.  
I shall only remark two or three things in the close of the Paper of Weighty Considerations. First, that he undertakes to say and affirm, that the King is as much subject to the Power of the Parliament as the Duke; which doth dethrone the King himself, and lessens him to the degree of a Subject. Secondly, that in this his Address he persuades the King to rend the Government, to lay aside the Commons of England, and abandon them as Rebels; to divide from them, and govern by a House of Lords and Privy Council. And thirdly, that the most venerable and Loyal Parliament that ever was convened in this Nation, though not so clearly purged from the corrupt Villains of the late long Parliament, as the next we hope will be, are charged by him to follow the Anarchical Encroachments of the Factions in the Rump-Parliament; by which he insinuates that we must become Papists, admit of a Popish Successor, or be used as Rebels and Traitors: by these three Remarks it is evident, what Principles and Designs these men are of, that oppose the Duke's Bill; and from thence you may find reason to assist it, and promote it with the greatest unanimity and resolution; and the rather, for that the Duke himself cannot want Considerations to dispose him to approve of it.  
For what should he do with a Crown that he cannot wear? Why should he accept of a trust that he cannot discharge, and a Government that his Principles oblige him to transfer to a Foreign Prince? he is too generous a Prince to enter upon a Province only to betray it.  
He is a Prince of great Charity: it was that surely moved him publicly to confess the Roman Religion, that he might thereby recommend that Religion to our belief, for the better reforming us from Heresy: Why then should not the same Charity move him to renounce the Government, lest he should offer an  temptation to the People to a Rebellion? a greater sin accounted by a King, though a Catholic, (however the Priests rate it) than an error in belief.  
But how can we imagine that he will condescend to be our King? He doth not intent to accept of our Oaths of Allegiance, and had rather not be King, than we should be his Subjects upon those terms. Why should we trouble him with the name of King, reproach him, call him Apostate, Heretic, and Infidel, by swearing ourselves his Subjects in the terms of the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy? Pray think no more of it, writ no more Great and Weighty Considerations; for he intends to be no more your King, than he doth to desert his Religion and the Roman Catholic Faith.  
Besides, his Zeal and Services, and the Difficulties that he hath undergone for that Church, and the hazards he hath incurred, deserve the best Place, and highest Office in that Church, which is that of a Priest; he ought not to be put off, and meanly rewarded with the Sheriffalties, which their Eminencies of the Conclave despise, and be preferred to all the Drudgeries and Cruelties that the Priesthood of that Church require of the Kings of that Communion that become Zealots.  
He is a Prince that can deliberate and consider, and will conclude, that it is better for him to betake himself to a Monastery now, before he hath filled the Land with Blood and Slaughter, and all the mischiefs that the hellish Plot designs upon us, than to take Sanctuary in one hereafter, loaded with the melancholy considerations of a lost design, and intolerable guilt, if he himself should chance to survive, and not perish ingloriously in the enterprise, never to be gathered to his Fathers, and shut out of the Sepulchers of Kings.  
He is a great lover of his Brother, as he ought in gratitude to be, who lets him live, and in his good opinion too, after he had departed from his Allegiance, and become a Member of another Hostile Polity and Regimen, and after, in consequence thereof, the King's Life is brought in conspicuous danger: Besides, that it was natural and necessary that attempts upon the Life of the King should ensue upon his public declaration of himself to be a Papist. And we cannot, without thinking too meanly of him, think him without a foresight thereof: there remains therefore no way for him to avoid the guilt of his Brother's Murder, (we tremble at the probability of it) than by renouncing the Crown. The King cannot in probability die before him, except he falls to the Interest of that Religion which his Highness doth profess. So that the Duke will relinquish nothing by the consenting to the Bill, but the hopes to succeed upon his Brother's Murder; but he would not the one (so virtuous we will think him) to obtain the other.  
Admit him to be King, he must be a King without Subjects; for he must be a Slave to one part of the people to destroy the other: these may not be, the other will not be his Subjects.  
To be an open Enemy is more Princely, than to submit to the sordid methods of Falsehood and Treachery, than to betray us and deceive us in the confidence we justly should have in him, if he should succeed to the Crown by a legal appointment. He hath already departed from the Government, which is Treason in a common person; but we will give it in him an honester name, and call him only an Enemy to our State and Religion, and his departure to be an overt declaration of Hostility; let him therefore be consistent with himself, purchase the Government by Conquest, by the assistance of the Arms of France, his Popish Adherents, and homebred Traitors. But let him not assume the Crown by Title and Succession, under obligations to govern by Law, and to preserve us in our Religion, which is our Legal Right, and more precious to us than any thing else the Law entitles us unto. Let him not add falsehood to his mistaken and cruel zeal, and do all the mischiefs the Plot designs, while he pretends to Govern. Let him openly assault us Miscreants, subdue us Infidels, that already stand Cursed and Excommunicated, whom he hath Warrant enough from his Religion to destroy with an utter destruction.  
