HAving with as much delight as diligence, read over this excellent Discourse, entitled, The Primitive practice for preserving Truth; and finding it richly furnished with variety of learned and select Story, eminently useful for common information against persecution merely for Conscience sake; I conceive it very worthy of the press.  
John Bachiler   

THE PRIMITIVE practice FOR PRESERVING TRUTH.  
OR AN historical NARRATION, showing what course the PRIMITIVE Church anciently, and the best Reformed Churches since have taken to suppress heresy and schism.  
AND Occasionally also by way of Opposition discovering the papal and prelatical courses to destroy and root out the same truth; and the judgements of GOD which have ensued upon persecuting Princes and Prelates.  
By Sir Simonds D' Ewes.  
The second Impression, more exact than the former.  
LONDON, Printed by M. S. for Henry Overton, and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head Alley.   

TO THE READER.  
JUDICIOUS READER,  
THIS ensuing Discourse being penned by me about eight years since, not only for recreation amidst my severer studies, but as a Preparative also, by which I desired to fit myself, either for a voluntary exitement, or a necessary suffering; I intended it only for a private use: For I then residing in the County of Suffolk, which had newly groaned under the prelatical tyranny of Bishop Wren, as did all other parts of his diocese; did know that the press was then only open to matters of a contrary subject. But now upon the perusal thereof, conceiving that it might be of some use, in respect of the many distractions amongst us at this present, when a blessed Reformation is so near the birth, and yet the Church seems to want strength to bring it forth, I was content to yield to the publishing thereof. I did at first, purposely omit the citations of those many and select Authorities, out of which this ensuing Discourse was drawn, lest the margin thereby should have swollen to a greater proportion than the Discourse itself, some whole Sections or Paragraphs being almost entirely extracted out of the Records of this kingdom: And I have through the whole Tractat chiefly laid down the matter of fact out of Story, not only extant in print, but yet remaining also in M. S. and have lest the debate of the dogmatic part of it, to those, whose calling and leisure is more proper for it. My many present employments, both public and private, did scarce permit me to supervise it, and to amend it in some few places, which puts me almost out of all hope ever to transmit to posterity any one of those several great and more necessary Works I had in part collected and prepared (for the good and benefit of this Church and kingdom) in the time of my leisure and freedom.  
S. D.   

THE PRIMITIVE practice For preserving TRUTH.  

SECTION I.  
IT is the undoubted Mark or Brand of the Church Antichristian and Malignant, to persecute; of the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholic, to be persecuted: For the Truth, if it have but equal countenance and safety, will not only prosper and flourish amongst the professors thereof, but will also in due time, sometimes by a sudden power, profligate and trample upon heresy, as it did upon Pelagianism, among the ancient Protestant Britains in Wales, about the year of our Lord, 466. and sometimes by insensible degrees waste and wear out falsehood, as it did the contagion of the Arrians amongst the Eastern Christians; but falsehood, heresy, men's Inventions, burdensome Superstitions intermixed with God's Worship, and Idolatry, or any divine Creature-adoration, consisting in men's bowing to, or towards Images, Crosses, Altars, Communion-tables, relics, or the like, can never be generally and publicly established, without sharp and cruel persecution be exercised and practised upon the goods, estates, liberties and lives of the godly. The Pope and the Turk have both upheld and propagated their abominations by the sword, although no indifferent and impartial judgement can deny, but that the Romish Antichrist, in this one particular, exceeds the Ottomanish Muphtis, in that he makes it a part of the Tridentine Faith, and so a Tenet of his Religion, to persecute, destroy and root out all the evangelical party, under the false and personated names of heretics: Whereas the Turk acknowledgeth this Truth, that the Conscience neither can, nor aught to be compelled; and therefore they permit the free exercise, not only of the Protestant Religion in all their dominions, but of the Popish also, in many places of the same, whom yet they justly abhor, as the Jews do also (led by the morality of the second commandment) for setting up Images in the places of their public Assemblies, and committing Idolatry by adoring them.   

SECT. II.  
A Protestant Church, if it desire to intermix any superstitious Ceremonies or Idolatrous actions, with the power and purity of the Gospel, must likewise be enforced to borrow some part of the other Characters also from the Church Malignant, by enforcing the observation of such additions with the persecution of God's children in their estates, goods, and liberties, equalling in many respects the shedding of their bloods; and reckoned up together by the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, for so many kinds or species of martyrdom. There are in all parts of the world, amongst the very Christians themselves, the greater number ignorant, profane and vicious, who neither regard to know the truth, nor desire to suffer for it, but will always run with the multitude, and be carried with the stream: They will of Protestants become Papists to morrow, rather than lose either goods, life or liberty; of Papists the next day Anabaptists with Sebastian Castellio, and James Arminius; of Anabaptists the third day (if by that means they may escape danger, and rise to preferment) become Turks or abisens': For, doubtless, in running from truth to falsehood, as in turning from the medium to an extreme, there is no essential, but only a gradual difference. As Constantine filled the Empire with Christians, so Julian with Atheists and Persecutors. The greater number with holy King Edward in England, even Harding and Boner, among others for company, embraced the Protestant truth; and as soon as he died, all again generally licked up the old vomit under Queen Mary, whose bloody fires were scarce quenched by her death, and the royal sceptre throughly grasped by her blessed sister, but all again, for the most part, (as if Religion had been but a fashion, which commonly deriveth its frenzy into the country by the Court) changed with the new Prince, and especially the churchmen, among whom, through the whole Realm, not twenty in a thousand did stick to their infallible Head, the Romish Antichrist.   

SECT. III.  
WHen learned and pious Luther lay on his deathbed, he 
* Lutherus paulò ante mortem, age● cum Phil●ppo Melancthone, fatetur, in negotio Coenae●n mium esse factum, &c. Dr Rainoldus prelectione 4a. in lib. Apocryphos, p. 53. Col. 1. Et Orat. Isaac Bootii Vesalii de controversiis Sacramentariis Edit. Basilere Ao. Dm. 1601. ad Calcem Polani Analys. in Ho●●seam, p. 405.  acknowledged his errors, which coming but newly out of darkness, had been embraced by him amongst his many truths, and obtruded from him upon the Church of God, especially those two monsters of Consubstantiation and Ubiquity; yet (taking counsel rather of men then of God's Word) for fear, lest if he retracted them, the people would suspect the rest, and so fall back again by an absolute recidivation to Popery, he counted it more safe to declare his judgement in private, and to leave the rooting out of those weeds by insensible degrees to his Disciples. To effect which, the French and Helvetian churches did readily afterwards afford the Germans divers public conferences: But Doctor Andreas, John Brentius, and other Pseudo-Lutherans, having sucked in the poison of the Anabaptiss (the devil's Master-engine in this latter age, with the Jesuits, to restore Pelagianism to the World) and having added those old blasphemies that concern the advancement of man's freewill above God's grace, to Luther's new mass, as the Papists then, and still in a bitter scoff or sarcasm call it, grew into so extreme an hatred against the maintainers of God's truth, both within and without Germany, as they became more bitter in their invectives against them, then against the Papists themselves, and did even then by their false and preposterous courses, threaten a ruin to themselves, and the whole evangelical party, which they have since most miserably effected and brought to pass in a great part of the Christian world; which drew the King of great Britain, in the year 1611. to remonstrate to the united States of the lower Germany upon the death of James Arminius the Anabaptist, or Pseudo-Lutheran, whom he calls the Enemy of God, and their electing of Vorstius into his chair, whom he calls a blasphemer; that if they did not in time prevent the growing of that pestilential Sect, it would in the issue prove the utter ruin of their flourishing commonwealth.   

SECT. IV.  
THe electoral House of Saxonic, upon the divesting of that brave and pious Prince John Frederick the true heir by Charles the fifth, and the investing of the younger House, to usurp that honour, hath ever since proved a greater friend to the Popish party, then to the purer Churches of Christendom, of the French and Helvetick confession. Miurice that usurped that duchy and Electorate upon the incaptivating of the said Duke John Frederick his Cousin, first ruined the Princes of the Smalcaldick union, to which himself had subscribed, and then casting an ambitious eye upon the Empire itself, broke his faith with the Emperor that had raised him; and having patched up that defection by the means of Eerdinand of Austria, King of Bohemia, afterwards settled in the imperial Throne, he lastly perished by a violent death in a pitched battle, sought against his fellow-Protestants, and left his brother Augustus to succeed him. This new electoral family aided the Leaguers in France, against that victorious Prince, Henry the Great: They ruined and took prisoner their Cousin, the Duke of Saxon Weymar, (the principal branch of their House) in the Castle of Goeth, in the time of Maximilian the Emperor, they put in their far-fetched pretensions to the duchy of Cleeve and Juliers' in our days, and joined their arms with the Archduke Leopold, against the marquess of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Newburg, the indubitate heirs thereof, whose right also was asserted by the whole Protestant party besides of Christendom. These were the fruits of their miserable errors in doctrine brought in and established by James Andreas Osiander, and their fellow Pseudo-Lutherans, retaining still their Images and Altars in the places of their public worship, although they confess them to minister matter of offence to many of the better learned, and matter of superstition to most of the ignorant multitude. Nay, hence in the year 1580. did the Pseudo-Lutherans proceed to enforce the Ministers of Saxony to subscribe, amongst other Articles, to that monstrous error of the Ubiquity of Christ's body, exploded with just derision by Bellarmine, and all learned Papists: And from enforced subscription (which is ever for the most part the forerunner of persecution) they fell in the year 1591. upon the death of Duke Christian, the best of all the Electors of the aforesaid Augustus line and race, to shed the innocent blood of that brave Gentleman and faithful servant of the State, Paulus Krelius, Chancellor of that duchy, for no other delict, but because he was a known friend to the purest doctrine, & a stout Protector of those whom they styled Calvinists. After which followed the suspension and imprisonment of Urbanus Pierius, Professor of Wittenberg, and of divers other learned and godly Ministers; yea, within a year or two after, such was the furious virulency of the Inhabitants of the Town of Leipsich, led by the Scholars of the university there, (who have since, in these later German wars, fully tasted of the divine indignation) as they fell upon the houses and moveables of such as embraced the helvetic Confession, despoiled them of their goods, and committed divers other outrages upon them. But most fatal have been the effects of this last Duke of Saxonie's hovering neutrality in matter of Religion, when at first he refused to be comprised in the Protestant union, entered into by the German Princes in the year 1617. for their necessary safety, when secondly he sided the year following, with the Emperor Mathias, against the Protestant Bohemians. And thirdly, when in the year 1620. he joined his Armies with those of the Emperor Ferdinand the second, (that but a few years before lay hid in obscurity, in his slender Patrimony at Gratz.) and so proved one of the chief causes of the utter subversion (for aught we yet see) of the Religion and Liberties of Germany. For had not Frederick the fifth, Prince Elector Palatine, rather aimed at the upholding of true Religion in Bohemia, then at any ambitious ends of his own, he had never hazarded the peace, plenty, and quiet he enjoyed at Heidelberg, to have accepted that controversial crown at Prague, and to have entered that kingdom in a hostile manner, which for above the space of twelve months before had been filled with war and misery.   

SECT. V.  
I do not find that any higher or greater punishment was inflicted upon heretics themselves in the Primitive times, though they remained obstinate after all other means used for convincing them of their errors, than exile or banishment. St. Austin writing to Proculianus the Donatist, acknowledgeth such as err from the truth, must be drawn home by mild instruction, and not by cruel enforcement. And when Bishop Itacius, in the year 383. being a man of a turbulent spirit, and fierce nature, had caused Priscillian the heretic, and divers of his followers to be put to death; he was first condemned for that bloody act by Thcognistus: And St. Ambrose afterwards meeting with some Bishops at Triers, that had partaken with Itacius in that cruel execution, would not so much as entertain any communion with them. Theodosius the Emperor, in the Synod of Constantinople, in stead of blood and irons, caused a public dispute to be afforded the Arians themselves, although they had been before condemned by the council of Nice: The like merciful provision did Charles the Great, and jews the Good in France, ordain for such as were counted Sectaries in their times. Neither did those three hundred and eighteen Fathers in the first Nicene council, those six hundred and thirty in that of Chalcedon, or those hundred and fifty in that of Constantinople use any other weapons against the same Arrians, Nestorians, and Macedonians, than the Word of God; nor stirred they up, or permitted the Christian Magistrate in their days to punish them by death. Paulus Aquiliensis, and Cedrenus, do also both of them report, that when the Emperor Justinus used clemency towards the very Arrian heretics, Theodoricus the King of Italy being infected with the same poison, did notwithstanding, led by that example, suffer the Orthodox Christians to have the free exercise of their Religion in all his Dominions. We shall need no further examples to prove this truth, when it is confessed by one of the most learned and best Romanists of our age, that there is no approved example in all the Monuments of Antiquity, of any execution done upon the Sectaries of those times; but that the Church of God did always abhor the shedding of blood in matters that merely concern Religion, Jac. Aug. Thuanus Prooem. in Histor. p. 5.   

SECT. VI.  
IT is likewise contrary to the practice of the best Princes, and the wisest States of this latter age of the world, to make matter of heresy itself a capital crime. Francis the first of that name, King of France, having decreed a persecution against the poor Protestants of Merindoll, and Cabrieres, and being informed by William Bellay, Lord Langay, governor of the Province, that they were harmless men, very laborious in their callings, just in their dealings, loyal to their Prince, charitable to the poor, and very frequent in their prayers to God, & their innocency being likewise cleared in a great measure by Cardinal Sadolet himself, he caused them to be freed from further persecution, till being falsely informed by one Minerius, a turbulent fellow, that there were fifteen thousand of them up in arms in rebellion, he rashly gave them over to the fury of their enemies, yet not as Heŕetiques, which he always accounted them, but as traitors, as he was then misinformed of them. In Germany, Ferdinand the first, taught by the error of Charles the fifth his elder Brother, found no such means to make his Government happy, and his Empire flourishing, as to decree the liberty of Religion. Which course the good Emperor Maximilian his son following, died as happy as he lived victorious. The Venetian State endure no Inquisitors in matters of Religion, nor if any of their Subjects be accused of heresy, do they suffer it to be questioned before any of the Clergy alone, who are thirsty after blood, but before them jointly together, with their civil Judges. The first Monarch in England that made matter of Religion, a capital crime, by a public Act or Statute, was the usurper Henry the fourth, who having by the persuasion and assistance of Thomas Arundel, that traitor, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his fellow-Prelates, deposed and murdered his lawful sovereign, Richard the second, to curry favour with those bloody cannibals, was forced to yield to the murdering of God's Saints: since whose time the blood of the Martyrs in England, have proved the seed of the Church, although by the short reign of that kingdom's unfortunate Mary, their number comes far short of those in France, and the seventeen Provinces; in which two Dominions, within the space of little more than five years, the curious searcher may find by diligent inquisition, that God's truth was sealed under Charles the ninth of France, and Philip the second of Spain, with the blood of near upon two hundred thousand Martyrs, amongst whom were slaughtered divers great and eminent personages of both sexes: a cruelty that very Mahometans do abhor; as it appeared by that which the ambassadors sent from Abas-Meriza the Persian Sultan, to the Emperor Rodolph, in the year 1604. did allege to justify the merciful Government of that Empire, to wit, that all Christians had free liberty of Conscience in all their sovereign's Dominions, and therefore they exhorted his imperial Majesty to join in a firm league with him against their common enemy the Turk.   

