THE REASON OF church-government urged against PRELATY By Mr. John Milton.  
In two Books.  
LONDON, Printed by E. G. for John Rothwell, and are to be sold at the sun in Paul's churchyard. 1641.   

The Reason of Church-government urged against PRELATY.  

THE PREFACE.  
IN the publishing of human laws, which for the most part aim not beyond the good of civil society, to set them barely forth to the people without reason or Preface, like a physical prescript, or only with threatenings, as it were a lordly command, in the judgement of Plato was thought to be done neither generously nor wisely. His advice was, seeing that persuasion certainly is a more winning, and more manlike way to keep men in obedience then fear, that to such laws as were of principal moment; there should be used as an induction, some well tempered discourse, showing how good, how gainful, how happy it must needs be to live according to honesty and justice, which being uttered with those native colours and graces of speech, as true eloquence the daughter of virtue can best bestow upon her mother's praises, would so incite, and in a manner, charm the multitude into the love of that which is really good, as to embrace it ever after, not of custom and awe, which most men do, but of choice and purpose, with true and constant delight. But this practice we may learn, from a better & more ancient authority, than any heathen writer hath to give us, and indeed being a point of so high wisdom & worth, how could it be but we should find it in that book, within whose sacred context all wisdom is enfolded? Moses therefore the only Lawgiver that we can believe to have been visibly taught of God, knowing how vain it was to write laws to men whose hearts were not first seasoned with the knowledge of God and of his works, began from the book of Genesis, as a prologue to his lawer; which Josephus right well hath noted. That the nation of the Jews, reading therein the universal goodness of God to all creatures in the Creation, and his peculiar favour to them in his election of Abraham their ancestor, from whom they could derive so many blessings upon themselves, might be moved to obey si cerely by knowing so good a reason of their obedience. If then in the administration of civil justice, and under the obscurity of ceremonial rites, such care was had by the wisest of the heathen, and by Moses among the Jews, to instruct them at least in a general reason of that government to which their subjection was required, how much more ought the members of the Church under the gospel seek to inform their understanding in the reason of that government which the Church claims to have over them: especially for that the Church hath in her immediate cure those inner parts and affections of the mind where the seat of reason is; having power to examine our spiritual knowledge, and to demand from us in God's behalf a service entirely reasonable. But because about the manner and order of this government, whether it ought to be presbyterial, or prelatical, such endless question, or rather uproar is arisen in this land, as may be justly termed, what the fever is to the physicians, the eternal reproach of our Divines; whilst other profound Clerks of late greatly, as they conceive, to the advancement of Prelaty, are so earnestly meeting out the Lydian proconsular Asia, to make good the prime metropolis of Ephesus, as if some of our Prelates in all haste meant to change their soul, and become neighbours to the English Bishop of Chalcedon; and whilst good Breerwood as busily bestirs himself in our vulgar tongue to divide precisely the three Patriarchats, of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, and whether to any of these England doth belong, I shall in the mean while not cease to hope through the mercy and grace of Christ, the head and husband of his Church, that England shortly is to belong, neither to See patriarchal, nor See prelatical, but to the faithful feeding and disciplining of that ministerial order, which the blessed Apostles constituted throughout the Churches: and this I shall assay to prove can be no other, then that of Presbyters and Deacons. And if any man incline to think I undertake a task too difficult for my years, I trust through the supreme enlightening assistance far otherwise; for my years, be they few or many, what imports it? so they bring reason, let that be look on: and for the task, from hence that the question in hand is so needful to be known at this time chiefly by every meaner capacity, and contains in it the explication of many admirable and heavenly privileges reached out to us by the gospel, I conclude the task must be easy. God having to this end ordained his gospel to be the revelation of his power and wisdom in Christ Jesus. And this is one depth of his wisdom, that he could so plainly reveal so great a measure of it to the gross distorted apprehension of decayed mankind. Let others therefore dread and shun the Scriptures for their darkness, I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and dwell upon them for their clearness. And this seems to be the cause why in those places of holy writ, wherein is treated of Church-government, the reasons thereof are not formally, and profestly set down, because to him that heeds attentively the drift and scope of Christian profession, they easily imply themselves, which thing further to explain, having now prefaced enough, I shall no longer defer.   

CHAP. I.  
That Church-government is prescribed in the gospel, and that to say otherwise is unsound.  
THe first and greatest reason of Church-government, we may securely with the assent of many on the adverse part, affirm to be, because we find it so ordained and set out to us by the appointment of God in the Scriptures; but whether this be presbyterial, or prelatical, it cannot be brought to the scanning, until I have said what is meet to some who do not think it for the ease of their inconsequent opinions, to grant that Church discipline is platformed in the Bible, but that it is left to the discretion of men. To this conceit of theirs I answer, that it is both unsound and untrue. For there is not that thing in the world of more grave and urgent importance throughout the whole life of man, than is discipline. What need I instance? He that hath read with judgement, of Nations and commonwealths, of Cities and Camps, of peace and war, sea and land, will readily agree that the flourishing and decaying of all civil societies, all the moments and turnings of human occasions are moved to and fro as upon the axle of discipline. So that whatsoever power or sway in mortal things weaker men have attributed to fortune, I durst with more confidence (the honour of divine providence ever saved) ascribe either to the vigour, or the slackness of discipline. Nor is there any sociable perfection in this life civil or sacred that can be above discipline, but she is that which with her musical cords preserves and holds all the parts thereof together. Hence in those perfect armies of Cyrus in Xenophon, and Scipio in the Roman stories, the excellence of military skill was esteemed, not by the not needing, but by the readiest submitting to the edicts of their commander. And certainly discipline is not only the removal of disorder, but if any visible shape can be given to divine things, the very visible shape and image of virtue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walks, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortal ears. Yea the Angels themselves, in whom no disorder is feared, as the Apostle that saw them in his rapture describes, are distinguished and quaternioned into their celestial princedoms, and Satrapies, according as God himself hath writ his imperial decrees through the great provinces of heaven. The state also of the blessed in Paradise, though never so perfect, is not therefore left without discipline, whose golden surveying reed marks out and measures every quarter and circuit of new Jerusalem. Yet is it not to be conceived that those eternal effluences of sanctity and love in the glorified Saints should by this means be confined and cloyed with repetition of that which is prescribed, but that our happiness may or be itself into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentrical equation be as it were an invariable Planet of joy and felicity, how much less can we believe that God would leave his frail and feeble, though not less beloved Church here below to the perpetual stumble of conjecture and disturbance in this our dark voyage without the card and compass of Discipline. Which is so hard to be of man's making, that we may see even in the guidance of a civil state to worldly happiness, it is not for every learned, or every wise man, though many of them consult in common, to invent or frame a discipline, but if it be at all the work of man, it must be of such a one as is a true knower of himself, and himself in whom contemplation and practice, wit, prudence, fortitude, and eloquence must be rarely met, both to comprehend the hidden causes of things, and span in his thoughts all the various effects that passion or complexion can work in man's nature; and hereto must his hand be at defiance with gain, and his heart in all virtues heroic. So far is it from the ken of these wretched projectors of ours that bescraull their Pamflets every day with new forms of government for our Church. And therefore all the ancient lawgivers were either truly inspired as Moses, or were such men as with authority enough might give it out to be so, as Minos, Lycurgus, Numa, because they wisely forethought that men would never quietly submit to such a discipline as had not more of God's hand in it then man's: To come within the narrowness of household government, observation will show us many deep counsellors of state and judges to demean themselves incorruptly in the settled course of affairs, and many worthy Preachers upright in their lives, powerful in their audience; but look upon either of these men where they are left to their own disciplining at home, and you shall soon perceive for all their single knowledge and uprightness, how deficient they are in the regulating of their own family; not only in what may concern the virtuous and decent composure of their minds in their several places, but that which is of a lower and easier performance, the right possessing of the outward vessel, their body, in health or sickness, rest or labour, diet, or abstinence, whereby to render it more pliant to the soul, and useful to the commonwealth: which if men were but as good to discipline themselves, as some are to tutor their Horses and Hawks, it could not be so gross in most households. If then it appear so hard and so little known, how to govern a house well, which is thought of so easy discharge, and for every man's undertaking, what skill of man, what wisdom, what parts, can be sufficient to give laws & ordinances to the elect household of God? If we could imagine that he had left it at random without his provident and gracious ordering, who is he so arrogant so presumptuous that durst dispose and guide the living ark of the holy Ghost; though he should find it wandering in the field of Bethshemesh, without the conscious warrant of some high calling. But no profane insolence can parallel that which our Prelates dare avouch, to drive outrageously, and shatter the holy ark of the Church, not born upon their shoulders with pains and labour in the word, but drawn with rude oxen their officials, and their own brute inventions. Let them make shows of reforming while they will, so long as the Church is mounted upon the prelatical Cart, and not as it ought between the hands of the Ministers, it will but shake and totter, and he that sets to his hand though with a good intent to hinder the shogging of it, in this unlawful waggonry wherein it rides, let him beware it be not fatal to him as it was to Vzza. Certainly if God be the father of his family the Church, wherein could he express that name more, then in training it up under his own all-wise and dear Oeconomy, not turning it loose to the havoc of strangers and wolves that would ask no better plea than this to do in the Church of Christ, what ever humour, faction, policy, or licentious will would prompt them to. Again, if Christ be the church's husband expecting her to be presented before him a pure unspotted virgin; in what could he show his tender love to her more, then in prescribing his own ways which he best knew would be to the improvement of her health and beauty with much greater care doubtless then the Persian King could appoint for his Queene Esther, those maiden dietings & set prescriptions of baths, & odors, which may tender her at last the more amiable to his eye. For of any age or sex, most unfitly may a virgin be left to an uncertain and arbitrary education. Yea though she be well instructed, yet is she still under a more strait tuition, especially if betrothed. In like manner the Church bearing the same resemblance, it were not reason to think she should be left destitute of that care which is as necessary, and proper to her, as instruction. For public preaching indeed is the gift of the Spirit working as best seems to his secret will, but discipline is the practic work of preaching directed and applied as is most requisite to particular duty; without which it were all one to the benefit of souls, as it would be to the cure of bodies, if all the physicians in London should get into the several Pulpits of the City, and assembling all the diseased in every parish should begin a learned Lecture of Pleurisies, Palsies, Lethargies, to which perhaps none there present were inclined, and so without so much as feeling one pulls, or giving the least order to any skilful Apothecary, should dismiss 'em from time to time, some groaning, some languishing, some expiring, with this only charge to look well to themselves, and do as they hear. Of what excellence and necessity than Church-discipline is, how beyond the faculty of man to frame, and how dangerous to be left to man's invention who would be every foot turning it to sinister ends, how properly also it is the work of God as father, and of Christ as Husband of the Church; we have by thus much heard.   

CHAP. II.  
That Church government is set down in holy Scripture, and that to say otherwise is untrue.  
AS therefore it is unsound to say that God hath not appointed any set government in his Church, so is it untrue. Of the time of the Law there can be no doubt; for to let pass the first institution of Priests and Levites, which is too clear to be insisted upon, when the Temple came to be built, which in plain judgement could breed no essential change either in religion, or in the Priestly government; yet God to show how little he could endure that men should be tampering and contriving in his worship, though in things of less regard, gave to David for Solomon not only a pattern and model of the Temple, but a direction for the courses of the Priests and Levites, and for all the work of their service. At the return from the Captivity things were only restored after the ordinance of Moses and David; or if the least alteration be to be found, they had with them inspired men, Prophets, and it were not sober to say they did aught of moment without divine intimation. In the prophecy of Ez-kiel from the 40 Chapt. onward, after the destruction of the Temple, God by his Prophet seeking to wean the hearts of the Jews from their old law to expect a new and more perfect reformation under Christ, sets out before their eyes the stately fabric & constitution of his Church, with all the ecclesiastical functions appertaining; indeed the description is as sorted best to the apprehension of those times, typical and shadowy, but in such manner as never yet came to pass, nor never must literally, unless we mean to annihilat the Gospel. But so exquisite and lively the description is in portraying the new state of the Church, and especially in those points where government seems to be most active, that both Jews and Gentiles might have good cause to be assured, that God when ever he meant to reform his Church, never intended to leave the government thereof delineated here in such curious architecture, to be patched afterwards, and varnished over with the devices and embellishings of man's imagination. Did God take such delight in measuring out the pillars, arches, and doors of a material Temple, was he so punctual and circumspect in lavers, altars, and sacrifices soon after to be abrogated, left any of these should have been made contrary to his mind? is not a far more perfect work more agreeable to his perfection in the most perfect state of the Church militant, the new alliance of God to man? should not he rather now by his own prescribed discipline have cast his line and level upon the soul of man which is his rational temple, and by the divine square and compass thereof form and regenerate in us the lovely shapes of virtues and graces, the sooner to edify and accomplish that immortal stature of Christ's body which is his Church, in all her glorious lineaments and proportions. And that this indeed God hath done for us in the Gospel he shall see with open eyes, not under a veil. We may pass over the history of the Acts and other places, turning only to those Epistles of S. Paul to Timothy and Titus: where the spiritual eye may discern more goodly and gracefully erected then all the magnificence of Temple or Tabernacle, such a heavenly structure of evangelic discipline so diffusive of knowledge and charity to the prosperous increase and growth of the Church, that it cannot be wondered if that elegant and artful symmetry of the promised new temple in Ezechiel, and all those sumptuous things under the Law were made to signify the inward beauty and splendour of the Christian Church thus governed. And whether this be commanded let it now be judged. S. Paul after his preface to the first of Timothy which he concludes in the 17 Verse with Amen, enters upon the subject of his Epistle which is to establish the Church-government with a command. This charge I commit to thee son Timothy: according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them might'st war a good warfare. Which is plain enough thus expounded. This charge I commit to thee wherein I now go about to instruct thee how thou shalt set up Church-discipline, that thou might'st war a good warfare, bearing thyself constantly and faithfully in the ministry, which in the I to the Corinthians is also called a warfare: and so after a kind of Parenthesis concerning Hymenaeus he returns to his command though under the mild word of exhorting, Cap. 2. v. 1. I exhort therefore. As if he had interrupted his former command by the occasional mention of Hymeneus. More beneath in the 14 V. of the 3 C. when he hath delivered the duties of Bishops or Presbyters and Deacons not once naming any other order in the Church, he thus adds. These things write I unto thee hoping to come unto thee shortly (such necessity it seems there was) but if I tarry long, that thou may'st know how thou oughtst to behave thy selfe lfe in the house of God. From this place it may be justly asked, whether Timothy by this here written might know what was to be known concerning the orders of church-governors or no? If he might, then in such a clear text as this may we know too without further jangle; if he might not, then did S. Paul write insufficiently, and moreover said not true, for he saith here he might know, and I persuade myself he did know ere this was written, but that the Apostle had more regard to the instruction of us, then to the informing of him. In the fifth Chap. after some other Church precepts concerning discipline, mark what a dreadful command follows, Verse 21. I charge thee before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect Angels, that thou observe these things, and as if all were not yet sure enough, he closes up the Epistle, with an adjuring charge thus. I give thee charge in the sight of God who quickeneth all things, and before Christ Jesus, that thou keep this commandment: that is the whole commandment concerning discipline, being them in purpose of the Epistle: although Hooker would fain have this denouncement referred to the particular precept going before, because the word commandment is in the singular number, not remembering that even in the first Chapt. of this Epistle, the word commandment is used in a plural sense, Vers. 5. Now the end of the commandment is charity. And what more frequent than in like manner to say the Law of Moses. So that either to restrain the significance too much, or too much to inlarg it would make the adjuration either not so weighty, or not so pertinent. And thus we find here that the rules of Church-discipline are not only commanded, but hedged about with such a terrible impalement of commands, as he that will break through wilfully to violate the least of them, must hazard the wounding of his conscience even to death. Yet all this notwithstanding we shall find them broken wellnigh all by the fair pretenders even of the next ages. No less to the contempt of him whom they fain to be the archfounder of prelaty S. Peter, who by what he writes in the 5 Chap. of his first Epistle should seem to be far another man than tradition reports him: there he commits to the Presbyters only full authority both of feeding the flock, and Episcopating: and commands that obedience be given to them as to the mighty hand of God, which is his mighty ordinance. Yet all this was as nothing to repel the venturous boldness of innovation that ensued, changing the decrees of God that is immutable, as if they had been breathed by man. Nevertheless when Christ by those visions of S. John foreshows the reformation of his Church, he bids him take his Reed, and meet it out again after the first pattern, for he prescribes him no other. Arise, said the angel, and measure the Temple of God and the Altar, and them that worship therein. What is there in the world can measure men but discipline? Our word ruling imports no less. Doctrine indeed is the measure, or at least the reason of the measure, 'tis true, but unless the measure be applied to that which it is to measure, how can it actually do its proper work. Whether therefore discipline be all one with doctrine, or the particular application thereof to this or that person, we all agree that doctrine must be such only as is commanded, or whether it be something really differing from doctrine, yet was it only of God's appointment, as being the most adequat measure of the Church and her children, which is here the office of a great Evangelist and the reed given him from heaven. But that part of the Temple which is not thus measured, so far is it from being in God's tuition or delight, that in the following verse he rejects it, however in show and visibility it may seem a part of his Church, yet in as much as it lies thus unmeasured he leaves it to be trampled by the Gentiles, that is to be polluted with idolatrous and Gentilish rites and ceremonies. And the the principal reformation here foretold is already come to pass as well in discipline as in doctrine the state of our neighbour Churches afford us to behold. Thus through all the periods and changes of the Church it hath been proved that God hath still reserved to himself the right of enacting Church-government.   