He is an excellent Son of King Charles the First, of blessed Memory, who died a Martyr for the Government of Church and State, and lost his Life as well as his Government, when he could not preserve it any longer by his Sword; And do you think that James his Son, who carries the Royal Name of his Grandfather, though the first of England, yet the Sixth of that Name in Scotland, will suffer the Government to be altered, and to be a King and no King? It is more just for him to choose an Exclusion from the Succession, than to suffer the Government to be changed; we must therefore suppose him to be willing rather to consent to the Bill and renounce the Succession, conformably to the recent example of his never-to-be-forgotten Father, than to consent to, or be bound by any Act of Parliament that shall alter the Government: They are not his Friends, nor agreeable to him, that would spoil the Government, more valuable in his esteem (as well as his Father's) than a personal Reign: That would make him a King in mockery; That conspire against the Government itself, which he will not, he ought not to sustain and endure, as long as there is any Iron and Steel in the hands, or Blood in the Veins of Loyal Roman Catholics.  
He is an equal Prince, and will not take it so much to Heart, that he sees the People of his Nativity not stupid Sots, but that they can be sensible of the dangers that he urgeth them with, and provide apt remedies against the evils which threaten us.  
But if these Reasons will not obtain his express Consent to that Law for his Exclusion, they will be allowed Inducements sufficient enough to pass it and conclude his Assent; for the nature of a Law is, to be first reasonable, and to make those willing that should be consenting to it as reasonable and fit, but are not, and to render them obedient and submitted: For this is one of the greatest benefits of Government, that they that cannot or will not choose what is best for themselves, the Laws will choose for them, with regard to the Public Good.  
For the better clearing the matter of the Constitutions of this Realm, in relation to the Succession, I thought it necessary to add the substance of an Act of Parliament yet in force, made 13 Elizabethae.  

13 Elizebthae Cap. 1.  
An Act whereby certain Offences are made Treason.  
FOrasmuch as it is of some doubted, whether the Laws and Statutes of this Realm, remaining at this present in force, are vallable and sufficient enough for the surety and preservation of the Queens most Royal Person, in whom consisteth all the happiness and comfort of the whole State and Subjects of the Realm: Which thing all Faithful, Loving, and Dutiful Subjects ought and will with all careful study and zeal cnosider, foresee, and provide for; By the neglecting and passing over whereof with winking Eyes, th●…e might happen to grow the subversion and ruin of the quiet and most Happy State and present Government of this Realm (which God defend.) Therefore, etc. to Declare, etc. during her Majesty's life, that the Right of the Crown was in any other Person, should be Treason. And such Person that should, during her Majesty's Life, Usurp the Crown, or the Royal Style, Title, or Dignity of the Crown or Realm of England, etc. they, and every of them so offending, shall be utterly disabled, during their natural Lives only, to have or enjoy the Crown or Realm of England, or the Style, Title, or Dignity thereof, at any time in Succession, Inheritance, or otherwise, after the Decease of our said Sovereign Lady the Queen, as if such Person were dead: any Law, Custom, Pretence, or matter whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding. After which, these words follow.  
And be it further Enacted, That if any Person shall in any wise hold, and affirm or maintain, That the Common Laws of this Realm, not altered by Parliament, ought not to direct the Right of the Crown of England; Or, that our said Severaign Lady, the Queen's Majesty that now is, with and by the Authority of the Parliament of England is not able to make Laws and Statutes of sufficient Force and Validity to limit and bind the Crown of this Realm, and the Descent, Limitation, Inheritance, and Government thereof: Or, that this present Statute, or any part thereof, or any other Statute to be made by the Authority of the Parliament of England, with the Royal Assent of our said Sovereign Lady the Queen, for limiting of the Crown, or any Statute for Recognising the Right of the said Crown and Realm, to be justly and Lawfully in the most Royal Person of our said Sovereign Lady the Queen, is not, are not, or shall not, or ought not to be for ever of good and sufficient Force and Validity to Bind, Limit, Restrain, and Govern all Persons their Rights and Titles, that in any wise may or might claim any Interest or Possibility in or to the Crown of England, in Possession, Remainder, Inheritance, Succession, or otherwise howsoever; And all other Persons whatsoever, every such person so holding, affirming, or maintaining, during the life of the Queen's ●…elly, shall be adjudged a High Traitor, and suf●…r and forfeit, as in Cases of High Treason is accustomed; and every Person so holding, affirming or maintaining after the Decease of our said Sovereign ●ady, shall forfeit all his Goods and Chattels.    

AN ANSWER TO A BOOK, Published 1679. Entitled, A LETTER FROM A GENTLEMAN of Quality In the COUNTRY, to his Friend, etc. Relating to the Point of SUCCESSION to the CROWN, etc.  
BY several accidents the former sheets have stopped in the Press, from a few days after the Great and Weighty Consideration were published; and being now ready to com● forth, we have a Gentleman of Quality, as h● calls himself, undertaking from Scripture, Law, History, and Reason, to show how improbable (〈◊〉 not impossible) it is to bar the next Heir in th● right Line from the Succession, in a Letter to his honoured Friend A. B.  
And now after so long a time of consideration, one should think the many men of great Parts ●nd Learning that are dependants on the Duke, spirited with zeal and ambition, should have offered all that they have to say against the Bill ●or excluding his Royal Highness. And this ●eing (as may be reasonably concluded) the last endeavours of the most learned and best parted men of that Interest; This Letter for that reason only, but not for any thing of moment that ●t offers, deserves to be considered.  