SECT. VII.  
AS it is against the practice of the Primitive Church, the course held by the Christian Emperors, and the observation of the wisest Princes and States of the latter age, though otherwise Pontifician, to make matter of heresy a capital crime, to enforce the Conscience, and to put to death, for the cause of Religion merely, so it is against the Rules of charity and reason.  
First, It is against the Rules of charity, if we had no other light to guide us, but the most wise answer of England's last matchless Edward, being then but a child, when he was pressed to yield his assent to the burning of an heretic; What (said he) shall I send him to hell? By which he truly intimated, that whereas in all other offences, the Malefactors are punished with death, because it may be hoped they have repented the sin; but to destroy an heretic before conviction, is to be the devil's Catour, and to send him in provision even to Hell itself. For the very pertinacious holding of an heresy is agreed on by all sides to be a damnable sin, and then the cutting them off in that sin, is to be the immediate Instrument of their perdition. This doth that virulent Romanist or monster of men, Nicholas Harpsfeild, in his Wiclevian History openly boast of, Cap. 16. p. 717. That those (blessed Champions of Christ whom he calls) heretics, did in the fires that consumed their bodies, taste the first-fruits of the eternal fire they endured afterwards. On the other side, if they suffer not but for fear of death, hope of preferment, or other base ends, turn from one Religion to another, especially from the truth to error and Idolatry, without instruction, or reasonable conviction, they only dissemble outwardly; as the moors of Gran ido did under that bloody Philip the second of Spain, who being enforced to be present at the mass in the morning, practised their own Mahometanism in the evening; or else their conscience being shipwracked by their apostasy before conviction, with Francis Spira they are swallowed up of despair, or with Peter Espinae, Archbishop of Lions, of the Henetick faction in Henry the fourths time of France, with lust and Epicurism, who practised that emasculating sin with his own sister. The Jews in England from William the firsts time, till the eighteenth year of Edward the first, were the only Usurers of the realm, and brought in large contributions and tallages to the Kings under whom they lived, and enjoyed here the freedom of their consciences: At their deaths their whole Estates escheated to the King, which their next heirs commonly redeemed for one full third part of three: But to encourage them to turn Christians, it was appointed in the Assize, by which they were governed under their own proper and peculiar Justices, that if any Jew died, whose heir became a Christian, he should inherit all the estate, of his Ancestors, without any further sine or composition with the Prince. The Master of the Rolls-house in London, and other places in other Cities of the kingdom were appointed for the entertainment of those Christian converts, and were thence called Domus Conversorum: All which may clearly be gathered out of those Records of the Exchequer, commonly called, The great Pipe rolls, and the Communi● rolls: By which allurements some of the Jews out of malice to their fellows, or having committed some penal offence to escape the punishment practised amongst themselves, or else for lucre sake, (the sin of avarice being connatural to most of them) were baptised and became Christians outwardly, without any due instruction in the Christian faith beforehand, and being convinced also that the Papists adoring or bowing to, and towards Images, Altars, relics, and the like trumpery, was absolute Idolatry against the second commandment, they proved, as commonly the Jews and Christians at this day do, when they turn Turks, the wretchedest varlets in the whole kingdom. What were the poor Indians wont to say, when to avoid the Spaniards extreme and inhuman cruelties, they were drawn to their Masses, but that since they became Christians, they had learned to swear and drink? It was an excellent and just sentence which one of the Grand Seignienrs pronounced against divers hundreds of Christians, that falling down-before him, made declaration, that they had deserted their Sacra, and given up their names to Mahomet, he inquired of them why they did so; and they confessing plainly, that they did it to be freed from those many taxes, contributions and oppressions which they before groaned under; he rejected their enforced conversion for outward ends, and commanded their taxes and levies to be continued. This heroic action of the Turkish Monarch, was not much short of that policy of one of the ancient Christian Emperors, who having his Army mixed of Christians and Pagans, and desiring to discover who of the first were little better than those of the latter, made, like another Jehu: a public Declaration for the restoring of paganism, upon which, divers of the Christian Commanders showing themselves forward to desert the truth, and to follow the stream and time, he presently reproved and cashiered them; alleging, that all such were unworthy to serve any Prince that had proved unfaithful to that divine Majesty, by which Princes rule.   

SECT. VIII.  
AS it is against the Dictamen of Christian Charity, to make matter of Religion a capital crime, or to enforce the conscience, without a full and clear conviction, from the profession of one Religion to another, or to any new burdensome Ceremonies, to be superadded in the public worship of God, although the Religion itself remain the same it was before in the general; so it is against the rules of Reason itself. This was confessed by Henry 3. of France, one of the most impotent Princes that ever swayed that sceptre, and most inveterate enemy that ever the Protestants had, having been instructed to hate, betray, and persecute them, by Katherine de Medici's his bloody mother, even from his very Cradle; yet when James Clement a Jesuited Monk had sheathed a knife in his bowels, and that he saw himself near the minute in which he was to give an account of all his cruelties to the supreme Judge of Heaven and earth, he made an effectual speech to the chief Commanders of his Army, being most of them Romanists: To acknowledge and obey the King of Navarre (than a Protestant) as their lawful sovereign, and the lineal heir of the French Crown, and to know this undoubted truth for the future; That Religion which is distilled into the souls of men by God himself, cannot he enforced by man. The same truth likewise, and almost in these very words, did the Lord Brederode, and the other Protestants of the lower Germany allege for their just excuse in their united apology, published in the year 1566. and further added; That if the Papists did conceive their Religion to be the truth, they should in sieed of blood, fines, imprisonments and exilings, follow the seasonable advice of wise Gamaliel, and try a while, whether the Protestants separation from them were of God or not; for otherwise, if by force and tyranny they did compel them to profess and practise those actions in God's worship which they accounted abominable, and did also restrain them from performing those holy duties towards God, wherein they were convinced the truth of his service consisted, their consciences must needs be shipwracked and undone, and so in stead of making them new Converts, they should leave them Atheists and Libertines. This very objection also (in the year 1572) did Katherine de Medici's of Florence, than Queen mother of France, (though she little practised the truth of the Consequence) make in the Treaty of marriage of Francis de Valois her youngest son, with Queen Elizabeth of England. The great rub pretended on both sides, (though the match was never really intended by either Queen) was matter of Religion; in which that glorious Virgin Monarch, having given her Ambassador express instructions, not to yield so far as that the Duke of Alenzon should be permitted the celebration of his mass in private. What Mr. Walsingham, saith the Queen-mother upon his next audience, Will your Mistress have my Son turn Atheist, and profess no Religion at all? For with your Church he cannot join, till he be further instructed; and you will not suffer him to continue those Sacra by which he hath hitherto served God, what shall he turn Heathen till you have converted him? Though this unfortunate Lady did by this her wise answer discover the true madness of all persecutors, yet did she not forbear to bathe her cruel hands for many years after, in the blood of God's Saints, and caused many, as St. Paul witnesseth of himself, before his conversion, to blaspheme, by their ejuration of the known truth, and their subscriptions to the Popish trumperies; of which, some that persisted in Papistry, turned prodigious sinners and libertines; and others with the King of Navarre, and Prince of Conde, as soon as they got loose, returned to the known truth. The heroic answer of that brave Prince, John Frederick Elector, and Duke of Saxony, is worthy to be engraven in letters of gold on pillars of brass, who being taken prisoner by the Emperor, Charles the fifth, in the year 1547. and threatened with present death, except he would renounce and yield up his Electorate and duchy to his false and treacherous Cousin Maurice, and become a Romanist, yielded readily to all the former conditions, but absolutely refused the latter: And when in the year following, that wicked interim was yielded unto by all the Princes of Germany; some being driven by fear, and others drawn on by flattery, which was, That Popery should be restored in all places, till a general council were called, and further order taken for the liberty of Religion; This godly Prince, though caesars captive, could never be drawn to subscribe to it; and when those two subtle Perenots, Nicholas Cardinal Granvellan the Father, and Anthony the Bishop of Arras his son, had used many arguments to persuade him, What (saith he) would you draw me to? I am convinced the Religion I now live in to be the truth, and should I outwardly make profession of any other, I should but dissemble with God and the Emperor, and so draw near to that unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost: with which answer, Charles the fifth himself was so pleased, as he more respected and honoured the Duke ever after. What this pious Prince foresaw and avoided, too many by lamentable experience have found true, and repented, who having abjured the truth for fear, and felt but a while the horror of an afflicted and wounded conscience, have hasted to those Popish Officers, as divers in England did in Queen Mary's time, where their abjurations and recantations remained, and having gotten sight of them, have rent them into many pieces, and joyfully embraced, not only their Irons, but the stake itself, as a far more easy suffering then what they before felt and endured. Had Charles the 9th of France but followed the good counsel was openly given him in the Parliament at St. Germans the first year of his reign, That the differences of Religion neither aught, nor ever could be composed by blood and cruelty, but by God's Word and seasonable conferences, he had never made his reign and memory so infamous to posterity as now it is, nor drawn the divine vengeance upon himself, by shedding so much innocent blood as afterwards he did. For as divers were butchered by him in that barbarous massacre at Paris, in the year 1572. so Henry de Clermont (commonly surnamed Bourbon) Prince of Conde, was some days after the general slaughter of the Protestants, committed there, appointed by him to die, but his pardon being obtained by Elizabeth (a name, it seems, only proper to gracious and excellent soveraignesses) his Queen, one of the daughters of the good Emperor Maximilian, (although Conde knew it not) he comes to him, and tells him, of three things he must elect one: either to hear mass, to die, or to suffer perpetual imprisonment; the young Prince no whit abashed, makes him this sudden and brave answer: God forbid, Sir, that I should choose the first, but of the two latter, I am ready to submit to that which your highness shall appoint. There is as rare a story of the Lady Jane Gray, eldest daughter of Henry Gray, Duke of Suffolk, not much inferior in birth and extraction to Conde himself, by her mother's side, who was grandchild and coheir to Edward the 4th, King of England, related by a Gentleman, and a Courtier, as it seems (for I find not his name) under Queen Mary, in the year 1553. who dined at Mr. Partridge's house within the Tower with her, whilst she remained a prisoner there, which narration well deserving to be transmitted to posterity, doth here ensue out of a Manuscript History of a great part of that Queen's time, the very Autograph itself being in my Library, written by the said Gentleman with his own hand, some few words being added, which were at first casually omitted by his haste, or inadvertency in penning of it, and some other words changed and written according to the manner of speech now used: On Tuesday, the 29th of August, I dined at partridges house with my Lady Jane, &c. After that we fell in discourse of matters of Religion, and she asked what he was that preached at Paul's on Sunday before, and so it was told her to be one:::::::: I pray you (quoth she) had they mass in London? Yea forsooth (quoth I) in some places: It may be so (quoth she) it is not so strange as the sudden conversion of the late 
* John Dudley Duke of Northumberland.  Duke, for who would have thought, said she, he would have so done? It was answered her, Perchance he thereby hoped to have had his pardon. Pardon! (quoth she) woe worth him, he hath brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition; but for the answering that he hoped for life by his turning, though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not: for what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope for life in that case, being in the field against the Queen in person as general, and after his taking so hated and evil spoken of by the Commons, and at his coming into prison so wondered at, as the like was never heard by any man's time; who can judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was odious to all men? But what will ye more? like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter: I pray God I, nor no friend of mine die so; should I, who am young, and in the flower of my years forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid; much more he should not, whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued: But life was sweet, it appeared so he might have lived, you will say, he did not care how; indeed the reason is good: for he that would have lived in chains to have his life, belike would leave no means unattempted: but God be merciful to us, for he saith, Whoso denyeth him before men, he will not know him in his father's kingdom. How justly may the masculine constancy of this excellent Lady, whose many virtues the pens of her very enemies have acknowledged, rise up in judgement against all such poor spirits, who for fear of death, or other outward motives, shall deny God and his truth, and so crown the trophies of the Antichristian or mongrel adversaries by their lamentable apostasy. For what she here spoke Christianly, she within a few months after performed constantly, her life being taken from her on the 12th day of February, 1553. having lived first to see Mr. Harding her father's Chaplain revolted to Antichrist, to whom she wrote an effectual Letter of admonition and reproof, published by Mr. Fox in his Acts and monuments, p. 1291. not unworthy the perusal of the ablest Christians and greatest Doctors.   

SECT. ix..  
AS it is against the dictamen of reason, to make matter of Religion a capital crime, so it is against the rules of policy itself, in respect that heresy and falsehood, which would in time die of themselves, are thereby increased & propagated, and so the end for which force and violence are used, is no ways obtained thereby. This was verified in the death of Prisciliian the heretic of old, by which his followers were mightily increased, and having before but reverenced him as a holy man, did afterwards adore him as a Martyr. The present age verifies it in the death of Michael Servetus the Spaniard, and other Anabaptiss, though most necessarily cut off by the sword of the Magistrate, for their blasphemous opinions and lawless Tenets, tending to the utter subversion of all civil government. The Anabaptists in their Dialogues, published in the English tongue in Queen Mary's days, though they craftily withdrew many of their anarchical Tenets (agreeing almost verbatim with the works since penned by James Arminius, and the latter Anabaptists) do extol that Servetus as a Prophet of the Lord; and their numbers are at this day so increased, as they constitute or make a considerable party in divers parts of Christendom. But those cursed enemies of the truth, that think by persecuting it, to abolish it, as they fight against God himself in so doing, so have they heretofore, and shall still in despite of all their devilish policy for the time to come increase and propagate the same. This, if all other Instances wanted, would sufficiently appear in that famous example of an English Schoolmaster, a most zealous Papist in the days of King Edward the sixt, who afterwards in the beginning of Queen Mary's government, frequenting the fires of some of the Martyrs, was so convinced with hearing what they spoke, and seeing how cheerfully they suffered, as he himself relinquishing the former ignorance and idolatry he had so long embraced, at last witnessed the truth with his own blood. Not he only, but many thousands also besides, were doubtless enabled by the clear shining of those fires, to discern the foulness of those mysteries of darkness, under which they had been so long held captive. And after her short reign (infamoused by so much bloodshed) was expired, it facilitated the way for her royal sister Elizabeth to restore the truth at an easy rate. When the Executioner came behind John Hus, to kindle the pile that encompassed him: Come hither my friend, (said he) and kindle it here before, for had I feared what thou bringest, I had not appeared at this Stake to day. His death brought so incredible progress to the true Church in Bohemia, as did also that of Jerome of Prague his contemporany, that their bloody persecutors had just cause within a few years after their decease, to acknowledge their own error in having hastened their ends. As fruitful a seedtime to the Church in France, proved the death of Annas Burgus, a Senator of Paris, in the year 1559. under Francis the second. A man he was so virtuous and innocent in his life, as some of the very enemies of the Truth laboured his delivery when he was in prison, and so resolute and cheerful in his death, as it encouraged thousands in that kingdom, in the constant profession of the Reformed Religion. What better success had all the bloody executions of Ferdinand de Toledo, that merciless Duke of Alva, and of his new erected Bishops in the lower Germany, but that the Gospel at the last got the victory over hell, and all the powers of darkness? Neither indeed could those cruel Inquisitors have expected other issue, had they but truly considered what Religion had been; and that Princes and States may command the bodies, but not the souls and consciences of men; Which having been once persuaded by Instruction and Information to embrace and believe any opinions, though heretical, and therefore much more the Truth itself, can never be driven from them, but by the same means of a further and more clear Instruction. The godly have ever looked upon chains, prisons, racks, and fires, as the trial and reward of their faith, more fearing to do evil, then to suffer evil, well knowing that they shall neither suffer more, nor their cruel enemies be able to inflict more, than God shall turn to his own endless glory, and their everlasting good. Did the Heathen Poet desire to be sent back to the Mines (a life more tedious than that of the galleys) rather than he would commend a few bad Verses, contrary to his judgement? Could Epicurus, that impure Philosopher, say of a wise man, that if he were scorched in Phalaris Bull, he would not be moved with it, but only cry out, Dulce est, & add me non attinet? Or the young Stoic in Gellius, to maintain the apathy of his Sect, neither groan nor frown in the midst of a burning fever? And shall we think that God's Saints who have their reason heightened and irradiated by grace, and their souls immoveably founded upon a lively and living faith, will fear to lose their estates, liberties, and lives for the truth's sake? No doubtless, but as the Gold is tried by the Furnace, and cleared from the dross, so in time of persecution they shall be discerned from all hypocrites, Atheists, Libertines, and Time-servers whatsoever.   