CHAP. III.  
That it is dangerous and unworthy the gospel to hold that Church-government is to be patterned by the Law, as B. Andrews and the primate of Armagh maintain.  
WE may return now from this interposing difficulty thus removed, to affirm, that since Church-government is so strictly commanded in God's Word, the first and greatest reason why we should submit thereto, is because God hath so commanded. But whether of these two, Prelaty or Presbytery can prove itself to be supported by this first and greatest reason, must be the next dispute. Where in this position is to be first laid down as granted; that I may not follow a chase rather than an argument, that one of these two, and none other is of God's ordaining, and if it be, that ordinance must be evident in the gospel. For the imperfect and obscure institution of the Law, which the Apostles themselves doubt not oft-times to vilify, cannot give rules to the complete and glorious ministration of the gospel, which looks on the Law, as on a child, not as on a tutor. And that the Prelates have no sure foundation in the gospel, their own guiltiness doth manifest: they would not else run questing up as high as Adam to fetch their original, as 'tis said one of them lately did in public. To which assertion, had I heard it, because I see they are so insatiable of antiquity, I should have gladly assented, and confessed them yet more ancient. For Lucifer before Adam was the first prelat Angel, and both he, as is commonly thought, and our forefather Adam, as we all know, for aspiring above their orders, were miserably degraded. But others better advised are content to receive their beginning from Aaron and his sons, among whom B. Andrews of late yeares, and in these times the primate of Armagh for their learning are reputed the best able to say what may be said in this opinion. The primate in his discourse about the original of Episcopacy newly revised begins thus. The ground of Episcopacy is fetched partly from the pattern prescribed by God in the old Testament, and partly from the imitation thereof brought in by the Apostles. Herein I must entreat to be excused of the desire I have to be satisfied, how for example the ground of Episcop. is fetched partly from the example of the old Testament, by whom next, and by whose authority. Secondly, how the Church-government under the gospel can be rightly called an imitation of that in the old Testament? for that the gospel is the end and fulfilling of the Law, our liberty also from the bondage of the Law I plainly read. How then the ripe age of the gospel should be put to school again, and learn to govern herself from the infancy of the Law, the stronger to imitate the weaker, the freeman to follow the captive, the learned to be lessoned by the rude, will be a hard undertaking to evince from any of those principles which either art or inspiration hath written. If any thing done by the Apostles may be drawn howsoever to a likeness of something mosaical, if it cannot be proved that it was done of purpose in imitation, as having the right thereof grounded in nature, and not in ceremony or type, it will little avail the matter. The whole Judaic law is either political, and to take pattern by that, no Christian nation ever thought itself obliged in conscience; or moral, which contains in it the observation of whatsoever is substantially, and perpetually true and good, either in religion, or course of life. That which is thus moral, besides what we fetch from those unwritten laws and Ideas which nature hath engraven in us, the gospel, as stands with her dignity most, lectures to us from her own authentic hand-writing and command, not copies out from the borrowed manuscript of a subservient scroll, by way of imitating. As well might she be said in her Sacrament of water to imitate the baptism of John. What though she retain excommunication used in the Synagogue, retain the morality of the Sabbath, she does not therefore imitate the law her underling, but perfect her. All that was morally delivered from the law to the gospel in the office of the Priests and Levites, was that there should be a ministry set a part to teach and discipline the Church; both which duties the Apostles thought good to commit to the Presbyters. And if any distinction of honour were to be made among them, they directed it should be to those not that only rule well, but especially to those that labour in the word and doctrine. By which we are taught that laborious teaching is the most honourable 
1 Tim. 5.  Prelaty that one Minister can have above another in the gospel: if therefore the superiority of Bishopship be grounded on the Priesthood as a part of the moral law, it cannot be said to be an imitation; for it were ridiculous that morality should imitate morality, which ever was the same thing. This very word of patterning or imitating excludes Episcopacy from the solid and grave ethical law, and betrays it to be a mere child of ceremony, or likelier some misbegotten thing, that having plucked the gay feathers of her obsolete bravery to hide her own deformed bareness, now vaunts and glories in her stolen plumes. In the mean while what danger there is against the very life of the gospel to make in any thing the typical law her pattern, and how impossible in that which touches the Priestly government, I shall use such light as I have received, to lay open. It cannot be unknown by what expressions the holy Apostle S. Paul spares not to explain to us the nature ure and condition of the law, calling those ordinances which were the chief and essential offices of the Priests, the elements and rudiments of the world both weak and beggarly. Now to breed, and bring up the children of the promise, the heirs of liberty and grace under such a kind of government as is professed to be but an imitation of that ministry which engendered to bondage the sons of Agar, how can this be but a foul injury and derogation, if not a cancelling of that birthright and immunity which Christ hath purchased for us with his blood. For the ministration of the law consisting of carnal things, drew to it such a ministry as consisted of carnal respects, dignity, precedence, and the like. And such a ministry established in the gospel, as is founded upon the points and terms of superiority, and nests itself in worldly honour, will draw to it, and we see it doth, such a religion as runs back again to the old pomp and glory of the flesh. For doubtless there is a certain attraction and magnetic force betwixt the religion and the ministerial form thereof. If the religion be pure, spiritual, simple, and lowly, as the Gospel most truly is, such must the face of the ministry be. And in like manner if the form of the ministry be grounded in the worldly degrees of authority, honour, temporal jurisdiction, we see it with our eyes it will turn the inward power and purity of the Gospel into the outward carnality of the law; evaporating and exhaling the internal worship into empty conformities, and gay shows. And what remains then but that we should run into as dangerous and deadly apostasy as our lamented neighbours the Papists, who by this very snire and pitfall of imitating the ceremonial law, fell into that irrecoverable superstition, as must needs make void the covenant of salvation to them that persist in this blindness.   

CHAP. IV.  
That it is impossible to make the Priesthood of Aaron a pattern whereon to ground Episcopacy.  
THat which was promised next, is to declare the impossibility of grounding evangelic government in the imitation of the Jewish Priesthood: which will be done by considering both the quality of the persons, and the office itself. Aaron and his sons were the Princes of their Tribe before they were sanctified to the Priesthood: that personal eminence which they held above the other Levites, they received not only from their office, but partly brought it into their office: and so from that time forward the Priests were not chosen out of the whole number of the Levites, as our Bishops, but were borne inheritors of the dignity. Therefore unless we shall choose our prelates only out of the Nobility, and let them run in a blood, there can be no possible imitation of Lording over their brethren in regard of their persons altogether unlike. As for the office which was a representation of Christ's own person more immediately in the high Priest, & of his whole priestly office in all the other; to the performance of which the Levites were but as servitors & Deacons, it was necessary there should be a distinction of dignity between two functions of so great odds. But there being no such difference among our Ministers, unless it be in reference to the Deacons, it is impossible to found a Prelaty upon the imitation of this Priesthood. For wherein, or in what work is the office of a prelate excellent above that of a Pastor? in ordination you'll say; but flatly against Scripture, for there we know Timothy received ordination by the hands of the Presbytery, notwithstanding all the vain delusions that are used to evade that testimony, and maintain an unwarrantable usurpation. But wherefore should ordination be a cause of setting up a superior degree in the Church? is not that whereby Christ became our Saviour a higher and greater work, then that whereby he did ordain messengers to preach and publish him our Saviour? Every Minister sustains the person of Christ in his highest work of communicating to us the mysteries of our salvation, and hath the power of binding and absolving, how should he need a higher dignity to represent or execute that which is an inferior work in Christ? why should the performance of ordination which is a lower office exalt a prelate, and not the seldom discharge of a higher and more noble office which is preaching & administering much rather depressehim? Verily neither the nature, nor the example of ordinationdoth any way require an imparity between the ordainer and the ordained. For what more natural than every like to produce his like; man to beget man, fire to propagate fire, and in examples of highest opinion the ordainer is inferior to the ordained; for the Pope is not made by the precedent Pope, but by Cardinals, who ordain and consecrate to a higher and greater office than their own.   