We will not follow him from Paragraph to Paragraph, since the greatest part of it is vain and empty, pedantic, bombast, and putrid affectation.  
I shall only draw you up short Summaries of his several Reasons, and give them all the advantages they can challenge, and improve them by just and natural Inferences: And that I think will be enough of confutation, and a sufficient countercharm against his deceiving the People.  
He first lays down for a Ground, That the Succession to the Crown of England is inseparable annexed to Proximity and nextness of Blood, by the Laws of God and Nature; And all Statute-Laws contrary to the Laws of God and Nature, are, ipso facto, null and void.  
That it is contrary to the Laws of God, he proves by the Law of God given by Moses to the Jews in the 7th of Numbers, that directs how the Succession of Lands should be amongst the Jews; and whatsoever Statute-Laws are contrary to those Laws are null and void, he saith.  
The consequence of this Argument is this That the Laws given by God to the Jews are Laws to all Mankind: That our common-Law and Statute-Law is against the Law of God, and null and void, because not agreeable to the Law of Moses: That the eldest Son is not to take by Descent the whole inheritance, but a double portion only, and that the Crown must be disposed of in Descents accordingly: That not the first Son only, and one Daughter, but all the Daughters of a King, if never so many, must succeed together to the Crown: That no Father can sell his Patrimony; for that was the Jewish Law, and established in that Chapter he quotes.  
He proves it to be a Law of God further, for that God saith to Cain of Abel, That his desires shall be subject, and thou shalt rule over him.  
The consequence of this, is, that because Cain could not kill Abel, (notwithstaning he was to have the Primacy) That Abel much more could not kill Cain his Elder Brother.  
And further he proves that to be a Law of God, because God maketh choice of the firstborn to be Sanctified and Consecrated to himself.  
And therefore it most certainly follows, with this Gentlemen, that he which is not the firstborn must be so too. I wish his Royal Highness, the second born, the Consecration of a Priest; (which the Text means, notwithstanding the Text doth not allow it him) so that he will not pretend to the Consecration of a King, which is clearly out of the meaning of the Text.  
He says, Consonant hereunto are the Suffrages of the Doctors of the Civil and Imperial Law.  
The Consequence of this is, first, That he is not bound to be coherent to himself; for he was before proving the Law of God to be, That the Succession of the Crown is inseparably annxed to proximity of blood, and now he tells us of some Opinions of Fathers and Doctors that are consonant thereunto, when they do not at all relate in their Opinions to what he had produced out of Moses his Law. Secondly, it follows, that he is impertinently troublesome to his Reader, by telling him of the Opinions of great names in this matter, that the Eldest Son by ordinary right is to have his Father's Estate in some Countries, or that the Crown doth so ordinarily descend where the Succession is hereditary; he should have spared them for another time, when he shall say something that all mankind doth not agree in. Thirdly, That he is a man of little reading, otherwise he would have been insufferably impertinent by 10000 quotations in this matter. Fourthly, That he is no Civilian? for that in this place he calls the Sovereignty a Fee, when all men agree that a Crown is of that fort of Inheritancs, which they call Allodiums, that are held 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. This would have made a swinging Argument for his Jure Divino, if he had thought of it, but we will give it them gratis. He tells us the Duke of York is in the same condition as the Eldest Son of the King Reigining, though his Brother be King: That the second Son of a King Regent, when the first is dead, living his Father, is within the 25. of E. 3. that makes it Treason to compass the death of the King's Eldest Son; and that such Second Son is Prince of Wales, and Duke of Cornwall.  
The Consequence whereof is, that he very impertinent, or else the Duke of York is now Prince of Wales, and Duke of Cornwall, and that he is within the Statute of 25 Ed. 3.  
This Argument of his he leaves to be further illustrated and pursued by the Churchmen and Civilians: But lest they should fail, this Epistoler (for I now am well assured, that this question and cause is to be managed by the Sword, by Massacres, and the French Plot, and not by Writing) I have adventured, and will proceed to illustrate his Arguments, and pursue them into their Consequences, & leave the Epistoler of Quality to be pursued with laughter; for he deserves no worse, if it be true that he professeth, that he is a Protestant and Lover of the Government.  
Now he will, he saith, as best sorting with his profession, and with a discourse of the nature, drive proofs from the Authority of the Common and Statute-Law of England.  
From whence it follows, That the Common-Law and Statute-Laws of England are proper to be consulted with, for declaring the Laws of God, and the Laws of Nature; which they never yet pretended to do. And Secondly, it follows from thence, that this Epistoler no more understands the Common and Statute-Laws of England, and what places they are to have in the Conduct of our manners, and guidance of our Consciences; than he doth (as appears by what he hath said before) what is the Law of God or Nature.  
He lays it down as most evident, That all the humane Acts and Powers in the World cannot hinder the Descent of the Crown upon the next Heir of the Blood? because (though they may hinder the Possession and Enjoyment of it) This is a Dowry which the great King of Kings hath reserved to his own immidiate Donation, and hath placed above the reach of a mortal Arm; and mankind can no more hinder or intercept it, than it can the Influences of the Stars or the Heavens upon the Sublunary world, or beat down the Moon.  