SECT. X.  
BUt oh that Princes and Great ones would shake off those fleshflyes and Sycophants, who tell them the contrary, and know the Truth to be that nothing can more infamouze their reigns and memories to Posterity, nothing bring more inevitable ruin to their Persons, nothing finally prove so deadly a Consumption amongst their posterity, as to enforce the Consciences of their Subjects, by fines, imprisonments, subscriptions, recantations, depauperations, and death. Charles the fift having obtained the imperial chair, by the money and means of Henry the eighth of England, was the most potent Emperor that ever Germany had, as long as he maintained the peace of Religion, but having yielded to the Pope's instigations, and prospered a while in his intended extirpation of the Truth, he found at last by experience what his brave and valiant general Castaldus had foretold him; That these violent proceedings would in the end prove fatal to himself; For having first fled away at midnight in a cold and rainy season from Onspruch, for fear of the Protestant Army, he was afterwards (in stead of settling his son Philip in his own chair, which he had fully intended) fain to surrender up the Empire to Ferdinand his Brother, who for divers months before had entered into a secret league with the Protestant Princes of Germany, and so having lived a few years after in a despised and disconsolate solitude, heat last ended his life very ingloriously. His son Philip the second, the most inveterate enemy of the Gospel that ever lived, did not only set up Shambles and Butcheries for God's Saints in most of his own large Dominions by his Inquisitors, but continually aided the rebels in France, England, and Ireland, against their lawful sovereigns, and plotted to invade all other Protestant Dominions in Christendom, that so at last by one general carnage of them all, he and his holy Father the Pope, might have shared the Christian world by a double Monarchy of the Church and Empire between them. But did this bloody Prince prosper in these his ambitious and cruel designs? Certainly, nothing less; for what got he by his invading France by land, England and Ireland by Sea, and by his large Pensions conferred on the traitors and secret enemies of either State; but that in the issue having wasted about thirty millions of money upon those fruitless designs, and not gained a foot of ground in either of those realms, he lost a great part of the Seventeen Provinces, with whom having broken the Oath solemnly sworn to them upon his Inauguration, they by assistance of England, and France, freed themselves from his unjust oppression and tyranny? Neither did the divine Justice let him so escape, but raised a fire in his own house, so as the jest of Augustus touching Herod, might well be verified in him, That it had been better to have been his swine then his son. For whereas he had issue by Mary his first wife, the daughter of John the third of that name, King of Portugal, one only son called Charles, a Prince of admirable towardliness; he during the life of England's unhappy Mary, his second wife, treated a marriage for his said son with Elizabeth the eldest daughter of Henry the second of France; During the treaty Mary his wife dying, he marries the Princess Elizabeth himself, intended for his son: they both often in private after never forgetting their old affection, lament their unhappy loss each of other: the son also distastes his father's cruelties, and the butcheries of his Inquisitors. This enraged his jealous Father, who having in the year 1568. first imprisoned him, within a few days after poisoned him in a dish of broth. His Mother in Law followed him within a few months after, sent out of the world by the same kind hand and means, (say the French Writers) the violence of the poison causing her to miscarry also by an abortion. And then was Philip the Father put to seek out a fourth wife, and having married Anne the daughter of Mary, his own natural sister, he had issue by her, Ferdinand and James, both cut off by death in their Infancy, and Philip who being the only issue of this incestuous Match, lived to inherit his father's Dominions, though not the full measure of his cruelties, having been perhaps forewarned by his sad and loathsome end, to pursue a more mild and peaceable Government. Rodolph the second of that name, Emperor of Germany, not following the steps of the wise Maximilian his Father, but of the foresaid Philip his Brother in Law, sought by all secret and hostile means to enervate and destroy Religion in the Empire. What got he by it, but to have the curse of the Scripture to fall upon him; That the Elder Brother should serve the younger? for Mathias the archduke of Austria, raising an Army in the year 1608. and joining his Forces with those of the oppressed Protestants in Bohemia, hemmed up his brother Rodolph in Prague, got the Kingdom of Hungary from him in possession, the Empire in reversion, and left him only the robes and compliments of Majesty; which notorious affront he did not long over-live, nor ever had the means or power to revenge.   

SECT. XI.  
IF we pass out of Spain and Germany, from the House of Austria into France, to consider the sad successes of the Princes of the Valesian line, upon their hatred and persecution of Religion, we shall see so many instances of God's just indignation against them, as they may not only leave to all posterity a just ground of admiration, but save us the labour also of searching any further back into the elder Histories of God's judgements poured out on the persecuting Emperors in the Primitive times. Henry the second of France, was meanly married to Katherine de Medici's, the Niece of Pope Clement the seventh, during the life of Francis the dolphin, his elder brother, afterwards poisoned. That prudent Prince, Francis the first, his Father deceasing, he succeeded him in his Throne and Purple, and swayed the French sceptre divers years, with much tranquillity and happiness, till loathing the coiture of his Queen, unfit indeed for a Prince's bed, he grew highly enamoured on Pictavia of Valence, a woman of exquisite beauty and good extraction: with whom he long after lived in continual advowtry, and was by her enticed to the persecution and slaughter of the Protestants, in the year 1553. that so by the confiscation of their lands and goods, she might enrich herself and her kindred. This persecution set a period to all his former victories, and was followed the next year with the loss of the City of Senis in Italy to the Spaniard, the death of that gallant old general Leo Strozzi, by a base hand, and the overthrow of the French Army by James de Medici's. In the year 1556. the violence of persecution was again renewed against the Professors of the Truth, and the very next year following, as before, God again gave up the French Army to the slaughter of the Spaniards, and the Dutch, at the siege and battle of St. Quintin's, in which there were about 3000. slain upon the place, and many of them signal men, and the Town soon after taken in by assault, Anna's Duke of Memorancie himself, the Constable of France, Gasper de Colignie, Earl of Caestilion, admiral of France, the marshal of St Andrew, the Duke of Longevile, and a number of other great Peers were taken prisoners. In sum, the loss and slaughter was so great and fatal to the French, as it well-near equalled that victory obtained by the Duke of Bourbon, at the battle of Pavia in Italy, against Francis the first his Father; yet Henry the second still shuts his eyes against the cause of all these losses, and having his heart already cauterised by lust, he not only caused the godly to be committed to the flames, but would needs view their torments himself, as a pleasing spectacle, and had conspired and combined with Philip the second of Spain, his new son in Law, for the utter ruin and final subversion of Geneva: Nay, but a few hours before his death, in the year 1559. Lodowick Faber, and Annas Burgus, two Senators of Paris, because they had spoken a little freely for the innocency and piety of the Protestants in the open Senate, were imprisoned upon his express command in the Bastile in the same City by Gabriel Earl of Mongomery, one of the Captains of his Guard; and the persecution against all others of the same profession grew hot and furious, when the King upon the 29th of June the same year, running at Tilt with that very Earl of Mongomery, and near the very Baslile, where the Senators remained prisoners, was struck with a splinter of mongomery's spear through his eye into his brain, and never had the happiness to speak any one word after, though he survived the wound a few days, or to acknowledge his former lust and cruelty. Had the Papists but such an instance of God's immediate providence in vindicating their cause, we should soon hear of one true miracle amidst so many false and adulterate. But if we further look to God's hand that followed this Prince in his posterity, it will yet seem the greater Miracle; for of five sons he had, all except one, died without lawful issue to survive them, and three of them by violent deaths, and in his posterity ended the Valesian line, the Crown devolving thereupon to the royal branch of Clermont, commonly called Bourbon, whom his sons had most bitterly hated and persecuted. Of all his five daughters, three died issueless, and the eldest that had issue was cut off by poison. Nay, his very Bastard son, Henry of Engolisme, a great actor amongst others in the massacre of Paris, perished also by the stab of Philip Altovit a Florentine, his old enemy, in the year, 1586. during the reign of Henry the third his brother.   

SECT. XII.  
FOr Charles the ninth (third son of Henry the second aforesaid) that succeeded Francis the second his brother, in the kingdom of France, in the year 1560. had he continued his reign with as much mercy and wisdom as he began it, or followed the grave and seasonable advice of Michael Hospitalius his Chancellor in his latter years, as well as he did in his former, he had in all likelihood lived as virtuously as he died miserably. He had scarce reigned two years in peace and plenty, when Katherine de Medici's his mother, desiring to vest and settle the regency in herself, by raising combustions in the Realm, began to persuade her son to revive and renew those persecutions against the Protestants which his father had begun; she reconciled herself to Francis Lorainer, Duke of Guise, whom but a little before she had justly feared and hated, being a secret enemy to jews de Clermont, Prince of Conde: He and the marshal of St Andrew having gained Annas de Memorancy, Constable of France to their party, conspired all together for the utter ruin of the truth. The Protestants in the mean, seeing the King in his Infancy, to be held captive, as it were, by this Triumvirate, take up Arms by the queen-mother's own instigation, to maintain the King's Edict of Pacification, published in the year 1561. and commonly called The Edict of January. The year following, by the instigation of the same Triumvirate, not only the Queen-mother, but Anthony de Clermont (usually surnamed Bourbon) King of Navarre also, (who yet died a Protestant) was drawn on to assail the said Protestants by open force, they in the mean time filling the queen-mother's ears with these vain flatteries, that she should soon see the utter ruin of all the heretics in France; from which time that goodly kingdom, so rich, peaceable and flourishing, for near upon forty years together, (some short times of truce and peace being interposed) was filled with cruelties, ravages, ravishments, bloodshedding, battles, sires, slaughters, and all other calamitous desolations that accompany intestine and civil broils; in the issue of all which, the Protestants being increased in their strength and numbers, obtained a more firm and advantageous peace then ever they had before enjoyed: whereas those three Incendiaries of all these miseries perished within a few years after, by the just judgement of God, in the very act of their hostile pursuements of his children: The marshal of Saint Andrew was slain at the battle of Dreux, Annas de Memorancie under the very walls of Paris, and Francis Lorainer, Duke of Guise, was pistolled by John Poltrot, at the siege of Orleans. King Charles seeing that open force could not destroy the truth, nor root out the Professors thereof, about two years before the hellish massacre began at Paris, and continued to the perpetual infamy of France in divers other Cities in that Realm, held a secret council in the Castle of Blois with Katherine de Medici's his mother, Alexander and Hercules (called also Henry and Francis) his two brothers, and Henry Lorainer, son and heir of the before pistolled Duke Francis, Duke of Guise; by what means they might best draw the Protestants into their toil to destroy and murder them. The same council was held again by King Charles in the house of Hieronimo de Gondy at St. Clou, and the time and order of the bloody marriage banquet to be served in at the nuptials of the King of Navarre, with the Lady Margaret his sister, was there agreed upon, and resolved of, almost, in the same manner as it was afterwards put in execution upon the 24. day of August, being St bartholomew's day, in the year 1572. in which were most inhumanly slaughtered within the space of few days, of men, women and children, many of them also being great and honourable personages of either sex, about thirty thousand: And while the Duke of Guise was busy in prosecuting that merciless and inhuman execution, it was seriously advised upon, and disputed of, in the queen-mother's cabinet-council, whether it were not necessary that he himself, and the rest of his family then there, should also be dispatched at the same time in that tumult: King Charles himself never saw good day after that bloody massacre, although his Court sycophants had promised him it should prove the first happy day of his absolute monarchy; for though he had been long drenched in lust, (a sin seldom separated from a Persecutor) by his ordinary advowtry with a mean wench of Orleans, on whom he begot Charles of Engolisme, after Earl of Auvergne; and though he had been trained up by his mother, to see the slaughter of beasts, and ever in the chaces loved to both his hands in the blood of the fallen game, (all which might have served to have stupefied his conscience, as they did inflame his fierce and cruel nature) yet so stinging a remorse in his inward man did ever pursue and haunt him after that merciless slaughter accomplished chiefly by his often swearing and forswearing himself, (by which the Queen of Navarre, and the admiral Chasrilion were deceived) as that his eyes rolled often uncertainly in the day with fear and suspicion; and his sleep was usually interrupted in the night with dismal dreams & apparitions, like R. 3. of England, after the murder of his two Nephews in the Tower of London; nay, though he survived not this inhuman slaughter sull two years, yet had he plotted and decreed the death of the said Henry Duke of Guise, and the removal of his Queen-mother & her instruments from the helm of State: But some of his agents that were to have acted these last feats, playing false with him, (as he had some few days before the said massacre poisoned that incomparable Princess for learning and piety, Joan D'Albret Queen of Navarre, Grandmother to jews the thirteenth, now King of France:) so did his mother or the Duke of Guise, by way of prevention or anticipation minister to him his fatal physic, of which, after many sharp and grievous torments, he deceased upon Whitsunday, having not then attained to the five and twentieth year of his age, in the year 1574. the violence of the venom leaving in his entrails (as appeared upon his distection) many blue spots and swellings.   