CHAP. V.  
To the Arguments of B. Andrews and the primate.  
IT follows here to attend to certain objections in a little treatise lately printed among others of like sort at Oxford, and in the title said to be out of the rude draughts of Bishop Andrews. And surely they be rude draughts indeed, in so much that it is marvel to think what his friends meant to let come abroad such shallow reasonings with the name of a man so much bruited for learning. In the 12 and 23 pages he seems most notoriously inconstant to himself; for in the former place he tells us he forbears to take any argument of Prelaty from Aaron, as being the type of Christ. In the latter he can forbear no longer, but repents him of his rash gratuity, affirming, that to say, Christ being come in the flesh, his figure in the high Priest ceaseth, is the shift of an Anabaptist; and stiffly argues that Christ being as well King as Priest, was as well fore-resembled by the Kings then, as by the high Priest. So that if his coming take away the one type, it must also the other. Marvellous piece of divinity! and well worth that the land should pay six thousand pound a year for, in a bishopric, although I read of no Sophister among the Greeks that was so dear, neither Hippias nor Protagoras, nor any whom the Socratic school famously refuted with out hire. Here we have the type of the King sowed to the typet of the Bishop, suttly to cast a jealousy upon the crown, as if the right of Kings; like Meleager in the Metamorphosis, were no longer lived than the firebrand of Prelaty. But more likely the prelates fearing (for their own guilty carriage protests they do fear) that their fair days cannot long hold, practice by possessing the King with this most false doctrine, to engage his power for them, as in his own quarrel, that when they fall they may fall in a general ruin, just as cruel Tiberius would wish,  
When I die, let the earth be rolled in flames.  
But where, O Bishop, doth the purpose of the law set forth Christ to us as a King? That which never was intended in the Law, can never be abolished as part thereof. When the Law was made, there was no King: if before the law, or under the law God by a special type in any King would foresignify the future kingdom of Christ, which is not yet visibly come, what was that to the law? The whole ceremonial law, and types can be in no law else, comprehends nothing but the propitiatory office of Christ's Priesthood, which being in substance accomplished, both law and Priesthood fades away of itself, and passes into air like a transitory vision, and the right of Kings neither stands by any type nor falls. We acknowledge that the civil magistrate wears an authority of God's giving, and aught to be obeyed as his vicegerent. But to make a King a type, we say is an abusive and unskilful speech, and of a moral solidity makes it seem a ceremonial shadow. Therefore your typical chain of King and Priest must unlink. But is not the type of Priest taken away by Christ's coming? no saith this famous Protestant Bishop of Winchester; it is not, and he that saith it is, is an Anabaptist. What think ye Readers, do ye not understand him? What can be gathered hence but that the prelate would still sacrifice? conceive him readers, he would missificate. Their altars indeed were in a fair forwardness; and by such arguments as the they were setting up the molten calf of their Masseagaine, and of their great Hierarch the Pope. For if the type of Priest be not taken away, then neither of the high Priest, it were a strange beheading; and high Priest more than one there cannot be, and that one can be no less than a Pope. And this doubtless was the bent of his career, though never so covertly. Yea but there was something else in the high Priest besides the figure, as is plain by S. Paul's acknowledging him. 'tis true that in the 17 of Deut, whence this authority arises to the Priest in matters too hard for the secular judges, as must needs be many in the occasions of those times involved so with ceremonial niceties, no wonder though it be commanded to inquire at the mouth of the Priests, who besides the Magistrates their colleagues had the Oracle of Urim to consult with. And whether the high Priest Ananias had not encroached beyond the limits of his Priestly authority, or whether used it rightly, was no time then for S. Paul to contest about. But if this instance be able to assert any right of jurisdiction to the Clergy, it must impart it in common to all Ministers, since it were a great folly to seek for counsel in a hard intricat scruple from a Dunce prelate, when there might be found a speedier solution from a grave and learned Minister, whom God hath gifted with the judgement of Urim more amply ofttimes than all the Prelates together; and now in the gospel hath granted the privilege of this oraculous Ephod alike to all his Ministers. The reason therefore of imparity in the Priests, being now as is aforesaid, really annulled both in their person, and in their representative office, what right of jurisdiction soever, can be from this place Levitically bequeathed, must descend upon the Ministers of the gospel equally, as it finds them in all other points equal. Well then he is finally content to let, Aaron go. Eleazar will serve his turn, as being a superior of superiors, and yet no type of Christ in Aaron's life time. O thou that wouldst wind into any figment, or phantasm to save thy mitre! Yet all this will not fadge, though it be cunningly interpolisht by some second hand with crooks & emendations; hear then; the type of Christ in some one particular, as of entering yearly into the Holy of holies and such like, rested upon the High Priest only as more immediately personating our Saviour: but to resemble his whole satisfactory office all the lineage of Aaron was no more than sufficient. And all, or any of the Priests considered separately without relation to the highest, are but as a liveless trunk and signify nothing. And this shows the excellent or Christ's sacrifice, who at once and in one person fulfilled that which many hunderds of Priests many times repeating had enough to foreshow. What other imparity there was among themselves, we may safely suppose it depended on the dignity of their birth and family, together with the circumstances of a carnal service, which might afford many priorities. And this I take to be the sum of what the Bishop hath laid together to make plea for Prelaty by imitation of the Law. I hough indeed, if it may stand, it will infer popedom all as well. Many other courses he tries, enforcing himself with much ostentation of endless genealogies, as if he were the man that S. Paul forewarns us of in Timothy, but so unvigorously, that I do not fear his winning of many to his cause, but such as doting upon great names are either over-weak, or over sudden of faith. I shall not refuse therefore to learn so much prudence as I find in the Roman soldier that attended the cross, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath is quite out of the body, but pass to that which follows. The primate of Armagh at the beginning of his tractat seeks to avail himself of that place in the 66 of Esaiah, I will take of them for Priests and Levites, saith the Lord; to uphold hereby such a form of superiority among the ministers of the gospel, succeeding those in the law, as the Lord's day did the Sabbath. But certain if this method may be admitted of interpreting those prophetical passages concerning Christian times in a punctual correspondence, it may with equal probability be urged upon us, that we are bound to observe some monthly solemnity answerable to the new moons, as well as the Lord's day which we keep in lieu of the Sabbath: for in the 23 v. the Prophet joins them in the same manner together, as before he did the Priests and Levites, thus. And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. Undoubtedly with as good consequence may it be alleged from hence, that we are to solemnize some religious monthly meeting different from the Sabbath, as from the other any distinct formality of ecclesiastical orders may be inferred. This rather will appear to be the lawful and unconstrained sense of the text, that God in taking of them for Priests and Levites, will not esteem them unworthy though Gentiles, to undergo any function in the Church, but will make of them a full and perfect ministry, as was that of the Priests and Levites in their kind. And Bishop Andrews himself to end the controversy, sends us a candid exposition of this quoted verse from the 24 page of his said book, plainly deciding that God by those legal names there of Priests and Levites means our Presbyters, and Deacons, for which either ingenuous confession, or slip of his pen we give him thanks, and withal to him that brought these treatises into one volume, who setting the contradictions of two learned men so near together, did not foresee. What other deducements or analogies are cited out of S. Paul to prove a likeness between the Ministers of the Old and New Testament, having tried their sinews. I judge they may pass without harm doing to our cause. We may remember then that Prelaty neither hath nor can have foundation in the law, nor yet in the gospel, which assertion as being for the plainness thereof a matter of eye sight, rather than of disquisition I voluntarily omit, not forgetting to specify this note again, that the earnest desire which the Prelates have to build their Hierarchy upon the sandy bottom of the law, gives us to see abundantly the little assurance which they find to rear up their high roofs by the authority of the gospel, repulsed as it were from the writings of the Apostles, and driven to take sanctuary among the Jews. Hence that open confession of the primate before mentioned. Episcopacy is fetched partly from the pattern of the Old Testament & partly from the New as an imitation of the Old, though nothing can be more rotten in Divinity than such a position as this, and is all one as to say Episcopacy is partly of divine institution, and partly of man's own carving. For who gave the authority to fetch more from the pattern of the law then what the Apostles had already fetched, if they fetched any thing at all, as hath been proved they did not. So was jeroboam's Episcopacy partly from the pattern of the law, and partly from the pattern of his own carnality; a particoloured and a parti-membered Episcopacy, and what can this be less than a monstrous? Others therefore among the prelates perhaps not so well able to brook, or rather to justify this foul relapsing to the old law, have condescended at last to a plain confessing that both the names and offices of Bishops and Presbyters at first were the same, and in the Scriptures nowhere distinguished. This grants the remonstrant in the fift Section of his defence, and in the Preface to his last short answer. But what need respect he had whether he grant or grant it not, when as through all antiquity, and even in the loftiest times of Prelaty we find it granted. Jerome the learnedest of the Fathers hides not his opinion, that custom only, which the proverb calls a tyrant, was the maker of Prelaty; before his audacious workmanship the Churches were ruled in common by the Presbyters, and such a certain truth this was esteemed, that it became a decree among the papal Canons compiled by Gratian. Anselme I'm also of Canturbury, who to uphold the points of his prelatism made himself a traitor to his country, yet commenting the Epistles to Titus and the Philippians acknowledges from the clearness of the text, what Jerome and the Church rubric hath before acknowledged. He little dreamed then that the weeding-hook of reformation would after two ages pluck up his glorious poppy from insulting over the good corn. Though since some of our British Prelates seeing themselves pressed to produce Scripture, try all their cunning, if the New Testament will not help them, to frame of their own heads as it were with wax a kind of mimic Bishop limned out to the life of a dead Priesthood. Or else they would strain us out a certain figurative prelate, by wringing the collective allegory of those seven Angels into seven single Rochets. Howsoever since it thus appears that custom was the creator of Prelaty being less ancient than the government of Presbyters, it is an extreme folly to give them the hearing that tell us of Bishops through so many ages: and if against their tedious muster of citations, Sees, and successions, it be replied that wagers and Church antiquities, such as are repugnant to the plain dictat of Scripture are both alike the arguments of fools, they have their answer. We rather are to cite all those ages to an arraignment before the word of God, wherefore, and what pretending, how presuming they durst alter that divine institution of Presbyters, which the Apostles who were no various and inconstant men surely had set up in the Churches, and why they choose to live by custom and catalogue, or as S. Paul saith by sight and visibility, rather than by faith? But first I conclude from their own mouths that God's command in Scripture, which doubtless aught to be the first and greatest reason of Church-government, is wanting to Prelaty. And certainly we have plenteous warrant in the doctrine of Christ to determine that the want of this reason is of itself sufficient to confute all other pretences that may be brought in favour of it.   

CHAP. VI.  
That Prelaty was not set up for prevention of schism, as is pretended, or if it were, that it performs not what it was first set up for, but quite the contrary.  
YEt because it hath the outside of a specious reason, & specious things we know are aptest to work with human lightness and frailty, even against the solidest truth, that sounds not plausibly, let us think it worth the examining for the love of infirmer Christians, of what importance this their second reason may be. Tradition they say hath taught them that for the prevention of growing schism the Bishop was heaved above the Presbyter. And must tradition then ever thus to the world's end be the perpetual cankerworm to eat out God's commandments? are his decrees so inconsiderate and so fickle, that when the statutes of Solon, or Lycurgus shall prove durably good to many ages, his in 40 years shall be found defective, ill contrived, and for needful causes to be altered? Our Saviour and his Apostles did not only foresee, but foretell and forewarn us to look for schism. Is it a thing to be imagined of God's wisdom, or at least of Apostolic prudence to set up such a government in the tenderness of the Church, as should incline, or not be more able than any other to oppose itself to schism? it was well known what a bold lurker schism was even in the household of Christ between his own Disciples and those of John the Baptist about fasting: and early in the Acts of the Apostles the noise of schism had almost drowned the proclaiming of the gospel; yet we read not in Scripture that any thought was had of making Prelates, no not in those places where dissension was most rife. If Prelaty had been then esteemed a remedy against schism, where was it more needful than in that great variance among the Corinthians which S. Paul so laboured to reconcile? and whose eye could have found the fittest remedy sooner than his? and what could have made the remedy more available, then to have used it speedily? and lastly what could have been more necessary then to have written it for our instruction? yet we see he neither commended it to us, nor used it himself. For the same division remaining there, or else bursting forth again more than 20 years after S. Paul's death, we find in Clement's Epistle of venerable authority written to the yet factious Corinthians, that they were still governed by Presbyters. And the same of other Churches out of Hermas, and divers other the scholars of the Apostles by the late industry of the learned Salmatius appears. Neither yet did this worthy Clement S. Paul's disciple, though writing to them to lay aside schism, in the least word advise them to change the presbyterial government into Prelaty. And therefore if God afterward gave, or permitted this insurrection of Episcopacy, it is to be feared he did it in his wrath, as he gave the Israelites a King. With so good a will doth he use to alter his own chosen government once established. For mark whether this rare device of man's brain thus preferred before the ordinance of God, had better success then fleshly wisdom not counseling with God is wont to have. So far was it from removing schism, that if schism parted the congregations before, now it rent and mangled, now it raged. Heresy begat heresy with a certain monstrous haste of pregnancy in her birth, at once borne and bringing forth. Contentions before brotherly were now hostile. Men went to choose their Bishop as they went to a pitched field, and the day of his election was like the sacking of a City, sometimes ended with the blood of thousands. Nor this among heretics only, but men of the same belief, yea confessors, and that with such odious ambition, that Eusebius in his eighth book testifies he abhorred to write. And the reason is not obscure, for the poor dignity or rather burden of a Parochial Presbyter could not engage any great party, nor that to any deadly feud: but Prelaty was a power of that extent, and sway, that if her election were popular, it was seldom not the cause of some faction or broil in the Church. But if her dignity came by favour of some Prince, she was from that time his creature, and obnoxious to comply with his ends in state were they right or wrong. So that in stead of finding Prelaty an impeacher of schism or faction, the more I search, the more I grow into all persuasion to think rather that faction and she as with a spousal ring are wedded together, never to be divorced. But here let every one behold the just, and dreadful judgement of God meeting with the audacious pride of man that durst offer to mend the ordinances of heaven. God out of the strife of men brought forth by his Apostles to the Church that beneficent and ever distributing office of Deacons, the stewards and Ministers of holy alms, man out of the pretended care of peace & unity being caught in the snare of his impious boldness to correct the will of Christ, brought forth to himself upon the Church that irreconcilable schism of perdition and Apostasy, the Roman Antichrist: for that the exaltation of the Pope arose out of the reason of Prelaty it cannot be denied. And as I noted before that the pattern of the High Priest pleaded for in the Gospel (for take away the head Priest the rest are but a carcase) sets up with better reason a Pope, than an Archbishop, for if Prelaty must still rise and rise till it come to a primate, why should it stay there? when as the Catholic government is not to follow the division of kingdoms, the temple best representing the universal Church, and the High Priest the universal head; so I observe here, that if to quiet schism there must be one head of Prelaty in a land or Monarchy rising from a provincial to a national Primacy, there may upon better grounds of repressing schism be set up one Catholic head over the Catholic Church. For the peace and good of the Church is not terminated in the schismelesse estate of one or two kingdoms, but should be provided for by the joint consultation of all reformed Christendom: that all controversy may end in the final pronounce or canon of one arch-primate, or Protestant Pope. Although by this means for aught I see, all the diameters of schism may as well meet and be knit up in the centre of one grand falsehood. Now let all impartial men arbitrate what goodly inference these two main reasons of the prelates have, that by a natural league of consequence make more for the Pope then for themselves. Yea to say more home are the very womb for a new subantichrist to breed in; if it be not rather the old force and power of the same man of sin counterfeiting protestant. It was not the prevention of schism, but it was schism itself, and the hateful thirst of Lording in the Church that first bestowed a being upon Prelaty; this was the true cause, but the pretence is still the same. The Prelates, as they would have it thought, are the only mawls of schism. Forsooth if they be put down, a deluge of innumerable sects will follow; we shall be all Brownists, Familists Anabaptists. For the word Puritan seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore were counted such, are now Brownists. And thus do they raise an evil report upon the expected reforming grace that God hath bid us hope for, like those faithless spies, whose carcases shall perish in the wilderness of their own confused ignorance, and never taste the good of reformation. Do they keep away schism? if to bring a numb and chill stupidity of soul, an unactive blindness of mind upon the people by their leaden doctrine, or no doctrine at all, if to persecute all knowing and zealous Christians by the violence of their courts, be to keep away schism, they keep away schism indeed; and by this kind of discipline all Italy and Spain is as purely and politicly kept from schism as England hath been by them. With as good a plea might the dead palsy boast to a man, t is I that free you from stitches and pains, and the troublesome feeling of cold & heat, of wounds and strokes; if I were gone, all these would molest you. The Winter might as well vaunt itself against the Spring, I destroy all noisome and rank weeds, I keep down all pestilent vapours. Yes and all wholesome herbs, and all fresh dews, by your violent & hidebound frost; but when the gentle west winds shall open the fruitful bosom of the earth thus overgirded by your imprisonment, than the flowers put forth and spring and then the sun shall scatter the mists, and the manuring hand of the tiler shall root up all that burdens the soil without thank to your bondage. But far worse than any frozen captivity is the bondage of Prelates, for that other, if it keep down any thing which is good, within the earth, so doth it likewise that which is ill, but these let out freely the ill, and keep down the good, or else keep down the lesser ill, and let out the greatest. Be ashamed at last to tell the parliament ye curb schismatics, when as they know ye cherish and side with Papists, and are now as it were one party with them, and 'tis said they help to petition for ye. Can we believe that your government strains in good earnest at the petty gnats of schism, when as we see it makes nothing to swallow the Camel heresy of Rome; but that indeed your throats are of the right Pharisaical strain. Where are those schismatics with whom the prelates hold such hot skirmish? show us your acts, those glorious annals which your Courts of loathed memory lately deceased have left us? those schismatics I doubt me will be found the most of them such as whose only schism was to have spoke the truth against your high abominations and cruelties in the Church; this is the schism ye hate most, the removal of your criminous Hierarchy. A politic government of yours, and of a pleasant conceit, set up to remove those as a pretended schism, that would remove you as a palpable heresy in government. If the schism would pardon ye that, she might go jagged in as many cuts and slashes as she pleased for you. As for the rending of the Church, we have many reasons to think it is not that which ye labour to prevent so much as the rending of your pontifical sleeves: that schism would be the sorest schism to you, that would be Brownism and Anabaptisme indeed. If we go down, say you, as if Adrian's wall were broke, a flood of sects will rush in. What sects? What are their opinions? give us the Inventory; it will appear both by your former prosecutions and your present instances, that they are only such to speak of as are offended with your lawless government, your ceremonies, your Liturgy, an extract of the mass book translated. But that they should be contemners of public prayer, and Churches used without superstition, I trust God will manifest it ere long to be as false a slander nder, as your former slanders against the Scots. Noise it till ye be hoarse; that a rabble of Sects will come in, it will be answered ye, no rabble sir Priest, but a unanimous multitude of good Protestants will then join to the Church, which now because of you stand separated. This will be the dreadful consequence of your removal. As for those terrible names of Sectaries and schismatics which ye have got together, we know your manner of fight, when the quiver of your arguments which it ever thin, and weakly stored, after the first brunt is quite empty, your course is to be take ye to your other quiver of slander, wherein lies your best archery. And whom ye could not move by sophistical arguing, them you think to confute by scandalous misnaming. Thereby inciting the blinder sort of people to mislike and deride sound doctrine and good christianity under two or three vile and hateful terms. But if we could easily endure and dissolve your doubtiest reasons in argument, we shall more easily bear the worst of your unreasonableness in calumny and false report. Especially being foretold by Christ, that if he our Master were by your predecessors called Samaritan and Belzebub, we must not think it strange if his best Disciples in the reformation, as at first by those of your tribe they were called Lollards and Hussites, so now by you be termed Puritans, and Brownists. But my hope is that the people of England will not suffer themselves to be juggled thus out of their faith and religion by a mist of names cast before their eyes, but will search wisely by the Scriptures, and look quite through this fraudulent aspersion of a disgraceful name into the things themselves: knowing that the Primitive Christians in their times were accounted such as are now called Familists and Adamites, or worse. And many on the Prelatick side like the Church of Sardis have a name to live, and yet are dead; to be Protestants, and are indeed Papists in most of their principles. Thus persuaded, this your old fallacy we shall soon unmask, and quickly apprehend how you prevent schism, and who are your schismatics. But what if ye prevent, and hinder all good means of preventing schism? that way which the Apostles used, was to call a council; from which by any thing that can be learned from the fifteenth of the Acts, no faithful Christian was debarred, to whom knowledge and piety might give entrance. Of such a council as this every parochial Consistory is a right homogeneous and constituting part being in itself as it were a little Synod, and towards a general assembly moving upon her own basis in an even and firm progression, as those smaller squares in battle unite in one great cube, the main phalanx, an emblem of truth and steadfastness. Whereas on the other side Prelaty ascending by a gradual monarchy from Bishop to Archbishop, from thence to P imat, and from thence, for there can be no reason yielded neither in nature, nor in religion, wherefore, if it have lawfully mounted thus high, it should not be a Lordly ascendent in the horoscope of the Church, from Primate to Patriarch, and so to Pope. I say Prelaty thus ascending in a continual pyramid upon pretence to perfect the church's unity, if notwithstanding it be found most needful, yea the utmost help to dern up the rents of schism by calling a council, what does it but teach us that Prelaty is of no force to effect this work which she boasts to be her masterpiece; and that her pyramid aspires and sharpens to ambition, not to perfection, or unity. This we know, that as often as any great schism disparts the Church, and Synods be proclaimed, the Presbyters have as great right there, and as free vote of old, as the Bishops, which the Canon law conceals not. So that Prelaty if she will seek to close up divisions in the Church, must be forced to dissolve, and unmake her own pyramidal figure, which she affirms to be of such uniting power, when as indeed it is the most dividing, and schismatical form that Geometricians know of, and must be fain to inglobe, or incube herself among the Presbyters; which she hating to do, sends her haughty Prelates from all parts with their forked mitres, the badge of schism or the stamp of his cloven foot whom they serve I think, who according to their hierarchies acuminating still higher and higher in a cone of Prelaty, in stead of healing up the gashes of the Church, as it happens in such pointed bodies meeting, fall to gore one another with their sharp spires for upper place, and precedence, till the council it selfe prove the greatest schism of all. And thus they are so far from hindering dissension, that they have made unprofitable, and even noisome the chiefest remedy we have to keep Christendom at one, which is by counsels: and these if we rightly consider Apostolic example, are nothing else but general Presbyteries. This seemed so far from the Apostles to think much of, as if hereby their dignity were impaired, that, as we may gather by those Epistles of Peter and John, which are likely to be latest written, when the Church grew to a settling, like those heroic patricians of Rome (if we may use such comparison) hasting to lay down their dictatorship, they rejoysed to call themselves and to be as fellow Elders among their brethren. Knowing that their high office was but as the scaffolding of the Church yet unbuilt, and would be but a troublesome disfigurement, so soon as the building was finished. But the lofty minds of an age or two after, such was their small discerning, thought it a poor indignity, that the high reared government of the Church should so on a sudden, as it seemed to them, squat into a Presbytery. Next or rather before counsel the timeliest prevention of schism is to preach the gospel abundantly and powerfully throughout all the land, to instruct the youth religiously, to endeavour how the Scriptures may be easiest understood by all men; to all which the proceedings of these men have been on set purpose contrary. But how O prelates should you remove schism, and how should you not remove and oppose all the means of removing schism? when Prelaty is a schism itself from the most reformed and most flourishing of our neighbour Churches abroad, and a sad subject of discord and offence to the whole nation at home. The remedy which you allege is the very disease we groan under; and never can be to us a remedy but by removing itself. Your predecessors were believed to assume this preeminence above their brethren only that they might appease dissension. Now God and the Church calls upon you, for the same reason to lay it down, as being to thousands of good men offensive, burdensome, intolerable. Surrender that pledge which unless you sowlely usurped it, the Church gave you, and now claims it again, for the reason she first lent it. Discharge the trust committed to you prevent schism, and that yeoan never do, but by discharging yourselves. That government which ye hold, we confess prevents much, hinders much removes much, but what? the schisms and grievances of the Church?— no, but all the peace and unity, all the welfare not of the Church alone, but of the whole kingdom. And if it be still permitted ye to hold, will cause the most sad I know not whether separation be enough to say, but such a wide gulf of distraction in this land as will never close her dismal gap, until ye be forced (for of your selvs ye will never do as that Roman Curtius nobly did) for the church's peace & your countries, to leap into the midst, and be no more seen. By this we shall know whether yours be that ancient Prelaty which you say was first constituted for the reducement of quiet & unanimity into the Church, for them you will not delay to prefer that above your own preferment. If otherwise, we must be confident that your Prelaty is nothing else but your ambition, an insolent preferring of yourselves above your brethren, and all your learned scraping in antiquity even to disturb the bones of old Aaron and his sons in their graves, is but to maintain and set upon our necks a stately and severe dignity, which you call sacred, and is nothing in very deed but a grave and reverent gluttony, a sanctimonious avarice, in comparison of which, all the duties and dearnesses which ye owe to God or to his Church, to law, custom, or nature, ye have resolved to set at nought. I could put you in mind what counsel Clement a fellow labourer with the Apostles gave to the Presbyters of Corinth, whom the people though unjustly sought to remove. Who among you saith he, is noble minded, who is pitiful, who is charitable, let him say thus, if for me this sedition, this enmity, these differences be, I willingly depart, I go my ways, only let the flock of Christ be at peace with the Presbyters that are set over it. He that shall do this, saith he, shall get him great honour in the Lord, and all places will receive him. This was Clement's counsel to good and holy men that they should depart rather from their just office, then by their stay, to raule out the seamless garment of concord in the Church. But I have better counsel to give the prelates, and far more acceptable to their cares, this advice in my opinion is fitter for them. Cling fast to your pontifical Sees, bate not, quit yourselves like Barons, stand to the utmost for your haughty Courts and votes in Parliament. Still tell us that you prevent schism, though schism and combustion be the very issue of your bodies your first born; and set your country a-bleeding in a prelatical mutiny, to fight for your pomp, and that ill favoured weed of temporal honour that sits dishonourably upon your laic shoulders, that ye may be fat and fleshy, swoll'n with high thoughts and big with mischievous designs, when God comes to visit upon you all this fourscore years' vexation of his Church under your Egyptian tyranny. For certainly of all those blessed souls which you have persecuted, and those miserable ones which you have lost; the just vengeance does not sleep.   