The Consequence of this is, that the man is Lunatic and of insane memory and hath forgot and denies what in the same breath he affirms: Eor, he agrees humane Power may hinder the possession and enjoyment, and yet it is no more possible to hinder the Descent, than to stop the Influences of Heaven, and to pull down the Moon. Secondly, It follows, that that which is done is impossibe to be done. Thirdly, that there is no Right at all by Descent, nor can be any Descent of the Crown; for that it is reserved, as he says, to Gods immediate Donation, And we never yet heard of any immediate Gift or Donation thereof from God. And if the Duke will stay until that be done, we most solemnly declare we will accept him for our King; and he shall be a King to intents and purposes (as he terms it;) we will be kinder and juster to him than his Friends of the same persuasion with the Epistoler, who will give him the Name and Style, and would Abridge him, as they pretend, of the Power and Authority of a King.  
He says further, That when the Duke is King, that the Legiance and Fidelity of the Subject is due to him by the immutable Law of Nature; from whence it clearly follows, that he must stay until that time come: That when he is a Loyal and Foyal King, we are to be Loyal and Foyal Liege-men and Subjects, For Calvin's Case which he citys, by the general Opinions of all considerable Lawyers, is Apocryphal, where it makes Allegiance absolute, and more extensive than the Legal Power of Kings. But here he subjoins such loathsome Pedantry, that I cannot but remark it: He subjoins to his mention of Calvin's Case, that Aristotle, Nature's Amanuensis (as he calls him) agrees with that Case, in that he saith, 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉. and Seneca's Natura commenta est Regem. But for my promise sake, I will make no further Observations upon him, than by bare repeating of it to expose it.  
That the King and his Successors are Kings by Nature, he proves; For that the Statute Laws do frequently style the King our Natural Liege-Lord: And for further proof tells us, that in Indictments it is set forth, that the Treason is committed contra debitum Fidei & Ligeantiae quod naturaliter & de jure impendere debet: And the King in Indictments is sometimes styled Natural Lord.  
Whence it follows, that we are born under Allegiance; that no man that is born under any form of Government can deny Faith unto it, though he never expressly swore Allegiance. That the King of France is not our Natural Lord, neither doth the Oath of Allegiance bind us to that Form of Government, if introduced, because the King was born to no such Kingship: Nor is our King a Natural Lord to any Foreigners that come hither; and the Form of the Indictment against Foreigners, as the Lawyers know, must be in another Form. And further it follows, That in all changes of Government, the word natural is to be adjoined to Allegiance in all Indictments of Treason committed against the Government in its several changes that it may suffer; And this all the Lawyers with one voice pronounce.  
He sums up all that he hath said before, thus: No humane Power can hinder the Descent of the Crown upon the Right Heir; the Descent makes the King, Allegiance is due to the King by the Law of Nature; The Law of Nature cannot be abrogated by humane Power: That Common-Law is more worthy than Statute-Law, and the Law of Nature more worthy than both. But upon better consideration of the whole matter, it follows with better Consequence, That Nature hath made no Laws about Property, nor about Governments; otherwise all Laws of Right and Property, and all Governments would have been the same; for what she makes are Universal, as the Nature of man: Besides that if he knew where she became a Legislatrix, or if this Gentleman could direct us to a view of her Pandects, we ought to acoord all our Laws to them. Secondly, That Common-Law is not to be preferred before Statute-Law; For the Judges who declare the Common-Law are not wiser than Parliaments; and the Common-Law appears so bad a Rule, that it requires oftentimes amendment. Thirdly, It follows, that no Legislation is Lawful, for that which is to be preferred, is best, and that which is best is to be a Law for ever. Fourthly, That no Allegiance is due to any Prince, but whom the Law appoints, and as the Law appoints: That he that is not King, to him no Allegiance is due. That humane Power is competent enough to alter as well as make any humane Constitution. That which by humane Authority was made, and made also descendible (for all Crowns are not descendible) can be altered by the same Authority in its Descent.  
The greater part of this ensuing Discourse, is, the remembrance of the Tragedies that have been acted upon the English Nation by our Kings: For we have not only suffered under their bad Government, but they have Usurped one upon another, and we have been infinitely miserable by being drawn into Wars, to dispute which of them should Govern us after their own manner and fashion. If this Epistoler had had any regard to mankind, any bowels and commiseration for the vast Miseries and Calamities which we have suffered thereby, except he had depressed all mankind so far below this Jure-Divinity Head, as if they were no more considerable than a swarm of Flies, and aught to perish by Thousands, to the Pleasure, Lust and Ambition of any that is big enough to pretend to a Crown; he had not here talked so gloriously of the Matter of Succession; he would have put the Crown in Cypress, and veiled its splendour with a mourning dress; he would not have talked of Pearls and Oriency, (in his foolish style) Jewels and Gems of Magnitude.  
But, if they, by Cruelty and Treachery have murdered one another, and usurped upon the Legal Right of Succession, and did keep the people in a state of War for Centuries of years; shall not we exclude a single Person from the Succession, to prevent more and greater Miseries to be executed perhaps in one year upon this poor Nation, than the former Usurpations did produce in Centuries of years?  