SECT. XIII.  
WE have seen the gain and advantage that King Charles the ninth of France made by his barbarous persecutions, 'tis likely that those very flatterers which assured him those cruelties should make him an absolute Monarch, did help to absolve him of his Monarchy. He had his punishment first, his mother, his two brethren, the Cardinal & Duke of Guise, that had not only joined with him in it, but encouraged him to it, they still survived him, and for ought men saw, were firmly stablished in much safety and prosperity; though Guise might have been warned by the death of Claude, Duke of Aumale his brother, slain at the siege of Rochel, in the year 1573. The first act by which Henry the third (the new French King, and brother and heir of Charles deceased) discovered his impotency of spirit, and want of judgement, was his clandestine and sudden stealing out of Poland, where he had been but a few months before elected and crowned King: This was the first unfortunate step of his following his mother's weak Dictates, and rejecting the able advices of his own council. But her next instructions which she as fatally gave him, as he weakly pursued, being to root out the Professors of the truth with fire and sword, involved him and his kingdom into innumerable miseries. The good Emperor Maximilian the second, in the King's passage out of Poland through Germany, and the Venetian State, during his stay there, gave him both of them more faithful counsel, earnestly advising him to maintain the former Edicts of Pacification, and not to enforce the consciences of men in matter of Religion: The same opinion was generally held by his wisest counsellors, and by all sober and discreet Romanists at home, who saw plainly, that the Protestants increasing was the only means now left under heaven, in time at length, to draw the Pope and his Conclave to yield to some reformation of the Church, which it exceedingly needed. But other Papists there were of loose and atheistical lives, as jews Lorainer, Cardinal of Guise, Henry Lorainer his elder brother, Duke of Guise, Renate Villoclare, (a man, saith incomparable Monsieur de Thou, fatally preferred to this King's attendance by his mother) and divers others, who persuaded the King to break the former Edicts of Pacification, and never to sheathe his sword, till he had utterly ruined the Protestants of France, whom some of their foul-mouthed fellow-brethren, Protestants of this age, have styled French Puritans, and would, perhaps, had they lived in his time, have joined their ghostly advices with those of the Cardinal of Guise for the utter extirpation of all such as dissented in judgement or practice from themselves in matter of Ceremony. I have often wondered in the perusal of the story of this King, whose troublesome reign did necessitate his frequent consultations; that when divers advices were propounded, he ever pitched upon the worst and most fatal to himself: But I found the two main causes of it to be; first, his blind and inveterate hatred of the truth: and secondly, his weak and degenerate spirit, by which the House of Guise, the Arch-enemies of the Gospel, became at the last so potent, and triumphed so notoriously over his impotency, as they forced him to seek to those very Protestants for support, against whom himself had taken a most wicked and solemn oath, as the head of a faction amongst his own Subjects, for their utter subversion. Infinite almost, was the treasure he spent upon his Minions and pleasures, (his very expenses for maintenance of his dogs only in that age, amounting unto twenty thousand pounds yearly at least) but most was exhausted in the prosecution of his civil wars against the Protestants, and his servile ancillating therein to the ambition of others. Guise and his faction now grown strong, (and assured of support from Philip the second of Spain,) after his expelling the King out of Paris, and heaping a world of other insolent affronts upon him, was drawn by him in the year 1588. to the Assembly then held at Blois; he came thither with Lewes' Lorainer, Cardinal of Guise his brother, and Charles Prince of Jenvile his son, upon the same royal assurance of safety with which Charles the ninth had (by his advice) deceived the Protestants before the inhuman massacre in the year 1572. And now let all Popish and Popishly addicted, Pseudo-Lutherans, who make it a sport to fine, imprison, suspend, vex, and impoverish their fellow-Christians for the lightest matter, draw near and stand amazed at God's secret judgements: For during this Assembly at Blois, was this Henry, Duke of Guise, slaughtered, against the public faith given him, not only within the Castle of Blois, but in that very room in which sixteen years before he had advised the bloody massacre of Paris to be committed and executed. Two circumstances also that attended his fatal minute, do add much horror to the punishment itself: The first, that he was but new risen from the bed of his adulterate lust, the very morning he was murdered, having not been able to conquer the chastity of a Gentlewoman attending the Queen-mother before that night; and therefore was so eager upon reaping the fruits of his long siege, as he repaired not to the council-chamber till he was often sent for, and scarce ready. The second, in the manner of his first wound, which was given him in his throat, and caused immediately the blood so abundantly to stream out of his mouth, as he never had time once to call on God for mercy or forgiveness, but spent the last minute of his life, in the revenging himself on his murderers. A little after the Cardinal of Guise his brother, a great gamester at Cards and Dice, perished likewise in the same Castle of Blois, by a violent death. Katherine de Medici's, the Queen-mother, who had been the chief cause, for near upon thirty years before her death, of the shedding so much innocent blood in France, being present at the same time, in the Castle of Blois, stormed secretly, that so great an action should be entered into, and gone through without her advice; and (when she understood that Charles Lorainer, Duke of Main was escaped, being the younger brother of the murdered Duke of Guise;) presaged to the King her son, the sad issue of that rash attempt, which he interpreting (as it seems) to be rather the expression of her wishes then her fears; and having, by many woeful experiences, seen the effects of her Italian revengeful spirit, took a course to pacify her wrath; for not long after, she there ended her unhappy life by poison, (saith Elias Reusner) in the same Castle also, where she held the first secret and bloody council for the execution of the foresaid inhuman massacre. Francis her youngest son, died before her, upon the tenth day of June, 1584. in the one and thirtieth year of his age, of so violent a poison ministered to him, doubtless by some of the Hispaniolized Guisards, as it caused his very blood to gush out of his body in several places; the sight of which purple streams, might well call upon him to remember with what inhuman triumph he trampled on the bloody streets of Paris, in the great slaughter committed on God's Saints and Martyrs, about twelve years before. There now only remained Henry the third, the French King alive, of all the first contrivers and principal executioners of that inhuman massacre, which no age, no time, no action of the most barbarous nations of the world could ever pattern; neither believe I, can any ancient or modern History parallel the following punishments of the chief actors therein in all respects: who not only all of them perished by violent and bloody ends, but proved also the murderers one of another. Charles Lorainer Duke of Main was presently upon the death of his brother, made general of the holy League; Paris itself, and in a manner, all the Popish cities beyond the Loire, giving up their names and forces to the Henotick faction, supported by Pope Sixtus the fifth, from Rome, and Philip the second from Spain. When the King saw that neither his acting the Monk with the Flagellators, nor his playing the Persecutor against the Protestants would secure him from a speedy ruin, by the violent hands of the rebels: He sends to the victorious King of Naver, his brother in Law, and to the evangelical Army, before whose known valour the Popish Forces hastened back from the Loire to the Seine; Henry the third pursues them, and pitched his royal Pavilion at St Clou, not far from the gates of Paris. But his old cruelties and persecutions of the godly, were doubtless the Remora of his new expected victories; and the divine providence so ordered it, that in the very place where the last resolution was taken by himself, his Mother, his brethren, and others, for the speedy execution of the beforementioned belluine Massacre, about seventeen years before, nay, in the very same house of Jerome de Gondy, and in the very same room or chamber (saith John de Serres) was he murdered by James Clement, a Jesuited Monk, in the year 1589. and in the thirty and ninth year of his age. The assassination was furthered by the authority of Pope Sixtus the fifth, by the seditious preachings of the Jesuits, Priests, and friars, in Paris, (who had secretly drawn infinite numbers into open rebellion before, by their auricular confession) and by the persuasion of the Lady Katherine Mary, Duchess of Mompensier, sister of the deceased Duke of Guise, whose horrible transport with malice against the Protestant party, and desire of revenge against the King himself, did so far excaecate and blind her nobler endowments, as she prostituted her body to that Jesuited wretch (as impartial de Thou himself relates) to encourage him the more in the accomplishment of the murder, and so to stupefy and harden his soul by that fatal sin of lust, that it might not startle at the commission of any other wickedness whatsoever. Yet as this King some months before his death altered his former bloody resolutions against God's servants, so did the Divine providence at his death afford him some hours of repentance and sorrow, after the bloody knife had been sheathed in his belly: In which he acknowledged his error and sin; his error, in having been so long misled by his ambitious and factious vassals; his sin, in having persecuted his Protestant Subjects, and enforced the consciences of many to submit to Popery against the known truth by cruelty and threatning.   

SECT. XIV.  
IN this fifteenth age also (within the compass of which we shall confine our discovery of God's Judgements upon persecuting Princes) the truth began to spread forth its beams in this other world of Great Britain, in a more resplendent lustre then formerly: not but that I dare undertake to prove by some select, and perhaps, fierce known monuments of Antiquity, that the Gospel was planted here in the Primitive time, that the Protestants Religion flourished here near upon four hundred years, before Austin the Monk, the first Popish Archbishop of Canterbury, poisoned the purity of God's worship with his burdensome Trinkets and Ceremonies. Finally, that it was from the first plantation preserved amongst the Welsh and Scots, to the days of John Wickleffe, without any interruption, and was secretly practised also in England from Henry the seconds time, at the least, to the begun Reformation of King Edward the sixth. But this requiring a reasonable Volume of itself to be at large deduced, I must pass over, as improper for this place. We may begin in England with Henry the eighth, in whose reign no Papist can deny, but that divers Protestants were not only hunted after, fined, imprisoned, compelled to abjure, and otherwise disciplined; but were likewise consumed in the merciless flames, as heretics. And therefore when the papal side take so much pains to recount either the ill successes of his own reign; or the dying issueless of all his posterity, as the signs and characters of God's indignation against him, they do but furnish the Orthodox party with weapons against themselves. For the truth is, he did only abolish the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome, not the Pontifician or papal Church, which to this day, as also in the former ages in France, hath been so hedged up and encircled under certain restrictions and limits, as it is of small consequence to help the Prelates, and of little power to hurt the King; So that Cuffetellus the Dominican proved it at large in an elaborate Work, published in the year 1609. and the Sorbonists determined it in the year 1611. that the Pope had no power or Jurisdiction in that kingdom in matter of Temporalities. Neither did Henry the eighth in England proceed any further in this particular of abolishing the Pope's power, than those his two coaetaneous Princes, Francis the first, and Charles the fifth, did at sundry times in their several Dominions, upon less provocations: So the same Charles the fifth, writing to the council assembled at Bononie, superscribed his Letters only, Conventui Bononiae, as did afterwards Henry the second of France, writing to the Tridentine Conspirators, fool it only the Convention of Trent; who also in the former and better part of his reign fairly cut shorter a great-part of the Pope's ecclesiastical authority in France. And how little Philip the second himself of Spain, the sworn enemy of the godly, regarded the Pope further than he did ancillate to his ambitious ends, appears plainly in this one particular, that when upon the unfortunate death of Sebastian, King of Portugal there were divers competitors for that kingdom, and that Don Antonio had already assumed the title thereof, he would not admit the Pope's intercession to have the matter composed by Treaty, or refer the cause to his decision: Nay, that bloody Charles of France, of whose fatal end we have but a while before discoursed, when Pius the fourth, in the year 1563. had cited Odetus de Coligny, Cardinal of chastilion, John de Monluce, Bishop of Valence, and others of his Subjects, to appear at Rome before his Inquisitors, he sent him a stout Message by Henry Clutinius his Ambassador then at Rome, That if he did not speedily withdraw that citation, he would no longer acknowledge him for Pope. At which bold Declaration, the Pope and his Conclave being affrighted, the prosecution of that business ceased by the very withdrawing of the Citation itself, and by the Pope's future silence. All which open affronts, the Popes in this fifteenth age after our bleffed saviour's incarnation, endured from these Kings; not because they were more dear to their Subjects then their Predecessors, or the Popes less potent than in former times, (for their strength in Italy was more increased in that age, then in ten foregoing) but indeed it was the light of the Gospel that began about these times to dawn everywhere, that made way for dispelling those chains of darkness, with which both Prince and people had in those former ages been enfettered; So as the Pope fearing, lest all should fall from him, as some German Princes, republics, and Cities had already done, was fain to comply with the French King, to submit to the Emperor, and to Court the King of England, by the intercession of foreign Princes for a reconcilement. But to proceed from Henry the eighth of England, the Father to Mary Queen of the same Realm, his daughter, of whom, and her wisdom, the Pontificians so much boast. It is certain that she entered her reign with the breach of her public faith; For whereas the Crown was set on her head by the German and Commons of Suffolk, although they knew her to be a Papist, (which shows that the godly Protestant usually nicknamed by those that are profane, lustful, and Popishly affected, is the best Subject any sovereign can be happy in) yet she in one of her first acts of council, took order for their restraint, long before the mass and Latin Service were generally received in London itself, and caused that diocese to taste the sharpest Inquisition and persecution that raged during her reign, which was happily shortened by her husbands contemning her person, and her enemies conquering her Dominions; neither of which she ever had power to revenge, or recover; so as though the cause of her death proceeded from no outward violence, yet was her end as inglorious and miserable, as her reign had been turbulent and bloody. She might have taken warning by the sudden and immature death of James the fifth King of Scotland, her cousin german, who raising persecution in Scotland against his loyal and innocent Protestant Subjects, in the year 1539. burning some, exiling and imprisoning others, and forcing many to blaspheme, in abjuring the known Truth, by the advice and procurement of James Beton, Archbishop of St Andrews, and David Beton, Abbot of Arbroth his brother, never saw good day after: two brave young Princes his sons were the year following cut off by abortive ends in their cradles. Wars to his great loss and disadvantage were raised between himself and his Uncle Henry the eighth King of England, and all things fell out so cross to his haughty and vast mind, as it hastened his death, which fell out in the year 1542.   

SECT. XV.  
WEre the Histories of Popish Prelates worthy to be joined to those of Kings and Princes, we might fill up a large Tract with God's judgements poured upon them: For as most of them have been given up to lust and crapulosity, so have many of them been bitter enemies of the truth, and stingy persecutors. We have seen the fall of the Cardinal of Guise, and all ages have cause to admire the exemplary judgements of God poured out upon that bastard-slip, Stephen Gardner, Bishop of Winchester, in the very instant of his plauditees and caresses for the vivicombury of reverend Latimer, and learned Ridley. But I shall content myself to have abstracted, as a taste for the rest, the notorious punishments inflicted by a higher hand upon two Arch-Prelates, the one of England, the other of Scotland: Thomas Arundel Archbishop of Canterbury, having been the successful traitor, by the help of his reverend fellow-Bishops, to establish Henry the 4th in the Throne of R. the second his liege Lord, and Cousin-German, pressed the new King (whose broken title needed his prelate's supportment) to use his temporal sword for the destroying the disciples of John Wicklesse, whose numbers were so increased at that time, as they even filled the kingdom; the King assents, and having by their merciless instigation shed the blood of God's Saints, he reigned neither long nor happily: H. 5. a brave and martial Prince, his son, succeeding him, the Protestants began to meet more publicly, and to profess the truth more openly than before; the Archbishop thereupon renews his former suit to the son he had before pressed with success upon the father, and prevailed. In particular, he first aimed at the destruction of Sir John de Old Castle, Knight, commonly called the Lord Cobham, who had most affronted him. This noble Gentleman was extracted from an ancient Family of Wales, where he had large possessions, and much alliance, by whose means he after lay long-hidden there, notwithstanding all the search his bloody enemies made after him: he had issue by Katherine, daughter of Richard ap Yevan his first wife, John, who died before himself, and Henry de Old Castle, who survived him, and to whom King Henry the sixth, in the 7th year of his reign, restored divers manors and Lands which had been entailed upon him; he married to his last wife, Joan, the sole daughter and heir of Sir John de la Pole, Knight, whom he had begotten upon the sole daughter and heir of the Lord Cobham of Kent, which Joan had been first married to Sir Robert de Hemenhale a Suffolk Knight, and was secondly the wife of Sir Reginald de Braybroke, Knight, by whom she had only issue that survived her; the said Sir John de Old Castle her third husband, in her right enjoyed the Castle of Couling in Kent, and many other large and great possessions; and by the marriage of her also he was nearly allied to the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Devonshire, and many other great Peers of the realm at that time, and did doubtless enjoy the stile and title of Baron Cobham, as is infallibly proved by several Writs of Summons sent unto him, being all entered upon Record in the Close Rolls, by which he was summoned to assist in the House of Peers in Parliament by that name, in the time of H. 4. and H. 5. All which I have thought fit to transmit to posterity touching this noble martyr, being nowhere to be found in any public story, not only to show how many supportments he had, besides the favour of King Henry himself, to have retarded the clergy from questioning him, but also, how easily he was destroyed by the bloody Prelates of those endarkened times, when the sovereign had but permitted them the use of his power to ancillate to their cruel resolutions; of which impotent act of the Kings, saith Archbishop Parker himself, Rex virum clarum sibique familiarissimum Episcoporum potestati, & carnificinae permisit, who yet overlived that excarnificating Arch-Prelate two years at the least: For the Archbishop having murdered divers godly martyrs in H. 4. time, and been a great stickler in state-affairs, when long before he procured himself to be made Lord Chancellor of England; and lastly, in a Synod held by himself at Rochester, having forbade the reading of the Scriptures in English, and limited Preachers under a heavy censure what they should treat upon in the Pulpit, was soon cut short himself by the immediate hand of God, after he had condemned that warlike Gentleman, Sir John de Old Castle, Lord Cobham, before he could see him executed, his tongue being so benumbed and swollen, that he could neither swallow nor speak, as Thomas Gascon relates in his theological Dictionary, for a few days before his death, it being, faith another, the just judgement of God upon him (and may be a fair warning to all other wicked Popish Prelates) that as he had muzzled up the mouths of Preachers, and kept the Scriptures from the knowledge of the people being their spiritual food; so he should neither be able to speak nor to swallow from that very minute this judgement fell first upon him, but died within a few days after in great torment and extremity, by a languishing silence and famishment. The last example is of later days, and concerns the admirable punishment of David Beton, Archbishop of St. Andrews in Scotland, being also a member of the purpurated Conclave at Rome, he had continued divers years an inveterate enemy of the Gospel in that kingdom, under James the fifth, and after his death taking advantage of the infancy and pupillary age of the Princess Mary, the hereditary Queen of that realm, he thought it a work worthy of himself to double-dye his Cardinal robes in the blood of the Saints; and therefore, to make a sull and clear way for that his sanguinary project, he forged a Will of the deceased King, establishing himself chief Regent there during the young Lady's incapability to govern; from which, upon the discovery of his false play, he being removed, and a while committed to safe custody, he was no sooner delivered, but he presently enterprised to raise a new and fatal war between England and Scotland, and to root out the professors of the truth, by a violent and bloody persecution. Amongst others, cited and imprisoned, or exiled in the year 1545. he seized on George Wischart, a very eloquent and learned Preacher, who by the Latin Writers of that age, is surnamed Sophocardius, and contrary to their own Popish Canons, adjudged him to present death himself, (which is never done, except in the merciless Inquisition of Spain, by those bloody Wolves themselves, but by delivering the martyrs into the power of the lay-Magistrate) and in the Court before his Castle of St. Andrews, caused the same to be executed, the said George being first strangled, and his body afterwards burnt to ashes, the Cardinal in the mean time had a chamber prepared for him, with Carpets and Cushions on the windows, out of which to be a triumphant spectator of this godly man's murder, from which he departed not more delighted then (as he himself thought) secured, beginning to fortify his said Castle against all assaults: But God's judgement from eternity awarded against him for this latter as well as his former cruelties exercised upon his faithful servants, slept not; for within a few weeks after, the Cardinal having falsified his promise to the Lord Norman Lesle, son of the Earl of Rothsey, a devout Romanist, he upon the thirteenth day of May, the same year, with some fourteen resolute Gentlemen in his company, entered the same Castle of St. Andrew's, where the Cardinal lay; and having first assured himself of the command within, and the gates without, he executed that bloody Prelate in his bed, without law or justice, who had but a little before, most unjustly condemned and murdered the aforesaid George Wischart; and willing to expose the dead carcase of that purpurated persecutor, as it were, all weltered and besmeared with blood to the view of the people, who abhorred his cruelties, and rejoiced at his fall; they casually and contingently laid it along to be seen of all men upon that very window out of which a little before, leaning at his ease upon rich Cushions, he had proudly beheld the butchering of that godly martyr. The Cardinal's end, 'tis likely, had neither been so sudden nor so shameful, had he followed the wholesome counsel and seasonable advice of John Viniram a learned Priest and moderate Papist, who by his command preaching before him and divers others of the Romish clergy then assembled together, for the condemnation of that godly martyr, George Wischart, told them plainly, That nothing did more increase the number of heretics, than their own stupid ignorance and wicked lives; and that there was no other sword to be used for their extirpation then that of God's Word, by which they were to be tried and convinced, because every error which might properly and truly be called an heresy, was directly and flatly against the same written Word.   