CHAP. VII.  
That those many Sects and schisms by some supposed to be among us, and that rebellion in Ireland, ought not to be a hindrancc, but a hastening of reformation.  
AS for those many Sects and divisions rumoured abroad to be amongst us, it is not hard to perceive that they are partly the mere fictions and false alarms of the Prelates, thereby to cast amazements and panic terrors into the hearts of weaker Christians that they should not venture to change the present deformity of the Church for fear of I know not what worse inconveniencies. With the same objected fears and suspicions, we know that subtle prelate Gardner sought to divert the first reformation. It may suffice us to be taught by S. Paul that there must be sects for the manifesting of those that are sound hearted. These are but winds and flaws to try the floating vessel of our faith whether it be staunch and sail well, whether our ballast be just, our anchorage and cable strong. By this is seen who lives by faith and certain knowledge, and who by credulity and the prevailing opinion of the age; whose virtue is of an unchangeable grain, and whose of a slight wash. If God come to try our constancy we ought not to shrink, or stand the less firmly for that, but pass on with more steadfast resolution to establish the truth though it were through a lane of sects and heresies on each side. Other things men do to the glory of God: but sects and errors it seems God suffers to be for the glory of good men, that the world may know and reverence their true fortitude and undaunted constancy in the truth. Let us not therefore make these things an encumbrance, or an excuse of our delay in reforming which God sends us as an incitement to proceed with more honour and alacrity. For if there were no opposition where were the trial of an unfeigned goodness and magnanimity? virtue that wavers is not virtue, but vice revolted from it selfe, and after a while returning. The actions of just and pious men do not darken in their middle course but Solomon tells us they are as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. But if we shall suffer the trifling doubts and jealousies of future sects to overcloud the fair beginnings of purposest reformation, let us rather fear that another proverb of the same Wiseman be not upbraided to us, that the way of the wicked is as darkness, they stumble at they know not what. If sects and schisms be turbulent in the unseal'd estate of a Church, while it lies under the amending hand, it best beseems our Christian courage to think they are but as the throws and pangs that go before the birth of reformation, and that the work itself is now in doing. For if we look but on the nature of elemental and mixed things, we know they cannot suffer any change of one kind, or quality into another without the struggl of contrarieties. And in things artificial, seldom any elegance is wrought without a superfluous wast and refuse in the transaction. No Marble statue can be politely carved, no fair edifice built without almost as much rubbish and sweeping. Insomuch that even in the spiritual conflict of S. Paul's conversion there fell scales from his eyes that were not perceaved before. No wonder then in the reforming of a Church which is never brought to effect without the fierce encounter of truth and falsehood together, if, as it were the splinters and shares of so violent a jousting, there fall from between the shock many fond errors and fanatic opinions, which when truth has the upper hand, and the reformation shall be perfected, will easily be rid out of the way, or kept so low, as that they shall be only the exercise of our knowledge, not the disturbance, or interruption of our faith. As for that which Barclay in his image of minds writes concerning the horrible and barbarous conceits of Englishmen in their religion. I deem it spoken like what he was, a fugitive Papist traducing the Hand whence he sprung. It may be more judiciously gathered from hence, that the Englishman of many other nations is least atheistical, and bears a natural disposition of much reverence and awe towards the Deity; but in his weakness and want of better instruction, which among us too frequently is neglected, especially by the meaner sort turning the bent of his own wits with a scrupulous and ceaseless care what he might do to inform himself a right of God and his worship, he may fall not unlikely sometimes as any otherland man into an uncouth opinion. And verily if we look at his native towardliness in the rough-cast without breeding, some nation or other may haply be better composed to a natural civility, and right judgement than he. But if he get the benefit once of a wise and well rectified nurture, which must first come in general from the godly vigilance of the Church, I suppose that where ever mention is made of country's manners, or men, the English people among the first that shall be praised, may deserve to be accounted a right pious, right honest, and right hardy nation. But thus while some stand dallying and deferring to reform for fear of that which should mainly hasten them forward, lest schism and error should increase, we may now thank ourselves and our delays if instead of schism a bloody and inhuman rebellion be struck in between our slow movings. Indeed against violent and powerful opposition there can be no just blame of a lingering dispatch. But this I urge against those that discourse it for a maxim, as if the swift opportunities of establishing, or reforming religion, were to attend upon the phlegm of state business. In state many things at first are crude and hard to digest, which only time and deliberation can supple, and concoct. But in religion wherein is no immaturity, nothing out of season, it goes far otherwise. The door of grace turns upon smooth hinges wide opening to send out, but soon shutting to recall the precious offers of mercy to a nation: which unless watchfulness and zeal two quick-sighted and ready-handed Virgins be there in our behalf to receive, we lose: and still the ofter we lose, the straighter the door opens, and the less is offered. This is all we get by demurring in God's service. 'tis not rebellion that ought to be the hindrance of reformation, but it is the want of this which is the cause of that. The prelates which boast themselves the only bridlers of schism God knows have been so cold and backward both there and with us to repress heresy and idolatry, that either through their carelessness or their craft all this mischief is befall'n. What can the Irish subject do less in God's just displeasure against us, than revenge upon English bodies the little care that our Prelate have had of their souls. Nor hath their negligence been new in that island but ever notorious in Queen Elizabeth's days, as Camden their known friend forbears not to complain. Yet so little are they touched with remorse of these their cruelties, for these cruelties are theirs, the bloody revenge of those souls which they have famished, that whenas against our brethren the Scots, who by their upright and loyal and loyal deeds have now bought themselves an honourable name to posterity, whatsoever malice by slander could invent, rage in hostility attempt, they greedily attempted, toward these murderous Irish the enemies of God and mankind, a cursed offspring of their own connivance, no man takes notice but that they seem to be very calmly and indifferently affected. Where then should we begin to extinguish a rebellion that hath his cause from the misgovernment of the Church, where? but at the church's reformation, and the removal of that government which pursues and wars with all good Christians under the name of schismatics, but maintains and fosters all Papists and Idolaters as tolerable Christians. And if the sacred Bible may be our light, we are neither without example, nor the witness of God himself, that the corrupted estate of the Church is both the cause of tumult, and civil wars, and that to stint them, the peace of the Church must first be settled. Now for a long season, saith Azariah to King Asa, Israel hath been without the true God, and without a teaching Priest, and without, law; and in those times there was no peace to him that went out, nor to him that came in, but great vexations were upon all the inhabitants of the countries. And nation was destroyed of nation, and City of City, for God did vex them with all adversity. Be ye strong therefore, saith he to the reformers of that age, and let not your hands be weak, for your work shall be rewarded. And in those Prophets that lived in the times of reformation after the Captivity often doth God stir up the people to consider that while establishment of Church matters was neglected, and put off, there was no peace to him that went out or came in, for I, saith God, had set all men every one against his neighbour. 
Zechar. 8.  But from the very day forward that they went seriously, and effectually about the welfare of the Church, he tells them that they 
Haggai 2.  themselves might perceive the sudden change of things into a prosperous and peaceful condition. But it will here be said that the reformation is a long work, and the miseries of Ireland are urgent of a speedy redress. They be indeed; and how speedy we are, the poor afflicted remnant of our martyred countrymen that sit there on the seashore, counting the hours of our delay with their sighs, and the minutes with their falling tears, perhaps with the destilling of their bloody wounds, if they have not quite by this time cast off, and almost cursed the vain hope of our foundered ships, and aids, can best judge how speedy we are to their relief. But let their succours be hasted, as all need and reason is, and let not therefore the reformation which is the chiefest cause of success and victory be still procrastinated. They of the captivity in their greatest extremities could find both counsel and hands enough at once to build, and to expect the enemy's assault. And we for our parts a populous and mighty nation must needs be fallen into a strange plight either of effeminacy, or confusion, if Ireland that was once the conquest of one single Earl with his private forces, and the small assistance of a petty Kernish Prince, should now take up all the wisdom and prowess of this potent Monarchy to quell a barbarous crew of rebels, whom if we take but the right course to subdue, that is beginning at the reformation of our Church, their own horrid murders and rapes, will so fight against them, that the very sutlers and horse boys of the camp will be able to rout and chase them without the staining of any Noble sword. To proceed by other method in this enterprise, be our Captains and Commanders never so expert, will be as great an error in the art of war, as any novice in soldiership ever committed. And thus I leave it as a declared truth, that neither the fear of sects no nor rebellion can be a fit plea to stay reformation, but rather to push it forward with all possible diligence and speed.    