But let him attempt the Crown, notwithstanding an Act of Parliament for his Exclusion, he is all that while but attempting to make us miserable; if he be not excluded, he doth it certainly: We exclude only his Person, not his Posterity; and we will not entail a War upon the Nation, though for the sake and interest of the Glorious Family of the Stuarts.  
The next Argument he produceth is this, viz. that in Acts of Parliament the Right of Succession is called a Natural Right, and consequently that it is unalterable. The consequence of this Argument is, that a Right by Birth is a natural Right, and that truly; for men are born by nature. Secondly, It follows, that no man hath a natural Right by Birth to the Inheritance of his Father, or that his Father cannot give it from him, or he himself foreclose himself by Treason and Felony. Or else it follows, that notwithstanding Princes of the Blood succeed by the right of their Birth, which is a natural Right, or a Right by Nature; they may be set aside, and excluded the Succession to the Crown upon as great reason as we have for this Bill of Exclusion.  
His Law- Farrago of Statutes that have been adjudged void, because unreasonable and impossible, concludes, that a Statute-Law in a matter that is not unreasonable and impossible, is a good and binding Law; and therefore he ought to have a profound veneration and deference to it (in which we use only his own words in this matter, which are the least foolish) when it passeth into a Law.  
But if he cannot find the reasonableness of this Bill, in what we have offered, we may further conclude, that nothing will convince him but French Auxiliaries, and a Stack of Faggots in Smithfield. If this Act be impossible to be executed, we must conclude that it is in the Power of his Party to execute our Laws, Religion, and Government, and to Assassinate the Nation. We wish only, on the behalf of our Religion and Government, that we had as great assurance that the Bill would pass into a Law, as the reasonableness thereof is evident.  
But this Epistoler (whose Province he saith is Law) nextly undertakes to say, That the Successsion of the Crown to the next Heir of the Blood, is a Foundamental and Primary Constitution of this Realm, and indeed the Basis and Foundation of all our Laws. The Succession of the Crown to the next Heir of the Blood, is one of the highest, essential, and undivided Rights of the Crown. That no Person or Community can give away, or transfer, a thing which they never had to give. Of this nature is the Right of Succession to the Crown, which is not the gift of a man, but the immediate Dowry (that World he is fond of) of God, Nature, and the immutable Customs of the State.  
Whence it follows, that God, Nature, and the immutable Customs of State, met together once upon a time about this Matter; or that the immutable Customs of State did sometime consult God and Nature about this matter; and agreed their Sentiments. Or,  
God and Nature and immutable Customs of State are all one: That Customs of State are made without People: That Customs of State are as immutable as God and Nature: That God and Nature cannot alter that which is once a Custom: That God cannot be heard, though he interposeth with all the Obligations that he lays upon us to Humanity and Justice, from his own Philanthropy and Justice, to protect the whole Body of an Innocent Nation, from, destroying Zeal and wasting Superstition; nor Nature herself be heard in her close injunctions of self-preservation: But immutable Custom a more powerful Supreme, must prevail against God and Nature, though at first they stuck together in making this Primary Constitution the Basis and Foundation of all Laws: for nothing else was certainly in the mind of God and Nature so much, as to set up a Royal Family amongst us a part of Mankind. And to show a particular kindness to the English People (for he hath not dealt so with every Nation:) That he doth not certainly think us worthy of any Laws, any Lives or Estates, if we do not aceept of this singular favour, nor if we do accept, woe worth us miserable people. But Laws, it seems, we can have none without it; for that's the true Basis and Foundation (saith he) of all Laws. And this follows with good reason; for the Succession of the Crown to the next of Blood, is one of the highest, most essential, and undivided Rights of the Crown: for it is clear we must lose our present King, and he be divided from his Life and Crown, rather than the Succession be divided from the next of Blood; and after that, what matters it what becomes of the People, of no regard certainly, of no regard at all, nor to be considered, where the Rights or pretences of Kings are concerned.  
And further, because Kings cannot alienate the Crown, which doth not lie in Dominion, but in Truth: not in Property, but in care; for Officium est imperare, non regnum: And because that people cannot be sold like Droves of Cattle: therefore it is with clear and irrefragable reason inferred by this Letter-writer, That the King must not live; that he cannot remove an irresistible temptation against his own Life: And we must receive a King that hath devoted us a fat Sacrifice to his cruel Superstition, as his party hath our King, that they may more easily come at us.  
Lastly, he saith, That the right Heir of the Crown cannot be barred or excluded by Act of Parliament; because the Accession and Descent of the Crown in an instant absolutely purgeth and dischargeth all Obstructions and Incapacities whatsoever, created by the same Act of Parliament.  
From whence it follows, that the Earl of Danby, if he were next Heir, might succeed, if he should be attained of Treason of State by Parliament; whereas if the King cannot pardon him, as he cannot, he could not in that case of the descent of the Crown pardon himself. The Heir of the Crown attainted, upon the devolving of the Crown upon him, is therefore purged from the Attainder, because he can pardon himself, and is intended to do so; but a Treason of State can never be pardoned by the King. Our young Lawyer knows well enough, that an incapacity by Act of Parliament to execute an Office growing upon a moral disability of executing the trust of that Office, is not in the King's power to pardon. Secondly, from hence it follows, that that Attainder which leaves a capacity to obtain a Pardon of the King, doth not at all differ from an Attainder that excludes all capacity from the King to pardon, and which in the Constitution of the Government he hath no power to pardon; such are all Treasons of State where the King is not the Pars laesa, and where it is not a private wrong, a single crime, but the attempt is upon the whole Government. Thirdly, hence it clearly follows, that he that is no King, and upon whom the Crown can never descend, (as it will not if this Bill passeth into an Act) he being without the Imperial Crown, without right, and without possession of it, is yet a King. That there is no difference between an Act of Parliament which leaves the Successor to a possibility of being purged from the Attainder it makes; and that Act of Parliament which leaves no such possibility, qut doth most absolutely and expressly exclude him.  