SECT. XVI.  
IT may somewhat amaze the reason and judgement of any moderate man, though an Atheist, why the Pope himself or his Prelates and clergy should so extremely hate and violently persecute (even more cruelly than they do Jews or Turks) the Evangelical party, and especially those of the French, Scottish and Helvetick confession, who do commonly join eminency of piety and godliness, with a most sound and absolute body of doctrine agreeable with that of the Primitive Church. But if we consider that the Pope himself, all Popish or popishly affected Prelates, and all the Romish rabble, like the Scribes and Priests in our saviour's days, aim nothing at all at God's glory, or the salvation of men's souls, but only at the maintenance of their wealth, pride and tyranny, not intending to yield an inch or hair's breadth to any the least reformation: we cannot but see that their self-love, and wallowing in all sensuality, is the cause of the hatred of the godly, who both by their lives and writings condemn and oppose their wickedness and errors: For as the persecutions of the Arrians against the Orthodox Fathers exceeded the cruelty of the Heathen Emperors, so hath that of the Romish Babylon far surpassed and outstripped them, both being joined together, they fear not the diminution of their Votaries by the persuasion of Jews or Turks, but only by the sound reasonings of the Protestants, whose Religion hath already gained from them, not only Cities, republics, and Provinces, but whole kingdoms also; and therefore seeing the truth itself is against them, they count it high time to fall from reasoning to policy, and from institution to cruel persecution, as a ready means to carry through their bad cause. Incomparable Monsieur de Thou (who is a glory to the Romish Synagogue itself, and whose History the most exact and excellent that ever was written by a human pen, ought always to be dear to the Christian world) discovers plainly to us this truth, in setting down the bloody Legacy Pope Paul the third left to his Conclave when he died in the year 1359. For having called divers of the Cardinals into his bedchamber, he exhorted them by all means to maintain and continue the office of the Inquisition, as the only means left upon earth to establish and support the Romish Religion: than which Confession there can none be more clear of the falsehood of their pretended Catholic Church; for if no other way remain but blood and butcheries for them to establish and repair the lofty and proud Towers of their Babylon, then have they doubtless no part left in the Church founded by our Saviour and his Apostles; for that was at first reared up and finished by the preaching of the Gospel, and may certainly be continued and supported to the world's end by the same means. It is not for Christians, but for Pagans and infidels, who know not the way of instruction, to propagate their gentilism and Idolatry by fire and sword. Besides, that epidemical sin of lust, both natural and against nature, being peculiar to the Popish Prelates, and the rest of their clergy, is a main ground of their stupefied Consciences, and so prepares and fits them for the shedding of innocent blood, or any other sin whatsoever. Peter Espina●, Archbishop of lions in France, was a great persecutor, and a prodigious incestuator with his own sister; John Archbishop of St. Andrew's in Scotland spent the greater part of the revenues of his Sea, and the seizure of the Protestants estates (whose mortal enemy he was) upon his harlots and revelings; the Cardinal of Granvellans veneries were so manifest and numerous, as when in the year 1574. the kingdom of Tunis, and the Fort called the Gulet, before accounted impregnable, were won by the Turk; the Spaniards made a jest of it, and said openly, that the Cardinal's breeches had occasioned that loss; meaning thereby that Philip the second relying chiefly upon his advice in that and most of the rest of his important affairs; his lust so took him up, as he had not time to give seasonable counsel. The reckoning up of all these lustful Priests and Prelates, who have been persecutors of the truth since the last Reformation begun by learned Luther, would defile all modest ears to hear, or any Christian tongue to relate. It may justly be said of them all, what one delivered of the beforementioned Cardinal Beton; That he wallowed at home in pollution with his harlots, and raged abroad with the blood and slaughter of the innocent. Ockam himself in the first part of his Dialogues, lib. 5. cap. 16. confesseth that a wicked and an atheistical life blinds the understanding, and prepares a way for the entertainment of the vilest heresies: How true is this of the Romish Prelates, who could not possibly swallow down those prodigious errors, and several kinds or species of Idolatry, abhorred of the very moors and Turks; That taking from the commandments one; that adding to the Articles of the Creed twelve; that robbing the people of the Cup; that depriving God of his honour, by praying to men and women departed; that trampling of Christ's infinite merits under their profane feet, by their own merits, and a number of other falsehoods, were not their judgements poisoned by their horrible lusts, and other crying sins? The Turks themselves boast at this day, that they first learned their sodomy from the Italians, and that disorderly brood in Italy, may as truly vaunt, that they first learned that abomination from those amongst them in orders. Was there ever, or shall there ever be, not only amongst the Papists, but amongst the Lutherans and Pseudo-Lutherans, any Prelate, or other ecclesiastical person, that did or shall violently cite, accuse, suspend, fine, imprison, deprive, or murder any godly Minister, or other pious Christian, who was not, or will not be amongst other vices, guilty of that brutish sin of lust? And 'tis possible, though the backdoor be kept never so secret, yet God shall at last, in his judgement, reveal it to the world, as he doth often punish them with that loathsome and infamous disease commensurate to that sin, with which that notable persecutor Doctor Weston in Queen Mary's days in England was so unconcealably smitten, as he was ordinarily branded by a beastly nickname, not beffiting modesty to express.   

SECT. XVII.  
THe fruitful seedtime of several vices, and of lust especially in the Popish prelacy and clergy, brings in a large increase in the Laity also, to fill up the reaping time, or harvest; and not only their lust and Epicurism, but their malice against the truth, and thirsting after the blood of the professors thereof, like a contagious gangrene, hath likewise infected, especially, since the year 1500. the vicious and profane lay-Papists themselves. What was Escovedo the great Instrument of the King of Spain's cruelties against the Evangelical party in the lower Germany, but a lump of lust, which in the end proved fatal to him? But as the horrible massacre committed in France, in several places, in the year 1572. is not to be paralleled, in respect of the treachery and inhumanity of it in any Story of the most barbarous Nations of the world: so it will not be amiss, seeing the examples of this kind would else prove endless, to confine ourselves, with taking a summary view of the chief undertakers in that masterpiece of hell, which was never in any possibility to be equalled since, but with the Romish Powder-plot in England, had it succeeded. To begin with Paris itself; the murderers 
The late inhuman massacre and bu●chery in Ireland hath since excee●ed it.  there, were for the most part, brutish and lustful soldiers, or profane varlets of the scum of the city, their leaders were indeed more noble, but less virtuous: The Dukes of Guise and Aumale, Albert Gondy, Earl of Rets, Tavanne, and others of them, having been bred up in lusts, revelings, and other Aulicall deviations. The place that came nearest to Paris in the cruelties of their murders, was the city of lions, where the numbers of the slain and massacred were so great, as their bodies being cast into the river Rosne, corrupted and stained the stream, the violence whereof carrying them down upon heaps to Tornou, and the inhabitants not knowing what they were, but fearing an invasion by enemies or robbers, assembled themselves in arms together for their mutual defence. The chief abetters and ringleaders of which butchery, Monsieur de Thou himself confesseth to have been Boidon, Mornieu, and Clou, three of the most wicked and vilest varlets that a kingdom could harbour: which Boidon was after executed at Clermont, in Auvergne; and if Mernive escaped a shameful end, yet doubtless he deserved it as well as his fellow-persecutor, having before, as witnesseth Serranus, procured the murder of his own father. At Tholouse also, a few days after, there was a great slaughter of the godly committed, but by whom? not by the better sort of Citizens, or sober and morally virtuous men, but one Turry, and a number of other infamous lewd persons like himself, joined themselves together, for the effecting of that bloody execution: The like villainy was accomplished at the great city of Roan in Normandy by one Maronie, a most infamous Ruffian, and a great many other base varlets, who assembled themselves to him as their ringleader; but in none of them were these two hellish sins of advowtry and blood more adaequately coupled together, then in one Ruygaillard the masterbutcher at Angiers, who having long continued an Adulterer, was at last enticed by his harlot, to murder his own wife. Thus we see that it is not the sober and virtuous, but the lustful and vicious Papist, that inveterately and irreconciliably hates the godly and sober Protestant; not but that common experience teacheth us how the loose and debauched persons of either Religion, do as well agree together in their plots and excesses, as if there were no difference of opinion between them; but that there should be such prodigious malice in the looser and erroneous Protestant against the more strict and Orthodox, as to wish their extirpation, rather than the conversion of the Romanists, nay, to join their arms with those of the vassals of Antichrist, for the eradication and subversion of them, is such a mystery of the lower region, as the horrible and vast desolation of God's true Church in our days, gives us as much cause to lament it, as the ages to come will have abundant occasion to admire it. Amongst the Turks, Jews, Indians, Persians, and the Papists themselves at this day, the most zealous and holiest as they conceive them in their Religion, are most esteemed and honoured, and only in the greater part of the Protestant Churches, the most knowing and tenacious of the Evangelical truth, and the most strict and godly in their lives are hated, nicknamed, disgraced, and vilified; and grace which should only add a lustre to learning, riches, honours, noble extraction, and all other outward gifts, either natural or acquisite, that alone obscureth all the rest, and brings the contempt, not only of great ones, but even of the scum and dregs of the multitude upon the persons so qualified. Doubtless, this shows that the Protestant Religion, where the Gospel is maintained in the power and purity of it, is the very truth itself. And that the Prince of darkness seeing the greatest zealoters amongst the Turks, Jews, and Papists hasten on in a false and fatal course, never opposeth them, no more than he doth the debauched, loose and Atheistical Protestant, but only stirreth up all he may the hatred, scorn and persecution of all sorts against those pious Christians, who are convinced of the truth, and by their innocent lives and godly conversations, maintain and demonstrate, that it undoubtedly is the true Religion which they profess.   