The second Book.  

HOw happy were it for this frail, and as it may be truly called, mortal life of man, since all earthly things which have the name of good and convenient in our daily use, are withal so cumbersome and full of trouble if knowledge yet which is the best and, lightsomest possession of the mind, were as the common saying is, no burden, and that what it wanted of being a load to any part of the body, it did not with a heavy advantage overlay upon the spirit. For not to speak of that knowledge that rests in the contemplation of natural causes and dimensions, which must needs be a lower wisdom, as the object is low, certain it is that he who hath obtained in more than the scantest measure to know any thing distinctly of God, and of his true worship, and what is infallibly good and happy in the state of man's life, what in itself evil and miserable, though vulgarly not so esteemed, he that hath obtained to know this, the only high valuable wisdom indeed, remembering also that God even to a strictness requires the improvement of these his entrusted gifts cannot but sustain a sorer burden of mind, and more pressing then any supportable toil, or weight, which the body can labour under; how and in what manner he shall dispose and employ those sums of knowledge and illumination, which God hath sent him into this world to trade with. And that which aggravats the burden more is, that having received amongst his allotted parcels certain precious truths of such an orient lustre as no Diamond can equal, which never the less he has in charge to put off at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will, the great merchants of this world searing that this course would soon discover, and disgrace the false glitter of their deceitful wares wherewith they abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses, practice by all means how they may suppress the venting of such rarities and such a cheapness as would undo them, and turn their trash upon their hands. Therefore by gratifying the corrupt desires of men in fleshly doctrines, they stir them up to persecute with hatred and contempt all those that seek to bear themselves uprightly in this their spiritual factory: which they foreseeing though they cannot but testify of Truth and the excellence of that heavenly traffic which they bring against what opposition, or danger soever, yet needs must it sit heavily upon their spirits, that being in God's prime intention and their own, selected heralds of peace, and dispensers of treasures inestimable without price to them that have no pence, they find in the discharge of their commission that they are made the greatest variance and offence, a very sword and fire both in house and City over the whole earth. This is that which the sad Prophet Jeremiah laments, woe is me my mother, that thou hast born me a man of strife, and contention. And although divine inspiration must certainly have been sweet to those ancient profets, yet the irksomeness of that truth which they brought was so unpleasant to them, that everywhere they call it a burden. Yea that mysterious book of Revelation which the great Evangelist was bid to eat, as it had been some eye-brightening electuary of knowledge, and foresight, though it were sweet in his mouth, and in the learning, it was bitter in his belly; bitter in the denouncing. Nor was this hid from the wise Poet Sophocles, who in that place of his Tragedy where Tirefias is called to resolve K. Oedipus in a matter which he knew would be grievous, brings him in bemoaning his lot, that he knew more than other men. For surely to every good and peaceable man it must in nature needs be a hateful thing to be the displeaser, and molester of thousands; much better would it like him doubtless to be the messenger of gladness and contentment, which is his chief intended business, to all mankind, but that they resist and oppose their own true happiness. But when God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal. If he shall think to be silent, as Jeremiah did, because of the reproach and derision he met with daily, and all his familiar friends watched for his halting to be revenged on him for speaking the truth, he would be forcced to confess as he confessed, his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, I was weary with forbearing, and could not stay. Which might teach these times not suddenly to condemn all things that are sharply spoken, or vehemently written, as proceeding out of stomach, virulence and ill nature, but to consider rather that if the prelates have leave to say the worst that can be said, and do the worst that can be done, while they strive to keep to themselves to their great pleasure and commodity those things which they ought to render up, no man can be justly offended with him that shall endeavour to impart and bestow without any gain to himself those sharp, but saving words which would be a terror, and a torment in him to keep back. For me I have determined to lay up as the best treasure, and solace of a good old age, if God vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of free speech from my youth, where I shall think it available in so dear a concernment as the Churches good. For if I be either by disposition, or what other cause too inquisitive, or suspicious of myself and mine own doings, who can help it? but this I foresee, that should the Church be brought under heavy oppression, and God have given me ability the while to reason against that man that should be the author of so foul a deed, or should she by blessing from above on the industry and courage of faithful men change this her distracted estate into better days without the least furtherance or contribution of those few talents which God at that present had lent me, I foresee what stories I should hear within myself, all my life after, of discourage and reproach. Timorous and ingrateful, the Church of God is now again at the foot of her insulting enemies: and thou bewail'st, what matters it for thee or thy bewailing? when time was, thou couldst not find a syllable of all that thou hadst read, or studied, to utter in her behalf. Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired thoughts out of the sweat of other men. Thou hadst the diligence the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were to be adorned or beautified, but when the cause of God and his Church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast, God listened if he could hear thy voice among his zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a beast; from hence forward be that which thine own brutish silence hath made thee. Or else I should have heard on the other care, slothful, and ever to be set light by, the Church hath now overcome her late distresses after the unwearied labours of many her true servants that stood up in her defence; thou also wouldst take upon thee to share amongst them of their joy: but wherefore thou? where canst thou show any word or deed of thine which might have hastened her peace; whatever thou dost now talk; or write, or look is the alms of other men's active prudence and zeal. Dare not now to say, or do any thing better than thy former sloth and infancy, or if thou dar'st, thou dost impudently to make a thrifty purchase of boldness to thyself out of the painful merits of other men: what before was thy sin, is now thy duty to be, abject, and worthless. These and such like lessons as these, I know would have been my Matins duly, and my evensong. But now by this little diligence, mark what a privilege I have gained; with good men and Saints to claim my right of lamenting the tribulations of the Church, if she should suffer, when others that have ventured nothing for her sake, have not the honour to be admitted mourners. But if she lift up her drooping head and prosper, among those that have something more than wished her welfare, I have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs. Concerning therefore this wayward subject against prelaty, the touching whereof is so distasteful and disquietous to a number of men, as by what hath been said I may deserve of charitable readers to be credited, that neither envy nor gall hath entered me upon this controversy, but the enforcement of conscience only, and a preventive fear lest the omitting of this duty should be against me when I would store up to myself the good provision of peaceful hours, So lest it should be still imputed to me, as I have found it hath been, that some self-pleasing humour of vainglory hath incited me to contest with men of high estimation now while green years are upon my head, from this needless surmisal I shall hope to dissuade the intelligent and equal auditor, if I can but say successfully that which in this exigent behoous me, although I would be heard only, if it might be, by the elegant & learned reader, to whom principally for a while I shall beg leave I may address myself. To him it will be no new thing though I tell him that if I hunted after praise by the ostentation of wit and learning, I should not write thus out of mine own season, when I have neither yet completed to my mind the full circle of my private studies, although I complain not of any insufficiency to the matter in hand, or were I ready to my wishes, it were a folly to commit any thing elaborately composed to the careless and interrupted listening of these tumultuous timer. Next if I were wise only to mine own ends, I would certainly take such a subject as of itself might catch applause, whereas this hath all the disadvantages on the contrary, and such a subject as the publishing whereof might be delayed at pleasure, and time enough to pencil it over with all the curious touches of art, even to the perfection of a faultless picture, whenas in this argument the not deferring is of great moment to the good speeding, that if solidity have leisure to do her office, art cannot have much. Lastly, I should not choose this manner of writing wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand. And though I shall be foolish in saying more to this purpose, yet since it will be such a folly as wisest men going about to commit, have only confessed and so committed, I may trust with more reason, because with more folly to have courteous pardon. For although a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him might without apology speak more of himself than I mean to do, yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a mortal thing among many readers of no empyreal conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of myself, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me. I must say therefore that after I had from my first years by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, whom God recompense, been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betak'n to of mine own choice in English, or other tongue prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the stile by certain vital fignes it had, was likely to live. But much latelier in the private Academies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout (for the manner is that every one must give some proof of his wit and reading there) met with acceptance above what was looked for, and other things which I had shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were received with written Encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps, I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. These thoughts at once possessed me, and these other. That if I were certain to write as men buy Leases, for three lives and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had, then to God's glory by the honour and instruction of my country. For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latins, I applied myself to that resolution which Aristo followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toilsome vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect. That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I in my proportion with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine: not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British lands as my world, whose fortune hath hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics.  
Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her musing hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope, and hardest attempting, whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art, and use judgement is no transgression, but an enriching of art. And lastly what K or Knight before the conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero. And as Tasso gave to a Prince of Italy his choice whether he would command him to write of Godfrey's expedition against the infidels, or Belisarius against the Goths, or Charlemagne against the Lombards; if to the instinct of nature and the imboldning of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing advers in our climate, or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness from an equal diligence and inclination to present the like offer in our own ancient stories. Or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation, the Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral Drama in the Song of Solomon consisting of two persons and a double Chorus, as Origen rightly judges. And the Apocalypse of Saint John is the majestic image of a high and stately Tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn Scenes and Acts with a sevenfold Chorus of hallelujas and harping symphonies: and this my opinion the grave authority of Pareus commenting that book is sufficient to confirm. Or if occasion shall lead to imitat those magnific Odes and Hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most an end faulty: But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy, to be incomparable. These abilities, wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed, but yet to some (though most abuse) in every Nation: and are of power beside the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue, and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune, to celebrate in glorious and lofty Hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his Church, to sing the victorious agonies of Martyrs and Saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious Nations doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ, to deplore the general relapses of Kingdoms and States from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable, or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within, all these things with a solid and treatable smoothness to paint out and describe. Teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue through all the instances of example with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper who will not so much as look upon Truth herself, unless they see her elegantly dressed, that whereas the paths of honesty and good life appear now rugged and difficult, though they be indeed easy and pleasant, they would then appear to all men both easy and pleasant though they were rugged and difficult indeed. And what a benefit this would be to our youth and gentry, may be soon guessed by what we know of the corruption and bane which they suck in daily from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant Poetasters, who having scars ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem, the choice of such persons as they ought to introduce, and what is moral and decent to each one, do for the most part lap up vicious principles in sweet pills to be swallowed down, and make the taste of virtuous documents harsh and sour. But because the spirit of man cannot demean itself lively in this body without some recreating intermission of labour, and serious things, it were happy for the Common wealth, if our Magistrates, as in those famous governments of old, would take into their care, not only the deciding of our contentious Law cases and brawls, but the managing of our public sports, and festival pastimes, that they might be, not such as were autorized a while since, the provocations of drunkenness and lust, but such as may enure and harden our bodies by martial exercises to all warlike skill and performance, and may civilize, adom and make discreet our minds by the learned and affable meeting of frequent Academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations sweetened with eloquent and graceful enticements to the love and practice of justice, temperance and fortitude, instructing and bettering the Nation at all opportunities, that the call of wisdom and virtue may be heard everywhere, as Salomon saith, She crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets, in the top of high places, in the chief concour, and in the openings of the Gates. Whether this may not be not only in Pulpits, but after another persuasive method, at set and solemn Paneguries, in Theaters, porches, or what other place, or way may win most upon the people to receive at once both recreation, & instruction, let them in authority consult. The thing which I had to say, and those intentions which have lived within me ever since I could conceive myself any thing worth to my country, I return to crave excuse that urgent reason hath plucked from me by an abortive and foredated discovery. And the accomplishment of them lies not but in a power above man's to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend, and that the Land had once enfranchised herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose Inquisitorius and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at wast from the pen of some vulgar Amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in some measure be compassed, at mine own peril and cost I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not loath to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them. Although it nothing content me to have disclosed thus much before hand, but that I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoars disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies to come into the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk, and there be fain to club quotations with men whose learning and belief lies in marginal stuffings, who when they have like good sumpters laid ye down their horse load of citations and fathers at your door, with a rhapsody of who and who were Bishops here or there, ye may take off their packsaddles, their days work is done, and episcopacy, as they think, stoutly vindicated. Let any gentle apprehension that can distinguish learned pains from unlearned drudgery, imagine what pleasure or profoundness can be in this, or what honour to deaf against such adversaries. But were it the meanest under-service, if God by his Secretary conscience enjoin it, it were sad for me if I should draw back, for me especially, now when all men offer their aid to help ease and enlighten the difficult labours of the Church, to whose service by the intentions of my parents and friends I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions, till coming to some maturity of years and perceaving what tyranny had invaded the Church, that he who would take Orders must subscibe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that would retch he must either strait perjure, or split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking bought, and begun with servitude and forswearing. Howsoever thus Church-outed by the prelates, hence may appear the right I have to meddle in these matters, as before, the necessity and constraint appeared.   