His Positions must therefore be false, and his Arguments not concluding, from which such notorious falsehoods and absurdities are naturally inferred.  
Instead of further argument, he tells us a matter of Fact, of an Act of Parliament made 28 H. 8. cap. 7. to render Queen Elizabeth incapable of Succession: And that she notwithstanding got into the Throne: And that Sir Nicholas Bacon (who had consulted the Judges) told the Queen, that there needed no formal Repeal of the said Act; for that Corona semel suscepta, omnes omnino desectus tollit.  
The Consequence of this is, that if the Duke can, notwithstanding an Act for his Exclusion, get into the Thhone, he will; and so let him. Secondly, that a King de facto, though a bad one, is not to be removed at the expense of a Civil War; that it is madness to part with a good one, when in possession, and cruelty to the People.  
Detrahere Dominum urbi servire parata.  
But afterwards in the 35 of Hen. the Eighth, the Crown was limited by Act of Parliament. in case the King and Prince Edward should die without Heirs of either of their Bodies, to the Lady Mary and the Heirs of her body; and for want of such Heir, to the Lady Elizabeth and the Heirs of her body.  
We are no ways concerned in the justification of our Bill, to approve of the humorous Caprice of Henry the Eighth, and the arbitrary Laws that he made in his time about the Succession: they are instances of his haughty Government, that he imposed upon Parliaments, and that he took the Crown to be at his dispose, and transferrable at his pleasure, as his Money and Lands: a great indignity to Mankind, and an injury to the nature of Government! But that the Succession of the Crown is the right of the whole Community, their Appointment, their Constitution, and Creature in Parliament, and alterable as far the Bill designs, and for such reasons as presseth and urgeth in the Case of the Duke. Whether this, I say, is not to satisfaction proved in these Sheets; and whether this Epistoler hath produced any shadow of Reason to prove the contrary, let the World judge: And whether he hath given us any thing for reason, but the insignificant bluster of Words, canting Language, and pedantic Nonsense, which will never pass with any man of the least spark of sense for Argument.  
Neither do we place the Right of Succession to Government in the same rank with private Inheritances; nor ever were they governed in any Country by the same Rules; though this Epistoler hath produced the Laws of God by Moses to the Jews (which was only to govern private Inheritances amongst them) to prove the unalterable Succession of the Crown amongst us: which is so wild an impertinence, wherewtih he gins his Letter, that he will be ashamed of it when he reviews it, and conceal his name for ever with care.  
That there is one Rule for the Succession of the Crown, and another for the Succession of private Estates, is from these Reason; That private Inheritances are disposed of in Succession, according to the presumed Will of the Decedens, which is collected from the general Opinion and Practice of the people in disposing of their Estates by Settlements; or by their Wills and Testaments, in case of Allodiums: or else the Succession goes according to the direction and limitation of the Lord made in the first collation of the Fee in case of Fees. But the Descent and Succession of the Crown is governed and directed by the presumed Will of the People: and that presumption of the People's Will is made by measuring and considering what is most expedient to the public good, or by the express limitation of the People in their conferring the Royal Dignity. In Allodiums, in defect of Heirs, the Inheritance belongs to the Sovereign Power, as a thing that is Nullius in bonis, and hath no owner. In Fees, when the Family is extinct it Escheats to the Lord of the Fee.  
In Crowns, upon the extinction of the Royal Family, it belongs to the People to make a new King, under what limitations they please, or to make none, for the Polity is not destroyed if there be no King appointed: and consequently in case of this cesser or discontinuance of the Regnum, there may be Treason committed against the people.  
That the Succession of the Crown is directed according to the presumed Will of the People, and collected from what is most expedient gives us the reason why one Daughter or Female of the next degree shall succeed to the Crown, and not all, if more than one; whereas a private Inheritance is equally divided amongst them all: For it is the Interest, and therefore the presumed Will of the People, that the Kingdom should continue undivided. The strength of the Kingdom is preserved in being continued united, and the Peace and Concord of the People thereby establed.  
That a Son by the Second Venture shall succeed to the Crown, which is not allowed in private Estates, is, because one so born is equally of the Family of his Father; and the expectation of the people as great from him, being descended from that glorious Person upon whom the Crown was conferred by the people, or who after he had got into the Throne, obtained the submissions of the People. The same reason admits an Alien born, though he be estranged from us by his Birth.  
Est in Juvencis, est in equis patrum vertus.  