SECT. XVIII.  
Luther had scarce planted the Gospel in Germany, in the year 1517 but within the space of some five years after, Melchior Hoffman, Thoms Muncer, Bernard Rotman, and other Anabaptiss, planted there also, as may be strongly collected, divers Pelagian blasphemies of freewill, recidivation from grace, and the rest, to which they joined community of goods, and the extirpation of all monarchy and magistracy, saying, Luther and the Pope were two false Prophets; but of the two, Luther was the worst, because Luther especially laboured to advance God's grace, and to beat down the heretical tenet of man's freewill. Michael Servetus the Spaniard, and Bernardin Ochinus, as may probably be gathered, did succeed Muncer and Rotman, as the chief Doctors of that pestilential Sect; but as may easily appear, upon diligent search, did cunningly conceal their dangerous doctrine, of not allowing temporal Princes and Magistrates, because they saw it inevitably drew upon them the necessary opposition of all Kings, and well governed States. Theodore Bibliander, and Sebastian Castellio the Savoyard, grew famous amongst their fellow Anabaptists after Servetus death: and the same Castellio translated into Latin the Dialogues which the said Ochinus had written in the Dutch or German tongue, which Dialogues are ordinarily at this day imprinted with the rest of Castellio's Works: And in the last age from the time this Sect took its first beginning in Holland, till about the year 1611. they knew no other name or appellation, but of Anabaptists only, which title also, with much alacrity and confidence, they assumed and appropriated to themselves in their own books they published: James Arminius, a flashy and shallow Divine of Leyden, (as may easily be evinced) was so taken and overtaken with the perusal of Castellio's Dialogues, and the secret conferences of some of the Anabaptiss themselves, as it clean turned his judgement from the truth to falsehood; and therefore to justify his own apostasy, and to perpetuate the memory of his new Master's labours, without once doing honour to his name; he reprints his said Dialogues, and other Works, almost verbatim, altering only the frame of them, and patching them out also with some pieces he had borrowed from the Jesuits polemical volumes against the Dominicans, the latter opposing, and the first defending the heretical tenets of Pelagius, the Britain, as learned de Thou himself freely acknowledgeth. After the death of Arminius, in the year 1611. the name of Anabaptists, by which the maintainers and asserters of those errors had for above fourscore years' last past, been known and called by (as in the Articles of the Church of England, published in the year 1552. Article 8. and elsewhere) and sometimes also Anabaptists or Servetians, from Michael Servetus, as by the same de Thou in his story, lib. 34. p. 239. began to be deserted, as too odious and gross for this learned age, and by the ignorance of the Orthodox Divines, who saw not the admirable use of story in their polemical Tractates, they have achieved the senseless and new name of Arminians, when poor Arminius himself took up his errors upon trust at the third or fourth hand, stealing that out of Castellio, which he had borrowed from Ochinus, the scholar of the Spaniard Servetus: And Barnevelt himself in his apology confesseth, that he had learned those points in Germany many years before he knew Arminius; nay, as men extracted from base beginnings, and advanced to high honours, do commonly pretend by an adulterate and a false descent to noble ancestors: so these impudent fellows are not ashamed to father their forgeries on judicious Luther himself, as if there were no other difference between them and the Orthodox Protestants, than was between Luther and Calvin; whereas it appeared plainly, in the year 1560. by the very confession of the Papists themselves, that upon a strict inquiry then made, it was found, that the Protestants dissented from the Romanists in forty points of doctrine. But those of the Helvetic and Augustane confessions amongst themselves but in two, whereas if these new coiners do but daily increase their dangerous errors for the time to come, as they have done for the time past, since Sebastian Castellio's death, they will dissent as much from learned Luther, as he did from the Papists themselves. And how little coherence there was between Luther and those Anabaptists of his time, whom Castellio followed, is apparently expressed in the very Preface itself prefixed before his Dialogues, and other his Latin Works, printed in the year 1613. where the Author of the said Preface (a stout Anabaptist) freely acknowledgeth, that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Martin Barrha, did all defend God's absolute and eternal Decree, and the Power of his Grace, following therein St. Augustine; and falsely addeth, That a way is thereby opened to a secure and loose life: which inconvenience, saith the same Prefacer, Erasmus Roterodamus, Theodore Bibliander, and Sebastian Castellio, foreseeing and desiring to prevent, did oppose the said doctrine, and maintained freewill to be in man, or an ability in and from himself, without the assistance of God's grace, to do good. The Pseudo-Lutherans, or Anabaptists in Germany, that had even overspread the whole Dominions of the Elector of Saxony, before the Enangelicall Jubilee was there celebrated in the year 1617. were within two years after, the direct Instruments of ruining the Gospel itself: For they mistake themselves ignorantly, or are wilfully blind in the passages of that time, who impute all the miseries that Germany hath now for these eighteen years' last passed groaned under, to Frederick the fifth, Prince Elector Palatine, his accepting of the Bohemian Crown, in the year 1619. in respect that the Protestants of that kingdom, after the election of Ferdinand of Gratz, for the King thereof, in 1617. finding that he was wholly swayed by the Jesuits themselves, or his Jesuited Counsellors, and began to infringe the liberty of Religion there established, they acquainted the Emperor Mathias therewith, during whose life, the said Ferdinand was not to intermeddle with the affairs of that realm. But the Emperor, whether he feared that his said Cousin of Gratz should supplant him, as he had formerly done his own brother, Rodolphus the second; or whether out of immoderate love to him, I know not, neglected the Bohemians, just Petitions and Romonstrances; whereupon, in the year following, there being a great Assembly of them in the Chancerychamber, within the Castle of Prague, and some sudden alteration happening, they threw out three of the Emperor's Counsellors at the windows, and though none of them were slain or maimed with the fall, yet the Bohemians themselves took this outrage to be an offence so unpardonable, as they presently prepared themselves for an offensive and defensive war, elected thirty Directors to govern the kingdom, and raised two Armies to be in readiness, the one under the Earl of Thurne, and the other under Ernest, Count of Mansfield. The Emperor also, and his Cousin Ferdinand, made great preparation for war, nominating the Counts of Dampetre and Buequoi for the generals, upon which there presently followed divers hot skirmishes, between the forces on both sides, the miserable Inhabitants of Bohemia proving already a lamentable prey to the licentious soldier. And now let any indifferent and impartial man judge, what fault or error all this time, did the said Prince Elector Palatine commit; Nay, on the contrary, the Jesuit himself confesseth in his Austrian Laurel, pag. 104. that the said Prince Elector laboured by all means to have composed this difference in a Treatable and amicable way by his letters and internuncios, till seeing the Emperor's Armies, notwithstanding all his intercession to have entered and wasted Bohemia, their aim to be chiefly at the extirpation of Religion; and himself as the prime Prince of the new Union, to be obliged in honour and conscience to have a care of the evangelical cause, he was necessitated to join his arms to theirs, not refusing also the Crown, being, for aught he knew, most justly laid at his feet, after a general and unanimous election: Could he foresee that any evangelical Prince should be so Pseudo Lutheranized, as to betray the whole body of the Protestant Religion, and the fundamental liberties of the Empire in Germany to the Antichristian adversary? In all human reason, had the Elector of Saxony but looked on, and done nothing, much more had he but assisted the Bohemians, professing the same Gospel with himself, that fair branch of the third family in Christendom had now flourished in those ancient regalities their Ancestors enjoyed, and the Church and Empire had been as glorious and happy as now they are desolate and miserable. But God that decrees all most justly and wisely for his own glory, and the good of his children, will, I doubt not, by some means, though yet hidden, replant again the royal branches of this imperial Vine, as to the admiration of the whole Christian world, both enemies and friends, he hath hitherto supported the royal root of those branches with patience and alacrity.   

SECT. XIX.  
AS the vicious and atheistical Popish and popishly affected Prelates and profane Christians hate and persecute the pious Protestants more than they do adulterers, swearers, perjurers, or any other notorious delinquents; so the moderate and virtuous Papists of both Orders, abhor their slaughters, and desire their peace and freedom. Sir John de Oldcastle, in the time of Henry the fifth of England, being convented before Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, and divers other lustful and bloody Prelates; whilst I was (saith he) a swearer, a rioter, and every way else vicious, you never reproved me or questioned me, but since I have embraced this despised doctrine of Wicklesfe, which hath taught me how to conquer my sins, and to lead a godly and an honest life, now you are enraged against me with malice, and seek my destruction. The same true observation was made by Annas Burgus, that brave Senator of Paris in the year 1559. under Henry the second of France; That there were many adulteries, perjuries, oaths, and other infamous offences, daily committed, and already punishable by the laws, and yet such as were guilty of all or any of those crimes were countenanced and advanced; but against the Protestants all cruelty was practised, who were guilty of no other offence, but of embracing the truth of the Gospel revealed unto them by the Spirit and Word of God, and of discovering by the same light, the horrible vices and errors of the Popish power, that so there might follow an emendation. To this purpose also tended that Christian advice which a person of noble extraction David Hamilton gave to his Cousin James, Earl of Arran, than Regent of Scotland, in the year 1545. when Cardinal Beton would have persuaded and drawn him to have joined with himself in the persecution and slaughter of the godly in that kingdom. I cannot but wonder, saith he, that you should give up the innocent servants of God himself, against whom no crime is objected, but the preaching of the Gospel, into the hands and power of men most infamous for lust, cruelty, and all other wickedness, when in the mean time those very enemies of the truth themselves cannot deny, but that the lives of such as profess this doctrine they hate, are full of integrity and virtue. And therefore, although the profane and bloody Prelates could never be drawn to pity God's children, much less to love them for their piety and innocency, being therein more inhuman than divers of the Heathen Emperors themselves, who upon information of the virtuous and harmless deportments of the Christians by their governors of Provinces under them, did cause their persecutions to be slackened and ceased. Yet have divers Princes and other moderate Pontificians in the foregoing age, been moved by the upright and honest lives of God's children, to further their liberty of conscience, and to abhor the cruelties of their fellow-Romanists practised upon them. Maximilian the Emperor, son of Ferdinand the second, and Francis the first, the French King, were hence drawn to permit unto their own Subjects freedom of conscience: The Earls of Egmont and Horn, (though zealous Papists) laboured with the Duchess of Parma, that the low-country Protestants might be free from fines, imprisonments, and all other persecutions in respect of Religion. Under Francis the second, the French King, in the year 1560. by the elaborate and learned speeches of Charles Marillack Archbishop of Vienna, and John de Mon●●●e Bishop of Valence freely pronounced before the King himself, in behalf of the French Protestants, all persecution against them was for a time remitted; the said Bishop amongst other particulars, not fearing to affirm plainly, That a great increase of the Sectaries did proceed from the ignorance and evil lives of the Bishops, who having cast away the cares of their flocks, had for many years studied to enhance their fines and rents, and to live deliciously and loosely; so as sometimes there were seen forty of them at once together mouldering and wasting themselves in Paris in luxury and idleness: the care of their Churches being in the mean time delegated over to young and ignorant fellows; and so the Bishops themselves becoming blind and useless, the Parish Priest also following the example of their Diocesans, were only careful to spoil and vex the people for their tithes, and wholly unskilful and negligent in preaching to them; and that therefore it was no wonder, though divers of the nobility, as well as of the common people, did readily harken to new opinions and doctrines. The same counsel, That the conscience ought not to be forced, nor any to be persecuted for Religion merely, did Michael Hospitalius Chancellor of France, give unto Charles the ninth, the same year upon his new succession to the Crown after the decease of the said Francis his brother; and Paulus Foxius to Henry the third, in the year 1574. very copiously, and most eloquently, couched in two several Orations, inserted at large by Monsieur de Thou, in his unparalleled History in their due places, who was himself nineteen years old when that horrible massacre was committed in Paris, in the year 1572. on Saint Bartholomenes day, which fell out that year on the Lord's Day, and did in his very soul abhor the cruelty and savageness thereof, when in his passage through the streets to matins that morning, he encountered with divers villains, dragging along the dead body of Jerome Grolote, late the governor of Orleans, all weltering with ghastly wounds in his own blood; at which sight his heart relenting, and mourning inwardly, not daring to shed tears publicly, he hastened home to the house of Christopher de Thou his father, at that time the chief President of the Court of Parliament at Paris, there freely to deplore and execrate that Heathenish butchery; as did also the said Christopher his father. Vidus Faber Pibracius, John Merviller, Belieureu, all eminent men, with all the judicious and morally virtuous Papists in the city, who Christianly hid up, and so preserved many Protestants secretly in their houses from a reckless massacring; nay, Arman Guntald the old marshal Byron (father of Charles Duke of Byron, that was beheaded in Henry the fourths time) when the Deputies of Rochel repaired unto him some few weeks after that bloody execution, to treat of a peaceable accommodation of their affairs with him, he shed many tears in their presence, upon his execrating the authors of that cruelty, and acknowledged it the great blessing of God upon him, that he neither knew of it, nor had any hand in it. At the City of Lions also, where the inhumanity of the murderers almost equalled that of Paris, Mandelot the governor there, did his best to have prevented it, and in his heart, with many other grave and sober Citizens of the Romish Religion, utterly detested it. And when the slaughtered bodies were tumbled into the River Rosne, and carried down with the stream to Tornou, Valence, Vienne, and Burg, contiguous to the same River, the Papists generally detested the cruelty. And at Arles, where for want of springs and ponds, they had most use of that river-water; they so much abhorred that butchery, as they would neither drink thereof, nor yet eat any of the fish taken therein, for divers days after; and generally, in all Provence, those of the Romish Religion drew out the mangled bodies out of the water, and with great humanity interred them. Monsieur Carragie, a noble Gentleman the governor of the great city of Robin in Normandy, did likewise oppose the massacres there to the utmost of his power, as did also James Benedict Lagabaston the prime Senator of Bordeaux, who thereby became himself in danger to have been slain by those seditious varlets, who had been at first stirred up to commit those murders by the wicked sermons of a lustful Jesuit, named Enimund Auger. Claudus, Earl of Tende, a descendent of the illustrious House of Savoy, governor of Provence, Monsieur de Gordes, governor of daulphiny, Monsieur Sauteran, governor of Auvergne, and Francis Duke of Memorancie, particularly and absolutely refused to suffer any massacres to be committed in such places as were under their several government; so as the Rochellers in their Declaration set out the same year, do acknowledge and confess, that all such Rom mists, who had but any humanity left in them, did in their hearts abhor, and with their mouths detest those hellish outrages and cruelties. And it well appeared, what base varlets they generally were in most places, who were the executioners of those villainies, because their Religion consisted chiefly in robbing and spoiling the Protestants houses, suffering many of them in the mean time beyond their cruel resolutions to escape safely away. Nay, whereas the furious people of Paris already enraged with a blind zeal, came to a certain white thorn-tree that blossomed the day of the massacre in St. Innocent's Churchyard, in that city, as if God by a miracle had approved their barbarous and sanguinary action; the more judicious Papists, conceived this to have happened by pouring of hot water upon the root of that tree, or by some other secret imposture; or if it were a true miracle, than the Protestants alleged, that it might much more justly be interpreted to the advantage of the Protestant Church then of their own: That first the place where the tree grew, being dedicated to the memory of Innocents, argued the innocency of those who were martyred; and that as the same tree at that season of the year, being in August, though it showed life, yet could not have blossomed without a miracle: So the Protestant Church and Religion in France, which seemed by this blow to be utterly extinct and ruined, should again revive, blossom forth and flourish, by the miracalous power of God, in as great splendour and beauty, as over it had done formerly; which the event and issue notwithstanding all the great Processions and high Masses of Pope Gregory the thirteenth and his Conclave at Rome, did accordingly verify.   

SECT. XX.  
HOw shall these sober minded and moderate Papists rise up in judgement at the last day against all loose, ignorant and profane Protestants of both orders, who for the smallest offences and for the very tenderness of conscience itself, vex, molest, cite, sue, imprison, fine, suspend, deprive, and utterly undo their innocent, godly and peaceable fellow Christians? For if it be neither warranted by the practice of the Primitive Church, nor consonant to reason, policy, or the property of the true Church, to kill an heretic by a long and noisome imprisonment, or to adjudge and put him to a violent death. If persecution for conscience sake be accounted, and that justyl, a brand of the Antichristian Church, and that Luther and his followers had even necessary cause in the year 1517. in that respect only to depart out of the Romish Babylon, as from a Malignant Synagogue; how is it possible that Protestant Prelates should persecute any at all with imprisonment and despoiling them of their goods, though convicted of schism itself, but much more such sober and innocent Christians, who by their own confession hold nothing in matter of doctrine contrary to the truth, live inoffensively and virtuously in respect of their conversation, and are ready in all humility to submit to any particulars in matters supposed to be indifferent, which they shall be convinced out of God's Word to be so? It is confessed on all hands, that it is a most dangerous sin to do any thing, yea, a lawful act, against the dictate and persuasion of Conscience; and shall pious Christians in all other respects, for this alone be persecuted, and followed with greater violence, than Adulterers, Swearers, or Fornicators themselves? The authority and glory of a Prince had been as fully extended in removing those particulars which made the breach, as in retaining them, it being acknowledged on all hands, that the removal of them is, and was always as lawful as the retention of them; but if the wisdom of any Church conceive itself upon great and sound motives rather obliged to retain them, and to add new burdens rather than to abolish or change the old; yet doubtless withal some course may be considered of, how those who in all main and fundamental truths are the true servants of God, the humble and obedient children of the Church, and of innocent and virtuous lives, might in the mean time enjoy the Ordinances of God in peace and quiet: For doubtless, if one Protestant may lawfully vex, cite, fine, suspend, deprive, excommunicate, and imprison another (which in some cases necessitates a lingering death) for things accounted by themselves no way essential to God's worship normans salvation: then is all we have said against the Romists Synagogue of no validity at all; nay, there being no Magis and Minus in persecution, it will follow necessarily, that for the same causes one Protestant may as well put to death another, as imprison him; and so Samaria shall of necessity justify her sister Sodom. That the supreme Magistrate in things lawful ought to be obeyed for Conscience sake, is a certain truth: But yet it is too apparent that such as are more violent for these lesser matters, so to ravage and trample on the weaker and more humble Christians, by pressing obedience to the Magistrate, are commonly themselves the most outrageously disobedient; for though they seem most eager to obey him in these formal and outward commands, yet where the commands of God himself and the Magistrates meet together, forbidding Adultery, Fornication, swearing, blaspheming, unlawful gaming, starving of souls, maintaining erroneous doctrines, and divers other horrible and atheistical offences; here neither God nor Prince, Law nor Gospel, heaven nor hell, can restrain their lustful practices or scandalous lives. Did Cardinal Sadolet himself intercede with Francis the first the Grandfather, and the Arcbishop of Vienne, and Bishop of Valence, with Francis the second, the grandchild, two of the French Kings, for the Protestants of their times, whom yet they accounted heretics; and is it possible any Protestant Prelate or Divine, should stir up any Protestant Prince or State to ruin their Protestant-fellow-Ministers, and other Christians, because they cannot submit to such particulars, as in themselves can no way hinder or impeach the unity of faith, nor could break (if God's glory were only aimed at) the bond of love? The Apostle Paul having left the true Church that incomparable Catholic Rule; That the stronger Christians should bear with the weaker, and that the weaker Christians should not condemn the stronger.   