CHAP. I.  
That Prelaty opposeth the reason and end of the Gospel three ways, and first in her outward form.  
AFter this digression it would remain that I should single out some other reason which might undertake for Prelaty to be a fit and lawful Church-government; but finding none of like validity with these that have already sped according to their fortune, I shall add one reason why it is not to be thought a Church-government at all, but a Church-tyranny, and is at hostile terms with the end and reason of Christ's evangelic ministry. Albeit I must confess to be half in doubt whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded, or not to be understood. For who is there almost that measures wisdom by simplicity, strength by suffering, dignity by lowliness, who is there that counts it first, to be last, something to be nothing, and reckons himself of great command in that he is a servant? yet God when he meant to subdue the world and hell at once, part of that to salvation, and this wholly to perdition, made choice of no other weapons, or auxiliaries than these whether to save, or to destroy. It had been a small mastery for him, to have drawn out his Legions into array, and flankt them with his thunder; therefore he sent foolishness to confute Wisdom, weakness to bind Strength, Despisednes to vanquish Pride. And this is the great mystery of the Gospel made good in Christ himself, who as he testifies came not to be ministered to, but to minister; and must he fulfilled in all his ministers till his second coming. To go against these principles S. Paul so feared, that if he should but affect the wisdom of words in his preaching, he thought it would be laid to his charge, that he had made the cross of Christ to be of none effect Whether then Prelaty do not make of none effect the cross of Christ by the principles it hath so contrary to these, nullifying the power and end of the Gospel, it shall not want due proof, if it want not due belief. Neither shall I stand to trifle with one that will tell me of quiddities and formalities, whether Prelaty or Prelateity in abstract notion be this or that, it suffices me that I find it in his skin, so I find it inseparable, or not oftener otherwise than a phoenix hath been seen; although I persuade me that whatever faultiness was but superficial to Prelaty at the beginning, is now by the just judgement of God long since branded and inworn into the very essence thereof. First therefore, if to do the work of the Gospel Christ our Lord took upon him the form of a servant, how can his servant in this ministry take upon him the form of a Lord? I know Bilson hath deciphered us all the galanteries of Signore and Monsignore, and Monsieur as circumstantially as any punctualist of Casteel, Naples, or Fountain Bleau could have done, but this must not so compliment us out of our right minds, as to be to learn that the form of a servant was a mean, laborious and vulgar life aptest to teach; which form Christ thought fittest, that he might bring about his will according to his own principles choosing the meaner things of this world that he might put under the high. Now whether the pompous garb, the Lordly life, the wealth, the haughty distance of Prelaty be those meaner things of the world, whereby God in them would manage the mystery of his Gospel, be it the verdict of common sense. For Christ saith in S. John, The servant is not greater than his Lord, nor he that is sent greater than he that sent him. And adds, If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. Then let the prelates well advise, if they neither know, nor do these things, or if they know, and yet do them not, wherein their happiness consists. And thus is the Gospel frustrated by the Lordly form of Prelaty.   

CHAP. II.  
That the ceremonious doctrine of Prelaty opposeth the reason and end of the Gospel.  
THat which next declares the heavenly power, and reveals the deep mystery of the Gospel, is the pure simplicity of doctrine accounted the foolishness of this world, yet crossing and confounding the pride and wisdom of the flesh. And wherein consists this fleshly wisdom and pride? in being altogether ignorant of God and his worship? no surely, for men are naturally ashamed of that. Where then? it consists in a bold presumption of ordering the worship and service of God after man's own will in traditions and ceremonies. Now if the pride and wisdom of the flesh were to be defeated and confounded, no doubt, but in that very point wherein it was proudest an thought itself wisest, that so the victory of the Gospel might be the more illustrious. But our prelates instead of expressing the spiritual power of their ministry by warring against this chief bulwark and strong hold of the flesh, have entered into fast league with the principal enemy against whom they were sent, and turned the strength of fleshly pride and wisdom against the pure simplicity of saving truth. First, mistrusting to find the authority of their order in the immediate institution of Christ, or his Apostles by the clear evidence of Scripture, they fly to the carnal supportment of tradition: when we appeal to the Bible, they to the unwieldy volumes of tradition. And do not shame to reject the ordinance of him that is eternal for the pervers iniquity of sixteen hundred years; choosing rather to think truth itself a liar, than that sixteen ages should be tax with an error; not considering the general a postasy that was foretold, and the church's flight into the wilderness. Nor is this enough, instead of showing the reason of their lowly condition from divine example and command, they seek to prove their high preeminence from human consent and authority. But let them chant while they will of prerogatives, we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, still of Scripture, till the quick and piercing word enter to the dividing of their souls, & the mighty weakness of the Gospel throw down the weak mightiness of man's reasoning. Now for their demeanour within the Church, how have they disfigured and defaced that more than angelic brightness, the unclouded serenity of Christian Religion with the dark overcasting of superstitious coaps and flaminical vestures; wearing on their backs; and, I abhor to think, perhaps in some worse place the unexpressible Image of God the father. Tell me ye Priests wherefore this gold, wherefore these robes and surplices over the Gospel? is our religion guilty of the first trespass, and hath need of clothing to cover her nakedness? whatdoes this else but hast an ignominy upon the perfection of Christ's ministry by seeking to adorn it with that which was the poor remedy of our shame. believe it, wondrous Doctors, all corporeal resemblances of inward holiness & beauty are now past; he that will clothe the Gospel now, intimates plainly, that the Gospel is naked, uncomely, that I may not say reproachful. Do not, ye Church maskers, while Christ is clothing upon our bareness with his righteous garment to make us acceptable in his father's fight, do not, as ye do, cover and hide his righteous verity with the polluted clothing of your ceremonies to make it seem more decent in your own eyes. How beautiful, saith Isaiah, are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth salvation! Are the feet so beautiful, and is the very bringing of these tidings so decent of itself? what new decency than can be added to this by your spinstry? ye think by these gaudy glisterings to stir up the devotion of the rude multitude; ye think so, because ye forsake the heavenly teaching of S. Paul for the hellish Sophistry of Papism. If the multitude be rude, the lips of the Preacher must give knowledge, and not ceremonies. And although some Christians be new born babes comparatively to some that are stronger, yet in respect of ceremony which is but a rudiment of the Law, the weakest Christian hath thrown off the robes of his minority, and is a perfect man, as to legal rites. What children's food there is in the Gospel we know to be no other than the sincerity of the word that they may grow thereby. But is here the utmost of your outbraving the service of God? No. Ye have been bold, not to set your threshold by his threshold, or your posts by his posts, but your Sacrament, your sign, call it what you will, by his Sacrament, baptising the Christian infant with a solemn sprinkle, and unbaptizing for your own part with a profane and impious forefinger: as if when ye had laid the purifying element upon his forehead, ye meant to cancel and cross it out again with a character not of God's bidding. O but the innocence of these ceremonies! O rather the fottish absurdity of this excuse! what could be more innocent than the washing of a cup, a glass, or hands before meat, and that under the Law when so many washings were commanded, and by long tradition, yet our Saviour detested their customs though never so seeming harmless, and charges them severely that they had transgressed the Commandments of God by their traditions and worshipped him in vain. How much more than must these, and much grosser ceremonies now in force delude the end of Christ's coming in the flesh against the flesh, and stifle the sincerity of our new covenant which hath bound us to forsake all carnal pride and wisdom especially in matters of religion. Thus we see again how Prelaty sailing in opposition to the main end and power of the Gospel doth not join in that mysterious work of Christ, by lowliness to confound height, by simplicity of doctrine the wisdom of the world, but contrariwise hath made itself high in the world and the flesh to vanquish things by the world accounted low, and made itself wise in tradition and fleshly ceremony to confound the purity of doctrine which is the wisdom of God.   