Though what I have said in this matter, is so obvious, that no considering man can escape these thoughts, yet I cannot think it impertinent to add it here, to clear what I have laid down in the precedent Sheets, as an undoubted truth, and evident in itself; That the Succession to the Crown is the people's Right. But there is nothing, I perceive, to be allowed clear and evident, when we live in an Age wherein Fools and most ignorant persons will undertake, by the Liberty of the Press, to print and publish to the world their crude thoughts, and with great assurance offer their uncouth Opinions with astonishing presumption. Besides to the reasonableness of this Doctrine, it is agreeable to the Illustrious Grotius, De Jure Belli & Pacis, Lib. 2. cap. 7.  
And nothing follows from his collected Lawcases about the different Rules of Succession of the Crown from private Fees, but that he is a very young Lawyer, or an old senseless Jobber of Lawcases.  
But I hope that all men that read him, will with resentment think themselves used with scorn, when they see what frivolous Fellows attempt upon them to deceive them; and will be fully convinced, that the Bill is reasonable, just, and fit, since they have nothing better to object against it.  
The last endeavour of the Epistoler is to remove the Authority of Parliaments, and the Act made in the Thirteenth of Queen Elizabeth. The words of which are printed at the close of the Papers against the man of Great and Weighty Considerations. Our case is not in its reasons unparallel to those that introduced that Law, and occasioned the making of that Declaration; but whatever was the particular Reason, the Declaration of that Parliament in that Act is general, and therefore it is an Authority not to be impeached, to prove that there is such a power to alter the Succession of the Crown, for great Ends, and weighty Reasons, and just Causes. Besides, that such a power is lodged in the Parliament, is clearly proved by us from the nature of Government, in the foregoing Sheets: As also, that such a power will not be abused by using it in this Bill of Exclusion, of which I hope no body upon the reading of them will retain any longer any manner of doubt. But I cannot, before I have done, but take notice of his little Artifice. in that he doth suggest, that by the Act of Parliament of the Thirteenth of Queen Elizabeth, cap, 1. the Title of the Family of Stuarts is excluded; when it is evident by the words of the Act, that the Disability there enacted is only personal. And his story of Monsieur the Duke of Anjou designing then to marry the Queen, is a false and malicious insinuation, to hurt the memory of that excellent Princess. And consequently, that King James and his Race had, and have, notwithstanding the validity of that Act, a good Title to the Crown: And that the validity of that Act may be maintained, without derogation and injury to his Majesty's sacred Title, whom God long preserve.  

A short Historical Collection touching the SUCCESSION of the CROWN.  
WHether the History of the Succession of the Crown will allow so good and clear an Hereditary Right, Jure humano, as we have yielded in the precedent discourse, the Reader will best judge by the short Historical Collection touching the Succession hereto subjoined.  
In the Heptarchy there was no fit Hereditary Right, one King tripping up the heels of another, as he had power, till one got all.  
After that, Alfred, Bastard-son to Oswin: Adelstane Bastard-son of Edward the Elder: Edmund, Surnamed the Martyr, Bastard-son to King Edgar: Harold, Surnamed Harefoot, Bastard-son to Canute, wore the Imperial Crown of England.  
But a Law was made under the Saxon Monarchy, De Oodinatione Regum, directing the Election of Kings, and prohibiting Bastards to be chosen.  
Edward the Confessor was no King Jure Haereditario; but the right was most indisputable at first in Edward Son of Edmond Ironside, Father to Edgar Etheling his Nephew, during his life; and after his decease, in that Edgar, who was Nephew also to the Confessor.  
William the First, called the Conqueror, was a Bastard, and had no right but from his Sword, and the People's Suhmissions, and their Electing him.  
William Rufus was elected against the right of his Elder Brother Robert then living.  
Henry the First was made King, favenle Clero & Populo, his Brother Robert still living, whose Eyes were after put out at Cardiss-Castle in Wales.  
King Stephen was elected a Clero & Populo, and confirmed by the Pope, and Maud Daughter of Henry the First excluded.  
Henry the Second came in by consent, yet he had no Hereditary right; for his Mother Maud the Empress, Daughter and Heir to Henry the First, was then living.  
King John had an elder Brother Jeoffery Earl of Britain, who had Issue Arthur and Elinor, which ought to have succeeded before him; but he Arthur his Eldest Brother's Son living, was elected a Clero & Populo; and being divorced from his Wife, by his new Queen had Henry the Third.  
Henry the Third was confirmed and settled in the Kingdom by the general Election of the people; Elinor, Daughter to Jeoffery the elder Brother, still living.  
Roger Mortimer Earl of March, Son of Edmund by Philippe Daughter and Heir of Lionel Duke Clarence, a younger Son of Edward the Third, was in the Parliament 9 R. 2. declared Heir Apparent of the Crown: which could not be but by force of an Act of Parliament.  
Henry the Fourth came to the Crown by way of Election; and in his time, viz. in the eighth year of his Reign, was the first Act of Parliament made for Entailing the Crown with Remainders.  
By virtue of which, his Son Henry the Fifth became King, and after him Henry the Sixth.  