SECT. XXI.  
THere were in all ages, even in the first and purest times, Confessions set out by the Primitive Christians, to be a Guide and a Rule for all Conditions to walk by: and when the Nicene Creed was penned by the learned Fathers of that council, it was all that was required of any to be publicly confessed, that had been either accused or suspected of heresy. The Protestants in all ages, when they were questioned, (and especially since the year 1500. that the differences about Religion have even filled Europe with the sharp disputes of the sword and pen) have not only offered to do whatsoever the ancient Fathers required as an act sufficient to clear and acquit such as were in their times suspected of heresy, but further to put their cause to the trial of the Scriptures, the best and surest Rule; nay, to admit the Decrees of the first general counsels, and the united Tenets of the Orthodox Fathers for the first five hundred years. But the Romish synagogue degenerating, first in manners, and then in doctrine; first introducing innumerable Trinkets and Ceremonies, to pester God's public worship, and afterwards several Idolatries, absolutely to kill and poison it, could not satisfy themselves with pressing upon the Protestants the confession of those Truths they yet maintained an I held; but that not a grain of corn might remain in their great heap of chaff, nor one true Professor be hidden amongst the multitude, they invented four manner of unchristian and tyrannical courses, whereby to ensnare and illaqueate not only the most innocent, but even the most prudent and sagacious man alive. First, they proceeded against any person they suspected, without accuser, witness, or proof, and fettered his ears with so many Questions to be answered unto upon oath, and with so many several examinations at several times, that at last, as John de Monluce, Bishop of Valence, well observed of the Spanish Inquisition, in the year 1562. that it was Decipula ad vexandos bonos & illa● queandas conscientias: Though he came into their clutches unjustly suspected, yet he was sure never to escape their griping talons justly acquitted. A second invention was to add many new matters to be confessed as matters of faith, which were before left as matters of liberty and fact, either to hold or not to hold; and in this particular did that fatal Conventicle of Trent so blasphemously transcend the bounds of all sobriety, as to add twelve new Articles of faith to the ancient Creed, to be believed upon pain of damnation; and to this they commonly adjoined, as a slip or branch of it, adjuration of all former truths, or at least a Recantation. Miserable experience hath taught the Lutherans and Pseudo-Lutheran, in Germany, the tyranny of the Romanists in this particular, who having assisted them to ruin those godly Protestants in the Empire, of the most sound and Orthodox Helvetic or French confessions, did, as a reward of their treachery, find them more implacable against them, enforcing upon them a most dangerous and blasphemous abjuration, then against the others. These two former ways of Inquisition went yet no further than the tongue, but the next that followed included the hands also, and compelled subscription to many false blasphemies, and dangerous heresies. Thus the Lutherans of Saxony desiring to root out all the godly Ministers amongst them of the purer Confessions, would have them subscribe to those two portentous and monstrous errors, of Consubstantiation and Ubiquity. And it was a notable Machiavilian policy of Charles' the ninth of France, who having enforced the consciences of the King of Navarre, and Prince of Conde, in the year 1572. by the cruel murder of divers in their sight, and by threatning death to themselves, to cause them to write to Pope Gregory the thirteenth, by their Letters under their own hands, that both their conversion to Popery, and abjuration of the truth, had been grateful and voluntary. But the fourth and last invention is a downright and never failing way, either of discovering the godly, or of shipwracking their consciences, being one of those sins Divines call Peccata vastantia Conscientiam, and that is their enforcing them to adore their several idols, by bowing to and towards their he-saints and she-saints, Altars, relics, Crucisixes, and their great Moloch of the mass. This skill they learned from the Heathens themselves, who to avoid multiplicity of Interrogations, with the first holy and Primitive Christians, who abhorred the placing of Images in their public Temples and Oratories; they asked them in a few words, Will you sacrifice to the Image? Charles the ninth of France never demanded of Henry de Clermont Prince of Conde, whether he would turn Papist; but, will you go, (said he) to mass? He knew raw flesh to be harder for a true Protestant to digest, than all the other parts of Popery. And doubtless, he that will adore and bow unto or towards an Image, the Sacrament, an Altar, a Communion Table, or any other creature, where the bowing is not merely civil, will never stumble at any other part or point of Popery, but may safely pass to Rome, or Rheims. Oh that the Papists could but see their own vanity in bowing to and adoring the Wafer Cake as God For they confess it is not transsubstantiated into Christ's flesh, unless the Priest that consecrate intend to turn and change it. And what then if the Priest be so ignorant, as many be, that he know not the words at which his quu or turn is come by his imagination only to work a miracle? what if his mind be roving about his necessary affairs, or more unnecessary and vainer thoughts, usual with them that read one particular often over, and so inadvertently he forget to join his intention to the words of Consecration? Doubtless, these cases and divers besides, might be instanced; in which the Priest hath often and doth daily fail to create his Saviour (blasphemy I confess positively to affirm) for want of mere advertency and premeditation within the rules of the Romish Synagogue itself. And than what follows, but formal and material Idolatry, by their own confessions, when they adore it? So as should the Papists themselves see a Protestant Prelate or Minister bowing to and adoring the Elements of Bread and Wine in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, before or after Consecration, he could not but account him a Poishly affected Priest belonging to his own Church, or an absolute Idolater; For in the 29th Article of Religion, published by the Church of England, agreeing expressly with the Helvetic and French Confessions, it is plainly let down; That Transubstantiation or any change of the substance of Bread and Wine, is repugnant to the plain words of the Scripture, overthroweth the nature of the Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions; That the body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper of the Lord only after an heavenly and spiritual manner; And that the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith; And that the Sacrament was not by Christ's Ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped; So the Article of the Church of England. When therefore any Papist shall see his mass celebrated by any English Divine, with Elevation and Adoration, or bowing to and towards it, both gestures being condemned by the doctrine of that Church, he must either within, and by the rules of his own Church give him up for an adaquate Idolater, in giving adoration to the substances of Bread and Wine, which action the Romanists abhor and condemn, or else in charity suppose howsoever in outward show he seem an heretic, yet in truth he is a good Catholic; and did intend in and by the words of Consecration to make his Saviour; and so supposing his body to be really there before him, doth adore and bow to it. The Lutherans condemn the Popish Transubstantiation; the Jesuits deride the Lutherans Consubstantiation and ubiquity, and both justly. But should they hear of any subtle wittol, that hath in theso days found out a third and more sublime invention out of the Bush that the man in the moon carries at his back, and can find Christ's body in the Sacrament as really and naturally as it was in the virgin's womb; but yet will not say, he is bodily there either Con, Sub, or Trans, they would most justly hiss him out of their Churches and schools. Doubtless, the Popish Transubstantiation is of the three the most rational and profound error, because that being accompanied with a supposed Miracle, and may be at any time excused by the inadvertent default of the Priest, admits the loss opposition. And I have often wondered why some of that active rabble could not as well and as secretly on the sudden have supposited true flesh instead of the Hostia, as they have by an insensible legerdemain sprinkled pure and lively blood from a lancinated singer upon the Wafer Cake itself. Certainly, there is no truth in Scripture more plainly set down then that doctrine of the Church of England, and of the more Orthodox reformed Churches, in which they maintain and teach, that Christ's body is ascended into heaven, and there remaineth as visibly and circumscriptively as it did upon earth before it ascended, that it is only present given and taken in the Sacrament, after an heavenly and spiritual manner, and that to worship it, or make it a sacrifice, are blasphemous and dangerous deceits, from all which it will undoubtedly and necessarily follow, that Christ's body is no more present at the Sacrament really and carnally after the words of Consecration, than it was present with the Bread before it was brought into the Church, or with that which is left after the administration of the Sacrament ended, and is carried again out of the Church, where also it may as lawfully be adored, as at any time during the holy administration itself, each adoration being gross Idolatry. Were the ignorantest men and silliest women able in Queen Mary's days to assert this truth, even by dispute against those bloody Bishops and Idolatrous Priests, that would have obtruded Christ's real presence in the Sacrament, and their blasphemous sacrifice of the mass upon them, and after to die for it; and shall we not think thousands will be now ready also in all humility and patience to lay down their lives for the same Truth? How dangerous in all ages this idolatrous adoration or bowing to Images, Altars, the Hostia, relics, and such other trumpery, hath been to the very moderate Papists themselves, appears by a pretty relation in the History of learned De Thou; That Francis the second in the year 1559. being persuaded by the Cardinal of Lorraine, and some others of his faction, that there was no way to discover and irretiate the Protestants like that of their Images, did cause them to be erected and set up with Candles burning before them in several streets and eminent places of Paris, to which there assembled divers tankard-bearers, scullions, and other such like of the dregs and scum of the people, who to the shame of the Priests and all Church-Discipline, profanely chanted and sang before them: And when any passed by, were he Papist or Protestant, if he did not presently deliver them money towards the maintenance of those Tapers, and adore the idol, they fell upon him; and not contented to make him taste of their fists and handy-blows, or to throw him into the dirt, and trample on him, did after all those gross abuses carry him to prison, there to be further questioned; many sober Papists having haste of business, not seeing the Images, or otherwise not regarding the disorderly carroling of such a company of Varlets, were by them basely assaulted, beaten, and spoiled, to the great distaste, and open repining of the best and discreetest Citizens, though otherways truly caec-obedient and zealous Romanists.   

SECT. XXII.  
YEt must we not think that heresy or heretics ought so to be indulged, as thereby to be confirmed, and made more pertinacious in their heresies. They ought to be instructed, reproved, and discountenanced, and if they prove irrecoverably obstinate, exiled. We see God himself commanded the Jews to put an Idolater and a blasphemer to death; and though I do not conceive that to be an Evangelical precept, but only a judicial law, proper and peculiar to that people and Church, yet doubtless it may thence by the rule of analogy be concluded, that where Idolatry and heresy are mixed together, as amongst Papists and Montanists or Altar-adorers, or where blasphemy and heresy meet in one, as amongst the Arrians, Pelagians, or Anabaptists, the followers of Sebastian Castellio, and James Arminius, there a more severe course may be warrantably practised to stop the dispersing of that poison, then for the suppressing of any other heretics, who are not guilty of those two abominations, but only hold some lesser errors. Incomparable Monsieur de Thou, saith in the Preface before his History, dedicated to Henry the Great of France, that exile or banishment was the first and greatest punishment that ever the ancient Church inflicted upon heretics, (which on all sides is acknowledged to have been a true Church) as we see in the banishment of the Manichees, under those two pious Emperors, Theodosius & Valentinian; and in the exilement of divers kinds of heretics under Constantine and Marcianus: But when men have joined, either open rebellion and treason, or proditorious positions to their Religion, as the Papists, or have maintained anarchical Theses as a part of their doctrine, condemning monarchy, magistracy, and all civil government, as the Anabaptiss: In these cases, although they did absolutely defend dogmatic and fundamental errors, yet were their exilement or a greater punishment justly inflicted on them, because the case is now altered from matter of conscience to matter of offence & crime. Had the Protestants been but once guilty of such an unmatched villainy, as the Powder-plot was, in any part of the world where they are tolerated, they had doubtless been for ever rooted out from thence; for though some desperate Romanists only were engaged in the execution, yet in the general, questionless, all the Recusants of England knew, that a great action was in hand, against Church and State; and that their Romish Synagogue was to be erected in Great Britain, upon the ruins of them both: And for the prosperity of it, as Henry Garnet himself confessed, they all prayed. Nay, when divers English Papists, admonished by the guilt of their own conscience, fled upon the discovery thereof into France, and were kindly received there by the governor of Calais, and he comforting them, in respect they had left their country, estates and friends; No, saith one of them to him again, we grieve not at all for those losses, but that so brave and excellent an action (meaning the Powder-treason) had no better success. At which answer, the said governor was so extremely incensed (as he often after himself related to the same de Thou, who delivers the Story) that he verily thought to have precipitated the varlet headlong into the sea. And as for their Romish doctrines, manifestly tending to treason, conspiracy and rebellion, they were so exactly collected together into one bo lie by learned Bishop Morton, and published in the year 1605. a little after the discovery of that treason, as we shall need a great deal of charity to believe they can be good subjects in and under any Protestant Prince or State. Neither do the Anabaptiss come much short of the Papists in their dangerous tenets or practices, although they exactly imitate their old master Pelagius in one particular, which Vossius himself confesseth of him, teaching many of their desperate doctrines, as he did, privately, which yet they conceal and suppress in their published Tractates, which have given so many fatal wounds to the true Church of God in this and the last preceding age; for the proof whereof, we shall need to produce no other witnesses than those two sincere and impartial Historians, John Sleidane, and the same Monsieur de Thou, from whom we may learn, that after Melchior Hoffman had broached his wicked Tenets in Germany, about the year 1520. and with his disciples, Thomas Muncer, Bernard Rotman, and John Leyden had assumed to themselves the name of Anabaptists, and drawn many of the baser sort after them, whom they persuaded not to suffer any of Noble blood to remain; and that there could be no other lawful Magistrate, but one of their Sect: they easily drew them to take arms, and possessing themselves of the city of Munster in Westphalia, had like to have proved the utter ruin of it, had it not been delivered by the arms of some of the German Princes, after which followed the execution of divers of those rebels. After these men succeeded as chief propagators of their errors, John Cerdo, hanged at Brussels, Michael Servetus the Spaniard burned at Geneva, and Cornelius Apelman executed at Utrecht in the year 1570. all three of them, though guilty of divers gross heresies, yet were condemned and put to death for blasphemy, and other notorious crimes. John Williams their successor, finding their treasonable and anarchical positions to afford them no safety in any well governed monarchy or republic, got him to Ruremund, in the duchy of gelders, and there having drawn to his party some three hundred varlets and mean fellows, he told them no goods could rightly appertain to any man but of their own Sect, and therefore assured them, whatsoever they could get by pillaging and robbery, was a lawful gain: by which means many horrible and grievous thefts and spoils were committed in Guelderland, and in the duchy of Cleve adjoining. The said Williams also being taken, was for his many abominable offences and villainies burnt at Buslaken in the duchy of Juliers', yet died so courageously, like Servetus his fellow Anabaptist, as that their Sect was exceedingly confirmed and increased thereby; so as had not their other portentous crimes justly necessitated their capital punishment, it had been much better for the true Church of God, their lives had been spared: For whereas before ignorant men had for the most part presidented their Church and kingdom, (for their chief Prophets commonly governed all the rest after their own wills) these men's sufferings drew on, as may be easily gathered, Theodore Bibliander and Sebastian Castellio, to give up their names to the maintenance of the same blasphemies, who cunningly defended only in their public writing those points which Pelagius had formerly broached, whom Arminius, Vorstius, and the other Anabaptists of the nether Germany have since followed; but for those dangerous and unsafe doctrines of condemning Magistracy, extirpating Nobility, and permitting robberies, howsoever they may still in private teach and adhere to them, and would, perhaps, if they could once make the stronger party in any State, soon enough practise them, yet they have most politicly omitted, not only the maintenance, but the very mention of them also, in the said published Works and Tractates. Thus also the Papists themselves, upon occasion, being pressed with any of their seditious tenets, will deny them; as Peter Cotton the Jesuit did their allowing of the murder of Kings after Henry the fourth of France was stabbed by that wicked Jesuited varlet, Ravaillac; and Henry Garnet, at his execution protested, that he ever abhorred the Gunpowder-plot. The Pelagians, in the time of the ancient Britain's were the undoubted instruments of the ruin of England, then called Britain, of murdering Constantine the father and Constans the son, both successive Kings there, and of setting the royal Crown upon the head of Vortigern, Duke of Cornwall, a Pelagianized traitor against his sovereign, who in lieu thereof to gratify them, soon filled up, as may be probably collected, the Bishop's Seas, to which neither Baronies nor Sericality were then, nor for five hundred years after annexed, with heretical and lazy drones, who had well-near ruined the true Church of God in those days. All the world may know what warning King James of England, that learned Prince, gave to the united States of the Netherlands, by his published Works upon the death of the Anabaptist Arminius, and succession of that blasphemous Vorstius in his room and chair at Layden, that if they did not in time look to the suppression of those blasphemous heretics, they would in the end prove the ruin of their Church and State. God of his infinite mercy grant that they may never be able to bring desolation or subversion to them; nor to any other Church, kingdom, or State of Christendom, where the Gospel and the truth are established, by the increasing of their numbers and powers to an excessive and formidable proportion.   