CHAP. III.  
That Prelatical jurisdiction opposeth the reason and end of the Gospel and of State.  
THe third and last consideration remains, whether the prelates in their function do work according to the Gospel practising to subdue the mighty things of this world by things weak: which S. Paul hath set forth to be the power and excellence of the Gospel, or whether in more likelihood they band themselves with the prevalent things of this world to overrun the weak things which Christ hath made choice to work by: and this will soonest be discerned by the course of their jurisdiction. But here again I find my thoughts almost in suspense betwixt yea and no, and am nigh turning mine eye which way I may best retire, and not proceed in this subject, blaming the ardency of my mind that fixed me too attentively to come thus far. For Truth, I know not how, hath this unhappiness fatal to her, ere she can come to the trial and inspection of the Understanding, being to pass through many little wards and limits of the several Affections and Desires, she cannot shift it, but must put on such colours and attire, as those pathetic handmaids of the soul please to lead her in to their Queen. And if she find so much favour with them, they let her pass in her own likeness; if not, they bring her into the presence habited and coloured like a notorious falsehood. And contrary when any falsehood comes that way, if they like the errand she brings, they are so artful to counterfeit the very shape and visage of Truth, that the Understanding not being able to discern the fucus which these inchantresses with such cunning have laid upon the feature sometimes of Truth, sometimes of falsehood interchangeably, sentences for the most part one for the other at the first blush, according to the subtle imposture of these sensual mistresses that keep the ports and passages between her and the object. So that were it not for leaving imperfect that which is already said, I should go near to relinquish that which is to follow. And because I see that most men, as it happens in this world, either weakly, or falsely principled, what through ignorance, and what through custom of licence, both in discourse and writing, by what hath been of late written in vulgar, have not seemed to attain the decision of this point, I shall likewise assay those wily Arbitresses who in most men have, as was heard, the sole ushering of Truth and falsehood between the sense, and the soul, with what loyalty they will use me in conuoying this Truth to my understanding; the rather for that by as much acquaintance as I can obtain with them, I do not find them engaged either one way or other. Concerning therefore ecclefial jurisdiction, I find still more controversy, who should administer it, then diligent enquiry made to learn what it is, for had the pains been taken to search out that, it had been long ago enrouled to be nothing else but a pure tyrannical forgery of the prelates; and that jurisdictive power in the Church there ought to be none at all. It cannot be conceived that what men now call jurisdiction in the Church, should be other thing than a Christian censorship; and therefore is it most commonly and truly named ecclesiastical censure. Now if the Roman censor a civil function, to that severe assize of surveying and controlling the privatest, and sliest manners of all men and all degrees had no jurisdiction, no courts of plea, or indictment, no punitive force annexed, whether it were that to this manner of correction the intanglement of suits was improper, or that the notice of those upright Inquisitors extended to such the most covert and spiritous vices as would slip easily between the wider and more material grasp of Law; Or that it stood more with the Majesty of that office to have no other sergeants or maces about them but those invisible ones of Terror and shame: Or lastly, were it their fear, lest the greatness of this authority and honour armed with jurisdiction might step with ease into a tyranny. In all these respects with much more reason undoubtedly ought the censure of the Church be quite devested and disintaled of all jurisdiction whatsoever. For if the course of judicature to a political censorship seem either too tedious, or too contentions, much more may it to the discipline of Church whose definitive decrees are to be speedy, but the execution of rigour slow, contrary to what in legal proceedings is most usual, and by how much the less contentious it is, by so much will it be the more Christian. And if the censor in his moral episcopy being to judge most in matters not answerable by writ or action could not use an instrument so gross and bodily as jurisdiction is, how can the minister of Gospel manage the corpulent and secular trial of bill and process in things merely spiritual. Or could that Roman office without this juridical sword or saw strike such a reverence of itself into the most undaunted hearts, as with one single dash of ignominy to put all the Senate and Knighthood of Rome into a tremble, surely much rather might the heavenly ministry of the Evangel bind herself about with far more piercing beams of Majesty and awe by wanting the beggarly help of halings and amercements in the use of her powerful keys. For when the Church without temporal support is able to do her great works upon the unforced obedience of men, it argues a divinity about her. But when she thinks to credit and better her spiritual efficacy, and to win herself respect and dread by strutting in the false vizard of worldly authority, 'tis evident that God is not there; but that her apostolic virtue is departed from her, and hath left her Key-cold. Which she perceaving as in a decayed nature seeks to the outward fomentations and chafings of worldly help, and external flourishes, to fetch, if it be possible, some motion into her extreme parts, orto hatch a counterfeit life with the crafty and arteficial heat of jurisdiction. But it is observable that so long as the Church in true imitation of Christ can be content to ride upon an ass carrying herself and her government along in a mean and simple guise, she may be as he is, a Lion of the tribe of Juda, and in her humility all men with loud hosannas will confess her greatness. But when despising the mighty operation of the spirit by the weak things of this world she thinks to make herself bigger and more considerable by using the way of civil force and jurisdiction, as she sits upon this Lion she changes into an ass, and instead of hosannas every man pelts her with stones and dirt. Lastly, if the wisdom of the Romans feared to commit jurisdiction to an office of so high esteem and dread as was the censors, we may see what a solecism in the art of policy it hath been all this while through Christendom to give jurisdiction to ecclesiastical Censure. For that strength joined with religion abused and pretended to ambition's ends must of necessity breed the heaviest and most quellingty ranny not only upon the necks, but even to the souls of men: which if Christian Rome had been so cautelous to prevent in her Church, as Pagan Rome was in herstate, we had not had such a lamentable experience thereof as now we have from thenceupon all Christendom. For although I said before that the Church coveting to ride upon the Lionly form of jurisdiction makes a transformation of herself into an ass, and becomes despicable, that is to those whom God hath enlight'nd with true knowledge; but where they remain yet in the relics of superstition, this is the extremity of their bondage, and blindness, that while they think they do obeisance to the Lordly visage of a Lion, they do it to an ass, that through the just judgement of God is permitted to play the dragon among them because of their wilful stupidity. And let England here well rub her eyes, lest by leaving jurisdiction and Church censure to the same persons, now that God hath been so long medcining her eyesight, she do not with her overpolitick fetches mar all, and bring herself back again to worship this ass bestriding a Lion. Having hit herto explained, that to ecclesiastical censure no jurisdictive power can be added without a childish and dangerous oversight in polity, and a pernicious contradiction in evangelic discipline, as anon more fully; it will be next to declare wherein the true reason and force of Church censure consists, which by than it shall be laid open to the root, so little is it that I fear lest any crookedness, any wrinkle or spot should be found in presbyterial governnient that if Bodin the famous French writer though a Papist, yet affirms that the commonwealth which maintains this discipline will certainly flourish in virtue and piety, I dare assure myself that every true protestant will admire the integrity, the uprightness, the divine and gracious purposes thereof, and even for the reason of it so coherent with the doctrine of the Gospel, besides the evidence of command in Scripture, will confess it to be the only true Church-government, and that contrary to the whole end and mistery of Christ's coming in the flesh a false appearance of the same is exercised by Prelaty. But because some count it rigorous, and that hereby men shall be liable to a double punishment, I will begin somewhat higher and speak of punishment. Which, as it is an evil, I esteem to be of two forty, or rather two degrees only, a reprobat conscience in this life, and hell in the other world. Whatever else men call punishment, or censure is not properly an evil, so it be not an illegal violence, but a saving medsen ordained of God both for the public and private good of man, who consisting of two parts the inward and the outward, was by the eternal providence left under two sorts of cure, the Church and the magistrate. The magistrate hath only to deal with the outward part, I mean not of the body alone, but of the mind in all her outward acts, which in Scripture is called the outward man. So that it would be helpful to us if we might borrow such authority as the Rhetoricians by parent may give us, with a kind of Promethean skill to shape and fashion this outward man into the similitude of a body, and set him visible before us; imagining the inner man only as the soul. Thus than the civil magistrate looking only upon the outward man (I say as a magistrate, for what he doth further, he doth it as a member of the Church) if he find in his complexion, skin, or outward temperature the signs and marks, or in his doings the effects of injustice, rapine, lost, cruelty, or the like, sometimes he shuts up as in frenetic, or infectious diseases; or confines within doors, as in every sickly estate. Sometimes he shaves by penalty, or mulct, or else to cool and take down those luxuriant humours which wealth and excess have caused to abound. Otherwhiles he sears, he cauterizes, he scarifies, lets blood, and finally for utmost remedy cuts off. The patients which mostanend are brought into his hospital are such as are far gone, and beside themselves (Unless they be falsely accused) so that force is necessary to tame and quiet them in their unruly fits, before they can be made capable of a more human cure. His general end is the outward peace and welfare of the Commonwealth and civil happiness in this life. His particular end in every man is, by the infliction of pain, damage, and disgrace, that the senses and common perceivance might carry this message to the soul within, that it is neither easeful, profitable, nor praise-worthy in this life to do evil. Which must needs tend to the good of man, whether he be to live or die; and be undoubtedly the first means to a natural man, especially an offender, which might open his eyes to a higher consideration of good and evil, as it is taught in religion. This is seen in the often penitence of those that suffer, who, had they scaped, had gone on sinning to an immeasurable heap, which is one of the extremest punishments. And this is all that the civil magistrate, as so being, confers to the healing of man's mind, working only by terrifying plaisters upon the rind & orifice of the sore, and by all outward appliances, as the Logicians say, a posteriori, at the effect, and not from the cause: not once touching the inward bed of corruption, and that hectic disposition to evil, the source of all vice, and obliquity against the rule of Law. Which how insufficient it is to cure the soul of man, we cannot better guess then by the art of bodily physic. Therefore God to the intent of further healing man's depraved mind, to this power of the magistrate which contents itself with the restraint of evil doing in the external man, added that which we call censure, to purge it and remove it clean out of the inmost soul. In the beginning this authority seems to have been placed, as all both civil and religious rites once were, only in each father of family. Afterwards among the heathen, in the wise men and Philosophers of the age; but so as it was a thing voluntary, and no set government. More distinctly among the Jews as being God's peculiar, where the Priests, Levites, Prophets, and at last the Scribes and Pharises took charge of instructing, and overseeing the lives of the people. But in the Gospel, which is the straitest and the dearest covenant can be made between God and man, we being now his adopted sons, and nothing fitter for us to think on, then to be like him, united to him, and as he pleases to express it, to have fellowship with him, it is all necessity that we should expect this blessed efficacy of healing our inward man to be ministered to us in a more familiar and effectual method then ever before. God being now no more a judge after the sentence of the Law, nor as it were a school Master of perishable rites, but a most indulgent father governing his Church as a family of sons in their discreet age; and therefore in the sweetest and mildest manner of paternal discipline he hath committed this other office of preserving in healthful constitution the innerman, which may be termed the spirit of the soul, to his spiritual deputy the minister of each Congregation; who being best acquainted with his own flock, hath best reason to know all the secretest diseases likely to be, there. And look by how much the internal man is more excellant and noble than the external, by so much is his cure more exactly, more throughly, and more particularly to be performed. For which cause the holy Ghost by the Apostles joined to the minister, as assistant in this great office sometimes a certain number of grave and faithful brethren, (for neither doth the physician do all in restoring his patient, he prescribes, another prepares the medsen, some read, some watch, some visit) much more may a minister partly not see all, partly err as a man: besides that nothing can be more for the mutual honour and love of the people to their Pastor, and his to them, then when in select numbers and courses they are seen partaking, and doing reverence to the holy duties of discipline by their serviceable, and solemn presence, and receiving honour again from their employment, not now any more to be separated in the Church by vails and partitions as laics and unclean, but admitted to wait upon the tabernacle as the rightful Clergy of Christ, a chosen generation, a royal Priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifice in that meet place to which God and the Congregation shall call and assign them. And this all Christians ought to know, that the title of Clergy S. Peter gave to all God's people, till Pope Higinus and the succeeding Prelates took it from them, appropriating that name to themselves and their Priests only; and condemning the rest of God's inheritance to an injurious and alienat condition of Laity, they separated from them by local partitions in Churches, through their gross ignorance and pride imitating the old temple: and excluded the members of Christ from the property of being members, the bearing of orderly and fit offices in the ecclesiastical body, as if they had meant to sow up that Jewish veil which Christ by his death on the cross rent in sunder. Although these usurpers could not so: presently overmaister the liberties and lawful titles of God's freeborn Church, but that Origen being yet a lay man expounded the Scriptures publicly, and was therein defended by Alexander of Jerusalem, and Theoctistus of Caesarea producing in his behalf divers examples that the privilege of teaching was anciently permitted to many worthy Laymen; And Cyprian in his Epistles professes he will do nothing without the advice and assent of his assistant laics. Neither did the first Nicene council, as great and learned as it was, think it any robbery to receive in, and require the help and presence of many learned lay brethren, as they were then called. Many other autorities to confirm this assertion both out of Scripture and the writings of next antiquity Golartius hath collected in his notes upon Cyprian; whereby it will be evident that the Laity not only by Apostolic permission, but by consent of many the ancientest Prelates did participate in Church offices as much as is desired any lay Elder should now do. Sometimes also not the Elders alone, but the whole body of the Church is interested in the work of discipline, as oft as public satisfaction is given by those that have given public scandal. Not to speak now of her right in elections. But another reason there is in it, which though religion did not commend to us, yet moral and civil prudence could not but extol. It was thought of old in Philosophy, that shame or to call it better, the reverence of our elders, our brethren, and friends was the greatest incitement to virtuous deeds and the greatest dissuasion from unworthy attempts that might be. Hence we may read in the Iliad where Hector being wished to retire si on the battle, many of his forces being routed, makes answer that he durst not for shame, lest the Trojan Knights and Dames should think he did ignobly. And certain it is that whereas Terror is thought such a great stickler in a Commonwealth, honourable shame is a far greater, and has more reason. For where shame is there is fear, but where fear is there is not presently shame. And if any thing may be done to inbreed in us this generous and Christianly reverence one of another, the very nurse and Guardian of piety and virtue, it can not sooner be then by such a discipline in the Church, as may use us to have in awe the assemblies of the faithful, & to count it a thing most grievous, next to the grieving of God's Spirit, to offend those whom he hath put in authority, as a healing superintendence over our lives and behaviours, both to our own happiness and that we may not give offence to good men, who without amends by us made, dare not against God's command hold communion with us in holy things. And this will be accompanied with a religious dread of being outcast from the company of Saints, and from the fatherly protection of God in his Church, to consort with the devil and his angels. But there is yet a more ingenuous and noble degree of honest shame, or call it if you will an esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own persons. And if the love of God as a fire sent from Heaven to be ever kept alive upon the altar of our hearts, be the first principle of all godly and virtuous actions in men, this pious and just honouring of ourselves is the second, and may be thought as the radical moisture and fountain head, whence every laudable and worthy enterprize issues forth. And although I have given it the name of a liquid thing, yet is it not incontinent to bound itself, as humid things are, but hath in it a most restraining and powerful abstinence to start back, and glob itself upward from the mixture of any ungenerous and unbeseeming motion, or any soil wherewith it may peril to stain itself. Something I confess it is to be ashamed of evil doing in the presence of any, and to reverence the opinion and the countenance of a good man rather than a bad, fearing most in his sight to offend, goes so far as almost to be virtuous; yet this is but still the fear of infamy, and many such, when they find themselves alone, saving their reputation will compound with other scruples, and come to a close treaty with their dearer vices in secret. But he that holds himself in reverence and due esteem, both for the dignity of God's image upon him, and for the price of his redemption, which he thinks is visibly marked upon his forehead, accounts himself both a fit person to do the noblest and godliest deeds, and much better worth then to deject and defile, with such a debasement and such a pollution as sin is, himself so highly ransomed and ennobled to a new friendship and filial relation with God. Nor can he fear so much the offence and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should see him doing or imagining that which is sinful though in the deepest secrecy. How shall a man know to do himself this right, how to perform this honourable duty of estimation and respect towards his own soul and body? which way will lead him best to this hill top of sanctity and goodness above which there is no higher ascent but to the love of God which from this self-pious regard cannot be asunder? no better way doubtless then to let him duly understand that as he is called by the high calling of God to be holy and pure, so is he by the same appointment ordained, and by the Churches call admitted to such offices of discipline in the Church to which his own spiritual gifts by the example of Apostolic institution have autorized him. For we have learned that the scornful term of laic, the consecrating of Temples, carpets, and table-clothes, the railing in of a repugnant and contradictive Mount Sinai in the gospel, as if the touch of a lay Christian who is never the less God's living temple, could profane dead judaisms, the exclusion of Christ's people from the offices of holy discipline through the pride of a usurping Clergy, causes the rest to have an unworthy and object opinion of themselves; to approach to holy, duties with a slavish fear, and to unholy doings with a familiar boldness. For seeing such a wide and terrible distance between religious things and themselves, and that in respect of a wooden table & the perimeter of holy ground about it, a flagon pot, and a linnen corporal, the Priest esteems their lay-ships unhallowed and unclean, they fear religion with such a fear as loves not, and think the purity of the gospel too pure for them, and that any uncleanness is more suitable to their unconsecrated estate. But when every good Christian throughly acquainted with all those glorious privileges of sanctification and adoption which render him more sacred than any dedicated altar or element, shall be restored to his right in the Church, and not excluded from such place of spiritual government as his Christian abilities and his approved good life in the eye and testimony of the Church shall prefer him to, this and nothing sooner will open his eyes to a wise and true valuation of himself, which is so requisite and high a point of Christianity, and will stir him up to walk worthy the honourable and grave employment wherewith God and the Church hath dignified him: not fearing left he should meet with some outward holy thing in religion which his lay touch or presence might profane, but lest something unholy from within his own heart should dishonour and profane in himself that Priestly unction and Clergy-right whereto Christ hath entitled him. Then would the congregation of the Lord soon recover the true likeness and visage of what she is indeed, a holy generation, a royal Priesthood, a Saintly communion, the household and City of God. And this I hold to be another considerable reason why the functions of Church-government ought to be free and open to any Christian man though never so laic, if his capacity, his faith, and prudent demeanour commend him. And this the Apostles warrant us to do. But the prelates object that this will bring profaneness into the Church, to whom may be replied, that none have brought that in more than their own irreligious courses; nor more driven holiness out of living into liveless things. For whereas God who hath cleansed every beast and creeping worm, would not suffer S. Peter to call them common or unclean, the prelate Bishops in their printed orders hung up in Churches have proclaimed the best of creatures, mankind, so unpurified and contagious, that for him to lay his hat, or his garment upon the chancel table they have defined it no less heinous in express words then to profane the Table of the Lord. And thus have they by their Canaanitish doctrine (for that which was to the Jew but jewish is to the Christian no better than Canaanitish) thus have they made common and unclean, thus have they made profane that nature which God hath not only cleansed, but Christ also hath assumed. And now that the equity and just reason is so perspicuous, why in ecclesiastic censure the assistance should be added of such, as whom not the vile odour of gain and fees (forbid it God and blow it with a whirlwind out of our land) but charity, neighbourhood, and duty to Church-government hath called together, where could a wiseman wish a more equal, gratuitous, and meek examination of any offence that he might happen to commit against Christianity than here? would he prefer those proud simoniacal Courts? Thus therefore the Minister assisted attends his heavenly and spiritual cure. Where we shall see him both in the course of his proceeding, and first in the excellence of his end from the magistrate far different, and not more different than excelling. His end is to recover all that is of man both soul and body to an everlasting health: and yet as for worldly happiness, which is the proper sphere wherein the magistrate cannot but confine his motion without a hideous exorbitancy from law, so little aims the Minister, as his intended scope, to procure the much prosperity of this life, that ofttimes he may have cause to wish much of it away, as a diet puffing up the soul with a slimy fleshiness, and weakening her principal organic parts. Two heads of evil he has to cope with, ignorance and malice. Against the former he provides the daily Manna of incorruptible doctrine, not at those set meals only in public, but as oft as he shall know that each infirmity, or constitution requires. Against the latter with all the branches thereof, not meddling with that restraining and styptic surgery which tho law uses, not indeed against the malady but against the eruptions, and outermost effects thereof. He on the contrary beginning at the prime causes and roots of the disease sends in those two divine ingredients of most cleansing power to the soul, Admonition & Reproof, besides which two there is no drug or antidote that can reach to purge the mind, and without which all other experiments are but vain, unless by accident. And he that will not let these pass into him, though he be the greatest King, as Plato affirms, must be thought to remain impure within, and unknowing of those things wherein his pureness and his knowledge should most appear. As soon therefore as it may be discerned that the Christian patient by feeding otherwhere on meats not allowable, but of evil juice, hath disordered his diet, and spread an ill humour through his veins immediately disposing to a sickness, the minister as being much nearer both in eye and duty, than the magistrates, speeds him betimes to overtake that diffused malignance with some gentle potion of admonishment; or if ought be obstructed, puts in his opening and discussive confections. This not succeeding after once or twice or oftener, in the presence of two or three his faithful brethren appointed thereto be advises him to be more careful of his dearest health, and what it is that he so rashly hath let down in to the divine vessel of his soul God's temple. If this obtain not, he then with the counsel of more assistants who are informed of what diligence hath been already used, with more speedy remedies lays nearer siege to the entrenched causes of his distemper, not sparing such servant and well aimed reproofs as may best give him to see the dangerous estate wherein he is. To this also his brethren and friends entreat, exhort, adjure, and all these endeavours, as there is hope left, are more or less repeated. But if, neither the regard of himself, nor the reverence of his Elders and friends prevail with him, to leave his vicious appetite, then as the time urges, such engines of terror God hath given into the hand of his minister as to search the tenderest angles of the heart: one while he shakes his stubbornness with racking convulsions nigh despair, other while with deadly corrosives he gripes the very roots of his faulty liver to bring him to life through the entry of death. Hereto the whole Church beseech him, beg of him, deplore him, pray for him. After all this performed with what patience and attendance is possible, and no relenting on his part, having done the utmost of their cure, in the name of God and of the Church they dissolve their fellowship with him, and holding forth the dreadful sponge of excommunion pronounce him wiped out of the list of God's inheritance, and in the custody of Satan till he repent. Which horrid sentence though it touch neither life, nor limb, nor any worldly possession, yet has it such a penetrating force, that swifter than any chemical sulphur, or that lightning which harms not the skin, and rifles the entrails, it scorches the inmost soul. Yet even this terrible denouncement is left to the Church for no other cause but to be as a rough and vehement cleansing medicine, where the malady is obdurate; a mortifying to life, a kind of saving by undoing. And it may be truly said, that as the mercies of wicked men are cruelties, so the cruelties of the Church are mercies. For if repentance sent from heaven meet this lost wanderer, and draw him out of that steep journey wherein he was hasting towards destruction, to come and reconcile to the Church, if he bring with him his bill of health, and that he is now clear of infection and of no danger to the other sheep, then with incredible expressions of joy all his brethren receive him, and set before him those perfumed banquets of Christian consolation; with precious ointments bathing and fomenting the old and now to be forgotten stripes which terror and shame had inflicted; and thus with heavenly solaces they cheer up his humble remorse, till he regain his first health and felicity. This is the approved way which the gospel prescribes, these are the spiritual weapons of holy censure, and ministerial warfare, not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds, casting 
Cor. 2. 10.  down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. What could be done more for the healing and reclaiming that divine particle of God's breathing the soul, and what could be done less? he that would hide his faults from such a wholesome curing as this, and count it a twofold punishment; as some do, is like a man that having foul diseases about him, perishes for shame, and the fear he has of a rigorous incision to come upon his flesh. We shall be able by this time to discern whether prelatical jurisdiction be contrary to the gospel or no. First therefore the government of the gospel being economical and paternal, that is, of such a family where there be no servants, but all sons in obedience, not in servility, as cannot be denied by him that lives but within the sound of Scripture, how can the Prelates justify to have turned the fatherly orders of Christ's household, the blessed meekness of his lowly roof, those ever open and inviting doors of his dwelling house which delight to be frequented with only filial accesses, how can they justify to have turned these domestic privileges into the bar of a proud judicial court where fees and clamours keep shop and drive a trade, where bribery and corruption solicits, paltering the free and moneyless power of discipline with a carnal satisfaction by the purse. Contrition, humiliation, confession, the very sighs of a repentant spirit are there sold by the penny. That undefloured and unblemishable simplicity of the gospel, not she herself for that could never be, but a false-whited, a lawnie resemblance of her, like that air-born Helena in the fables, made by the sorcery of prelates, instead of calling her Disciples from the receipt of custom, is now turned Publican herself; and gives up her body to a mercenary whoredom under those fornicated ches which she calls God's house, and in the fight of those her altars which she hath set up to be adored makes merchandise of the bodies and souls of men. Rejecting purgatory for no other reason, as it seems, then because her greediness cannot defer but had rather use the utmost extortion of redeemed penances in this life. But because these matters could not be thus carried without a begged and borrowed force from worldly authority, therefore prelaty slighting the deliberate and chosen counsel of Christ in his spiritual government, whose glory is in the weakness of fleshly things to tread upon the crest of the world's pride and violence by the power of spiritual ordinances, hath on the contrary made these her friends and champions which are Christ's enemies in this his high design, smothering and extinguishing the spiritual force of his bodily weakness in the discipline of his Church with the boisterous and carnal tyranny of an undue, unlawful and ungospellike jurisdiction. And thus Prelaty both in her fleshly supportments, in her carnal doctrine of ceremony and tradition, in her violent and secular power going quite counter to the prime end of Christ's coming in the flesh, that is to revele his truth, his glory and his might in a clean contrary manner than Prelaty seeks to do, thwarting and defeating the great mystery of God, I do not conclude that Prelaty is Antichristian, for what need I? the things themselves conclude it. Yet if such like practices, and not many worse than these of our prelates, in that great darkness of the Roman Church, have not exempted both her and her present members from being judged to be Antichristian in all orthodoxal esteem, I cannot think but that it is the absolute voice of truth and all her children to pronounce this Prelaty, and these her dark deeds in the midst of this great light wherein we live, to be more Antichristian than Antichrist himself.    