In Henry the Sixth his time, Richard Duke of York claimed the Crown: and an Act of Parliament was made 39 H. 6. that Henry the Sixth should enjoy the Crown for his life, and the said Duke and his Heirs after him. After which, King Henry raises an Army by the assistance of the Queen and Prince, and at Wakefield in Battle kills the Duke; for which, 1 Edw. 4. they were all by Act of Parliament, attainted of Treason; and one principal reason thereof was, for that the Duke being declared Heir to the Crown after Henry by Act of Parliament, they had killed him: which Act of Attainder was 1 H. 7. repealed, and the Blood of the King, Queen, and Prince restored, in terms of disgrace and detestation of so barbarous an Attainder, Rot. Palr. Anno 1 H. 7.  
Edward the Fourth succeeds upon the death of H. 6. by virtue of an Act of Parliament made in the time of H. 6. for entailing the Crown as Son and Heir to the Duke of York.  
Edward the Fifth succeeded by virtue of the same Act of Entail.  
Richard the Third having got the Crown, he was confirmed King by Act of Parliament; which likewise Entailed the Crown: which was done upon two reasons pretended: First, for that by reason of a precontract of Edward the Fourth, Edward the Fifth his eldest Son, and all his other Children, were declared Bastards. Secondly, for that the Son of the Duke of Clarence, second Brother to Edward the Fourth, had no right, because the Duke was attainted of Treason by a Parliament of Edward the Fourth. The Act of Parliament for Bastardising the Children of Edward the Fourth, was in force until repealed in the time of Henry the Seventh, after his Marriage with Elizabeth the Daughter of Edward the Fourth.  
Henry the Seventh comes in by no legal Title: First, because Edw. 4th his Daughter was then living. Secondly, his own Mother was then living. In his first Parliament the Crown was Entailed upon him and the Heirs of his body. And observable it is, that after the death of Elizabeth his Queen, Daughter and Heir to Ed. 4th. there is no notice taken of any right which was pretended to by Hen. 8. during his Fathir's life, as being Son and Heir of his Mother, who had the legal Right to the Crown by an ordinary right of Succession.  
Henry the Eighth Succeeded, who did (as all his Laws speak) derive his Title to the Crown by the Father's side, and not by the Mothers. In his Reign the Crown was Entailed thrice by Act of Parliament, Confirmed by the general Oaths both of the Spiritualty and the Lasty; and it was made High Treason to refuse such Oaths; and several Attainders were in his time by particular Acts of parliament of several persons who opposed such limitations of the Crown, and the authority of the Laws that made them.  
But the great Law of the three was made in the 35th year of his Reign, Cap. 1. whereby power was given him to give and dispose by his Letters Patents, or by Will, the Imperial Crown of the Realm, to remain and come after his death, for want of lawful Heirs of Prince Edward, the Lady Mary, and the Lady Elizabeth to such person or persons, in remainder or reversion, as should please his Highness. In which Act there was a Clause, that made it high Treason to speak or write against that Act, or to go about to annul or repeal it. Besides, there is another Proviso in that Act, That if the Lady Mary should not keep such conditions which the King should declare by his Letters Patents or last Will, the Imperial Crown should come to the Lady Elizabeth: And if the Lady Elizabeth should not observe the same, than the Crown was to go to such person as the King by his Letters Patents, or last Will, should limit and appoint.  
By virtue of which limitation in the Act of Parliament , Edward the Sixth succeeded to the Crown, and after him Queen Mary: in whose Reign, in an Act of Parliament for Conformation of the Articles of Marriage between her and Philip of Spain, the Crown was again Entailed; but she dying without Issue, the Lady Elizabeth became Queen, who had been declared a Bastard (as well as her Sister Mary) in the life of their Father; and therefore succeeded to the Crown by force of the Entail made in the 35 H. 8. Cap. 1.  
Pursuant to these Precedents in fact, in the 13. year of the Reign of Q. Eliz. an Act of Parliament was made, declaratory of the power of Parliament in the limitation of the Succession, which made it highly penal to deny the Authority of an Act of Parliament for the limitation of the Crown. Several persons in her time were proceeded against upon that Act, and had the Judgement of Traitor, and as Traitors executed for being contrary to that Law.  
This Queen dying, King James succeeded, who was (as the Statute of Recognition made in Parliament the first year of his Reign, declares) lineally, rightfully, descended of the most excellent Lady Margaret eldest Daughter of the most renowned Henry the 7th, and the high and Noble Princess Queen Elizabeth his Wife, eldest Daughter of King Edward the 4th, the said Lady Margaret being eldest Sister of King Henry the 8th, Father of the High and mighty Princes of famous memory Elizabeth late Queen of England.  
It is further observable, that upon the Marriage of Queen Mary to King Philip of Spain, both the Crowns of Emgland and Spain were entailed; whereby it was provided, that of the several Children to be begotten upon the Queen, one was to have the Crown of England, another Spain, another the Low Countries: The Articles of Marriage to this purpose were confirmed by Act of Parliament and the Pope's Bull.  
And by that Act of Parliament for confirming the Articles of Marriage, Philip was created King, and did exercise Sovereign Authority, and particularly in making Laws together with the Queen: the Style of the Sovereign Assent to Bills in Parliament in their time being, Le Roy & la Roigne les veulent.  
And likewise for that it was agreed by the States of both Kingdoms, and the Low Countries; it is therefore probable, that it was the Universal opinion of the great men of that Age, That Kings and Sovereign Princes, by and with the consent of their States, had a power to alter and bind the Succession of the Crown.   
FINIS.