SECT. XXIII.  
WE have seen the greatest and uttermost punishment that the Primitive Church thought fit to be inflicted on the heretics of those times was exilement, in which case they had always a competent time allowed to provide conveniences before they receded, safe conduct for their departure, and a full power given them, either to retain their praediall and fixed estates they left, and to receive by their deputed agents the yearly revenues of them, or else sell them. And if we do seriously peruse the Histories of later times, we shall find the cruelest tigers, and most Wolvish Prelates that ever miscarried the affairs of any kingdom or State since the year 1500. never to have grown to that senseless and belluine height of malice against the godly, as neither to suffer them to enjoy their liberty and quiet of their consciences at home, nor yet peaceably and innocently to leave their dear and native country, and to plant themselves in such parts of the world as they may enjoy their inward peace without offence or scandal to any. Philip the second of Spain, who was one of the most prodigious offenders against God, in his time, having vitiated women of the noblest rank, violated contracts of the deepest nature, murdered his eldest son, and third wife, unjustly detained the kingdom of Navarre, broken his oath with Arragon, Naples, and the Netherlands, and the most resolved and premeditated persecutor of Christendom, being wholly actuated & precipitated to it by Nicholas Perenot, Cardinal of Granvellan, and the bloody Inquisitors, yet in the year, 1575. he set out a public Declaration touching all the Inhabitants of the Netherlands, that it should be lawful for any that would not embrace the Rom m Religion, to depart from thence whither soever they would, and to sell their estates, or else to. retain them, and to receive the profits of them: And not many years after, he gave liberty also to the very Mahometan moors in Spain, amounting to divers thousands, to depart freely thence, into any Province of Africa, there to enjoy freedom from the bloody Inquisitors, and with his own shipping conveyed many of them safe into France, through which, by the graclous permission of Henry the Great, they had safe and free passage. Charles the ninth also, the French King, did by his Agents earnestly solicit jews de Clermont, Prince of Conde, and Gaspar de Colignie, Earl of Cistillion, admiral of that kingdom, being the chief Commanders and Directors of the Protestants affairs, to depart the kingdom, with the rest of the Religion; and that they might begin a Plantation in the Island of Florida in America, he not only gave leave to the first expedition, which was undertaken by John Ribald, in the year 1562. but also, at the same admiral's entreaty, did contribute very largely himself to the second navigation, which was entered upon, not long after the first, by Renate Laudonere, and divers other Protestants. But it pleased God, that this fair occasion, not only of enlarging the French Empire, but also of planting a blessed Church amongst those Heathen people, was in the very bloom and infancy prevented and brought to nothing by the precipitation of Luidonere himself, and by those factious Romanists about the King, who occasioned new civil wars and tumults in the realm. After the horrible and inhuman massacre of Paris, in the year 1572. which was partly resolved upon, because the Protestants would not upon any terms remove out of France, and so desert and leave their dear and native country: Charles Duke of Lorraine intending to take that occasion, to extirpate the true Religion out of his own Dominions, which he might have done by their slaughters, yet gave them liberty to depart whithersoever they would in safety, and full time to sell and dispose of their goods and estates. Nay Queen Mary of England, whose bloody persecutions shall make her reign infamous to the world's end, yet in her first year expressed so much mercy, as having publicly declared, that she meant to restore the Romish Religion; she further permitted to all her subjects that would not profess the same, free liberty to depart out of her kingdom; by which the lives and ravagings of many hundreds were saved, and amongst them divers of the clergy; for the first sensible persecution began then in St. John's college in Cambridge, where the Idolatrous bowing to the mass and Altar, being wickedly practised and pressed, divers immediately left the same college thereupon. Now if the Popish Prelates of those times, who accounted the Protestants arch-heretiques, and mortally hated them, did yet persuade the Kings and Princes they served, and too often misadvised, to permit the Protestants freedom of departure, with liberty and time to sell their goods and estates; is it possible that there should live in and under any Protestant Church, such inveterately hating Prelates, against the weaker and humbler Christians, who dissent from them, as themselves pretend, only in matters of form and order, arbitrary to be abolished or retained by the supreme Magistrate, as neither to suffer them to live quietly at home without vexation, suits, fines, suspension, deprivation, and imprisonment, which in many cases occasioneth their immature deaths, nor yet suffer them to depart quietly, to plant a Church amongst the very Heathens themselves, to the honour of God, and the enlargement of their sovereign's Empire and profit? Is it possible that so many miles distance should not abate and assuage the very malice of Rome itself against them? Were their departure like that of the fugitive Romanists a few years since, to join with the public enemies of the kingdom, to invade it, and to be more forward to subdue it to a cruel and barbarous Nation, as they were in eighty eight, than the adversaries themselves, then might there be some colourable reason to use all extremity and cruelty against them for their ruin and extirpation; but when their hearts and soul's breath forth nothing but loyalty and innocency, the throne and kingdom fare the better for their prayers and humiliations, and the worst they desire, is but the quiet of their own consciences; how is it possible they should be so prodigiously hated of any, that would but pretend truly to love the Gospel, and heartily to vote the flourishing of it? Certainly it is impossible they should be so transported with barbarous rage, as some of the Popes have been, who rather desired to see the ruin of those innocent Christians, then of the very Turks and Mahometans, unless they will yield themselves to be as deeply toxicated with the dregs of that Romish cup as the Jesuits are, who in the year 1578. began to preach and teach publicly, that it was a more acceptable work to God, for Christian Princes to root out and persecute all Sectaries and schismatics amongst themselves, then for them to join their forces against the Turks and Infidels; A doctrine, saith Monsieur de Thou, (one of their own Historians) contrary to all Christian piety and mansuetude, who with the rest of the sober and moderate Romanists, by their charitable and advised censures, given of the strictest and most tender conscienced Christians, (notwithstanding they most abhor any the least intermixtures and additions in God's Worship, which have been introduced by the Papists) shall at the last day rise up in judgement against the invectives of many seeming Protestants, of both orders, against the same persons, endeavouring thereby to prepossess the ears and fascinate the judgements of the greatest Princes, that so they may obtain licence and power under them, utterly to ruin and destroy their humble and pious fellow-Christians, who are notwithstanding permitted quietly and safely to enjoy the public liberty of their conscience in those kingdoms and States where the Romish Religion itself flourisheth.   

SECT. XXIV.  
UNder Henry the fourth, the late great and victorious French King, the major part of the Papists of that kingdom continued in a most obstinate and furious war against him, during the first four years of his reign, calling into their succours the Spaniards the sworn enemies of that Crown and State, and yet he offered them, not only to permit all his Romanized subjects the public exercise of their Religion, but also to continue it in all places in the same form and freedom as it had been used at the time of the murder of Henry the third his predecessor, by a Jesuited assassinate. And further implored his own Subjects, Not to endeavour to force him to the change of his Religion, which he knew to be the truth, being a cruelty he desired not to practise upon the meanest of them. The Protestants will yield up their Religion as false and wicked, if ever such an example can be produced against them, where they had liberty of conscience sincerely afforded them, and yet took up arms against their lawful sovereign. But those unreasonable French Papists, being true limbs of the Romish Synagogue, whose faith was then faction, and whose Religion was then rebellion, would embrace no conditions of peace, no offers of pacification from their own undoubtedly lawful and warlike King, as long as he continued in the open profession of that truth, in which he had been educated under Joan D'Albret, hereditary Queen of Navarre, his royal and godly mother; who also upon her deathbed had expressly charged him never to recede from it. This brave Prince seeing nothing but an utter ruin threatened to his kingdom of France, either by cantonizing it into Provinces, or setting a foreigner on the Throne, (which Charles Lorainer Duke of Main had out of some ambitious and self-respects of his own, a while opposed and prevented) in the year 1593. submitted himself to a public recidivation, which though it brought on an outward peace to that realm, yet was the King himself never freed from continual Treasons and Conspiracies, hatched against him in the dens and nests of the Jesuits, till at the last he perished under one of them to the irreparable loss, not only of France, but likewise of all Christendom. Neither did the Papists cease to vilify his very act of reconciling himself to their Church, saying, as Monsieur de Thou himself confesseth, that either his conversion was feigned, as it had been before in the year 1572. and that a false Catholic would do more hurt in their Church then a true heretic, or else that he loved the Crown of France better than he did the kingdom of Heaven, that to gain that without any inward convincement, would turn from one Religion to another.   

SECT. XXV.  
AFter this martial Prince had deserted the Protestant Religion to the great astonishment and excessive grief of all the Professors of the Gospel, both at home and abroad; What did his French Subjects of the helvetic Confession instantly rebel against him, and deny him due and lawful obedience, as his Popish Subjects had done before? Nothing less; but all the disobedience they showed to him, or expressed towards him, consisted in humble supplications and Remonstrances, that they might still enjoy the public liberty of their Consciences; and he as graciously yielded to their just and Christian Petitions; and all the time he reigned, never forgot their cause or prayers, or suffered any of his bloody Prelates, or Jesuited Counsellors, to molest, vex, cite, fine, suspend, deprive, or imprison any of them, and much less to butcher them, or draw blood from them; because he knew every one of those acts are essentially true and downright persecution, as well as shedding their bloods; only there is a gradual difference in the martyrdoms of the sufferers as well as in the cruelty of the destroyers. As strange was the example of Henry the eight of England, who led by the advice of some of his sycophantical Popish Prelates, thought to have established the Romish Religion, without admitting the influence of the Papacy, whose unerring spirit is to that Synagogue like the soul to the body, or the sun to the firmament. But he soon saw his error, and would doubtless, had he lived, have made that integral and saving Reformation, which his royal son so piously finished; for he himself and his new Popery, were more abhorred by the Bishop of Rome, and his vassals, as a monstrous and inconsistent Church, than the Princes of Germany themselves, who had made a rational and entire defection from that man of son. For the Pope and his Conclave employed Cardinal Poole (Henry the Eighths near kinsman) as their ambassador to Charles the fifth the Emperor, to exhort and persuade him instantly to invade the King of England's Dominion, rather than to make war against the Turk himself. And the reason why the Pope was so vehement in his prosecution against that King, doth palpably and fully appear from the very words ensuing of the Decree of Pope Boniface the eighth, in his Extravagants set forth by himself in the eighth year of his Papacy, about the year 1300. Subesse Romano pontifici (saith he) omni humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, definimus, & pronunciamus omnino esse de necessitate salut is: We declare, define, and pronounce, that it is necessary for every one that is to be saved, to be subject to the Pope of Rome. The same doctrine doth the Bull of Pope Pius the fifth, bearing date there in the year 1564. & the Romish catechism set out a little after, doth maintain and confirm in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Sections thereof, in their exposition of the twentieth Article of their new Creed, (to which Creed their Prelates and other ecclesiastics are compelled to swear, that they hold it to be the true Catholic faith) it being strongly disputed for also by Suarez in his first book and twelfth Chapter against the Lutherans, by Gregory de Valentia in his Analysis, lib. 6. cap. 1. and by Bellarmine in his third book and fifth Chapter of the Church Militant; That though any Prince, Prelate, Priest, State, or Church, should receive all the other parts of the Romish faith & Religion, abolishing the doctrine and discipline of the Protestants, and should only deny the Pope's Supremacy and subjection to him, yet they should still remain damnable and wicked heretics; So as the light of the sun is not more clear than that the Pope in this one particular imitates God himself, hating more a linsey-woolsey mongrel halting Popish Protestant, than a true and zealous one. Blessed therefore are those Monarchs, Princes, and States, who preserve the evangelic truth, without the least intermixtures of false doctrine and pontifical additions; for to halt between light and darkness, and to intermix Idolatrous actions, or Popish errors, with saving truths, will necessarily draw on the ruin of the godly, and the hatred of the Papacy, and bring down God's judgements as causally as an absolute, entire, and plenary defection and recidivation. And then if the Pope's headship be once admitted, a volume would not suffice, how not only every proud Prelate, but even every Popish Priest; might trample on the sovereign's crown and dignity, murder their fellow-subjects, and be guilty of a thousand other villainies, without dreading or regarding the punishment of the temporal sword.   

SECT. XXVI.  
MAtthew Paris, the monk of St Albans, (a witness without exception) doth truly relate a pithy Story, to show the ancient deplorable and base state and condition of the English Kings under the papal tyranny; That Pope Innocent the 4th in the year 1253. in the 37th year of Henry the third, being set in his Conclave, in the middle of his Cardinals, after mature deliberation and advisement upon a very small and trifling occasion, broke out into this vehement Interrogation; Nonne Rex Anglorum (saith he) noster est vafsallus, & ut plus dicam, mancipium, qui possumus eum nutu nostro incarcerare & ignominiae mancipare? That is, Is not the King of England our vassal, or to say more, is he not our slave, who have power as often as we please, either to mew him up in prison, or to expose him to ignominy? Justly therefore did Henry the eight of England free himself from this papal Tyranny: and if he had been possibly sensible of those bodily pangs, or inward remorses and horrors upon his deathbed, which the Papists mention, yet could not these divine flagellations be imputed to his defection from Rome, and error, as they pretend, but to his shedding of so much innocent blood of God's Saints, by the instigation of his sanguinary Prelates. For in France after that barbarous and cruel Massacre in the year 1572. upon the eighth day of November the same year, there appeared a dreadful Comet, touching which some learned Protestant immediately published an elaborate and exquisite Poem, presaging that it was God's Herald or Messenger to denounce his judgement shortly to ensue upon that kingdom, for their newly perpetrated inhuman butchery. His verses were 〈◊〉 dispersed, when there suddenly broke out in Poitou a new 〈◊〉 and before unknown disease commonly called the Poit●vin colic, which wasted that goodly kingdom for above thirty years after It was accompanied with so many extreme pains and torments, not only in the outward parts of the body, but in the innards and vitals also, as it drew on divers horrid convulsions, and in many blindness itself before they died. The strange original, the hidden nature and those unparalleled torments it produced, sometimes resembling the very stabs and gashes made with swords and poygnards, gave all impartial judgements just ground to conclude it to be the finger of God himself, in punishing the merciless murders of his dear Saints. And a blessed warning it may be to all Christian Kingdoms and States, that a seasonable remedy to stop the growing of the plague, pestilence, and other several diseases and judgements may questionless be applied, by inhibiting and abolishing the power and malice of such Popish Prelates as count it their chiefest solace to waste and persecute the pious and godly Protestants, that so the true Catholic Church might again flourish, as it did in the Primitive times under learned, religious, sober, faithful, preaching Pastors and Ministers. Which incomparable blessing, the Divine Providence vouchsafed to the Scottish, French, and helvetic Churches upon their first Reformation.    

The Printer to the Reader.  
I Am here courteous Reader, instead of troubling thee with an Index of the Errata, to give thee notice, that so great care hath been used, in this second Impression, as it needs none; neither was it my fault, but my misfortune, that the first had so many greater errors as well as lesser slips; for I had the use of a very imperfect copy, transcribed from the original by two or three several hands in some haste; by which I was misled almost in every Section. Those errors, and such as escaped the press, are now amended to thy hand.  
FINIS.