The Conclusion. The mischief that Prelaty does in the State.  
I add one thing more to those great ones that are so fond of Prelaty, this is certain that the gospel being the hidden might of Christ, as hath been heard, hath over a victorious power joined with it, like him in the Revelation that went forth on the white Horse with his bow and his crown conquering, and to conquer. If we let the angel of the gospel ride on his own way, he does his proper business conquering the high thoughts, and the proud reasonings of the flesh, and brings them under to give obedience to Christ with the salvation of many souls. But if ye turn him out of his road, and in a manner force him to express his irresistible power by a doctrine of carnal might, as Prelaty is, he will use the, fleshly strength which ye put into his hands to subdue your spirits by a servile and blind superstition, and that again shall hold such dominion over your captive minds, as returning with an insatiate greediness and force upon your worldly wealth and power wherewith to deck and magnify herself, and her false worships, she shall spoil and havoc your estates, disturb your ease, diminish your honour, inthraul your liberty under the swelling mood of a proud Clergy, who will not serve or feed your souls with spiritual food, look not for it, they have not wherewithal, or if they had, it is not in their purpose. But when they have glutted their ingrateful bodies, at least if it be possible that those open sepulchers should ever be glutted, and when they have stuffed their Idolish temples with the wasteful pillage of your estates, will they yet have any compassion upon you, and that poor pittance which they have left you, will they be but so good to you as that ravisher was to his sister, when he had used her at his pleasure, will they but only hate ye and so turn ye lose? no: they will not, Lords and Commons, they will not favour ye so much. What will they do then in the name of God and Saints, what will these man-haters yet with more despite and mischief do? I'll tell ye, or at least remember ye, for most of ye know it already. That they may want nothing to make them true merchants of Babylon, as they have done to your souls, they will sell your bodies, your wives, your children, your liberties, your parliaments, all these things, and if there be aught else dearer than these, they will sell at an outcry in their Pulpits to the arbitrary and illegal dispose of any one that may hereafter be called a King, whose mind shall serve him to listen to their bargain. And by their corrupt and servile doctrines boring our ears to an everlasting slavery, as they have done hitherto, so will they yet do their best to repeal and erase every line and clause of both our great charters. Nor is this only what they will do, but what they hold as the main reason and mystery of their advancement that they must do; be the Prince never so just and equal to his subjects; yet such are their malicious and depraved eyes, that they so look on him, & so understand him, as if he required no other gratitude, or piece of service from them then this. And indeed they stand so opportunly for the disturbing or the destroying of a state, being a knot of creatures whose dignities, means, and preferments have no foundation in the Gospel, as they themselves acknowledge, but only in the Prince's favour, & to continue so long to them, as by pleasing him they shall deserve, whence it must needs be they should bend all their intentions, and services to no other ends but to his, that if it should happen that a tyrant (God turn such a scourge from us to our enemies) should come to grasp the sceptre, here were his spear men and his lances, here were his firelocks ready, he should need no other Praetorian band nor pensionry then these, if they could once with their perfidious preachments awe the people. For although the prelates in time of popery were sometimes friendly enough to magnacharta, it was because they stood upon their own bottom, without their main dependence on the royal nod: but now being well acquainted that the protestant religion, if she will reform herself rightly by the Scriptures, must undress them of all their guilded vanities, and reduce them as they were at first, to the lowly and equal order of Presbyters, they know it concerns them nearly to study the times more than the text, and to lift up their eyes to the hills of the Court, from whence only comes their help; but if their pride grow weary of this crouching and observance, as ere long it would, and that yet their minds climb still to a higher ascent of worldly honour, this only refuge can remain to them, that they must of necessity contrive to bring themselves and us back again to the Pope's supremacy, and this we see they had by fair degrees of late been doing. These be the two fair supporters between which the strength of Prelaty is born up, either of inducing tyranny, or of reducing popery. Hence also we may judge that Prelaty is mere falsehood. For the property of Truth is, where she is publicly taught, to unyoke & set free the minds and spirits of a Nation first from the thraldom of sin and superstition, after which all honest and legal freedom of civil life cannot be long absent; but Prelaty whom the tyrant custom begot a natural tyrant in religion, & in state the agent & minister of tyranny, seems to have had this fatal gift in her nativity like another Midas that whatsoever she should touch or come near either in ecclesial or political government, it should turn, not to gold, though she for her part could wish it, but to the dross and scum of slavery breeding and settling both in the bodies and the souls of all such as do not in time with the sovereign treacle of sound doctrine provide to fortify their hearts against her Hierarchy. The service of God who is Truth, her Liturgy confesses to be perfect freedom, but her works and her opinions declare that the service of Prelaty is perfect slavery, and by consequence perfect falsehood. Which makes me wonder much that many of the Gentry, studious men, as I hear should engage themselves to write, and speak publicly in her defence, but that I believe their honest and ingenuous natures coming to the Universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else, but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastical burr in their throats, as hath stopped and hindered all true and generous philosophy from entering, cracked their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms, and hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men prelatically addicted, whose unchast'nd and unwrought minds never yet initiated or subdued under the true lore of religion or moral virtue, which two are the best and greatest points of learning, but either slightly trained up in a kind of hypocritical and hackney course of literature to get their living by, and dazzle the ignorant, or else fondly overstudied in useless controversies, except those which they use with all the specious and delusive suttlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta, having a Gospel and Church-government set before their eyes, as a fair field wherein they might exercise the greatest virtue's, and the greatest deeds of Christian authority in mean fortunes and little furniture of this world, which even the sage heathen writers and those old Fabritii, and Curii well knew to be a manner of working, than which nothing could lik'n a mortal man more to God, who delights most to work from within himself, and not by the heavy luggage of corporeal instrument, they understand it not, & think no such matter, but admire & dote upon worldly riches, & honours, with an easy & intemperate life, to the bane of Christianity: yea they and their Seminaries shame not to profess, to petition and never lin pealing our ears that unless we fat them like boors, and cram them as they list with wealth, with Deaneries, and pluralities, with Baronies and stately preferments, all learning and religion will go underfoot. Which is such a shameless, such a bestial plea, and of that odious impudence in churchmen, who should be to us a pattern of temperance and frugal mediocrity, who should teach us to contemn this world, and the gaudy things thereof, according to the promise which they themselves require from us in baptism, that should the Scripture stand by and be mute, there is not that sect of Philosophers among the heathen so dissolute, no not Epicurus, nor Aristippus with all his Cyrenaic rout, but would shut his school doors against such greasy sophisters: not any College of Mountebanks, but would think scorn to discover in themselves with such a brazen forehead the outrageous desire of filthy lucre. Which the prelates make so little conscience of, that they are ready to fight, and if it lay in their power, to massacre all good Christians under the names of horrible schismatics for only finding fault with their temporal dignities, their unconscionable wealth and revenues, their cruel authority over their brethren that labour in the word, while they snore in their luxurious excess. Openly proclaiming themselves now in the sight of all men to be those which for a while they fought to cover under sheep's clothing, ravenous and savage wolves threatening inroads and bloody incursions upon the flock of Christ, which they took upon them to feed, but now claim to devour us their prey. More like that huge dragon of Egypt breathing out wast, and desolation to the land, unless he were daily fattened with virgin's blood. Him our old patron Saint George by his matchless valour slew, as the prelate of the Garter that reads his Collect can tell. And if our Princes and Knights will imitate the same of the t old champion, as by their order of Knighthood solemnly taken, they vow, far be it that they should uphold and side with this English Dragon; but rather to do as indeed their oath binds them, they should make it their Knightly adventure to pursue & vanquish this mighty sailewinged monster that menaces to swallow up the Land, unless her bottomless gorge may be satisfied with the blood of the King's daughter the Church; and may, as she was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of the Saints. Nor will any one have reason to think this as too incredible or too tragical to be spoken of Prelaty, if he consider well from what a mass of slime and mud, the slothful, the covetous and ambitious hopes of Church-promotions and fat bishoprics she is bred up and nuzzled in, like a great Python from her youth, to prove the general poison both of doctrine and good discipline in the Land. For certainly such hopes and such principles of earth as these wherein she welters from a young one, are the immediate generation both of a slavish and tyrannous life to follow, and a pestiferous contagion to the whole Kingdom, till like that fenborn serpent she be shot to death with the darts of the sun, the pure and powerful beams of God's word. And this may serve to describe to us in part, what Prelaty hath been and what, if she stand, she is like to be toward the whole body of people in England. Now that it may appear how she is not such a kind of evil, as hath any good, or use in it, which many evils have, but a distilled quintessence, a pure elixir of mischief, pestilent alike to all I shall show briefly, ere I conclude, that the prelates, as they are to the subjects a calamity, so are they the greatest underminers and betrayers of the Monarch, to whom they seem to be most favourable. I cannot better liken the state and person of a King then to that mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and the practice of Temperance and Sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks the laws waving and curling about his god like shoulders. And while he keeps them about him undiminisht and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is, with the word of his meanest officer suppress and put to confusion thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and thinks no harm, they wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty tresses of his laws, and just prerogatives which were his ornament and strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which as those Philistines put out the fair, and far-sighted eyes of his natural discerning, and make him grind in the prison house of their sinister ends and practices upon him. Till he knowing this prelatical razor to have bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the golden beams of Law and Right; and they sternly shook, thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great affliction to himself. This is the sum of their loyal service to Kings; yet these are the men that still cry the King, the King, the Lord's Anointed. We grant it, and wonder how they came to light upon any thing so true; and wonder more, if Kings be the Lord's Anointed, how they dare thus oil over and besmear so holy an unction with the corrupt and putrid ointment of their base flatteries, which while they smooth the skin, strike inward and envenom the life blood. What fidelity Kings can expect from prelates both examples past, and our present experience of their doings at this day, whereon is grounded all that hath been said, may suffice to inform us. And if they be such clippers of regal power and shavers of the Laws, how they stand affected to the law giving parliament, yourselves, worthy peers and Commons, can best testify; the current of whose glorious and immortal actions hath been only opposed by the obscure and pernicious defignes of the prelates: until: their insolence broke out to such a bold affront, as hath justly immured their haughty looks within strong walls. Nor have they done any thing of late with more diligence; then to hinder or break the happy assembling of parliaments, however needful to repair the shattered and disjointed frame of the commonwealth, or if they cannot do this, to cross, to disinable, and traduce all parliamentary proceedings. And this, if nothing else, plainly accuses them to be no lawful members of the house, if they thus perpetually mutiny against their own body. And though they pretend like Salomon's harlot, that they have right thereto, by the same judgement that Solomon gave, it cannot belong to them, whenas it is not only their assent, but their endeavour continually to divide parliaments in twain; and not only by dividing, but by all other means to abolish and destroy the free use of them to all posterity. For the which and for all their former misdeeds, whereof this book and many volumes more cannot contain the moiety, I shall move ye Lords in the behalf I dare say of many thousand good Christians, to let your justice and speedy sentence pass against this great malefactor Prelaty. And yet in the midst of rigor I would beseech ye to think of mercy; and such a mercy, I fear I shall overshoot with a desire to save this falling Prelaty, such a mercy (if I may venture to say it) as may exceed that which for only ten righteous persons would have saved Sodom. Not that I dare advise ye to contend with God whether he or you shall be more merciful, but in your wise esteems to balance the offences of those peccant cities with these enormous riots of ungodly misrule that Prelaty hath wrought both in the Church of Christ, and in the state of this kingdom. And if ye think ye may with a pious presumption strive to go beyond God in mercy, I shall not be one now that would dissuade ye. Though God for less than ten just persons would not spare Sodom, yet if you can find after due search but only one good thing in prelaty either to religion, or civil goverment, to King or Parliament, to Prince or people, to law, liberty, wealth or learning, spare her, let her live, let her spread among ye, till with her shadow, all your dignities and honours, and all the glory of the land be darkened and obscured. But on the contrary if she be found to be malignant, hostile, destructive to all these, as nothing can be surer, then let your severe and impartial doom imitate the divine vengeance; rain down your punishing force upon this godless and oppressing government: and bring such a dead Sea of subversion upon her, that she may never in this Land rise more to afflict the holy reformed Church, and the elect people of God.  
The end.