of the Papal Usurpations to expose himself to the fencing with two enraged Multitudes which would have produced the same effect as would a Iesuit's Preaching a Postilling Sermon here against the Yearly burning of the Pope to the Populace employed in that Solemnity My Lord I find my self her engulfed in writing a long Letter and the truth is having a great concern for your Lordship's Honour I am willing to take pains to satisfie my self exactly by thus tracing your Lordship's steps on the Stage of the World that I may satisfie others so about your being as averse as any one can be from supporting any Papal Power to invade the rights of Conscience or those of Princes The Roman Historian speaking of Nero saith Tyrannum hunc per quatuordecem annos passus est terrarum orbis And it may truly be said That England formerly has endured the Popes Tyranny and the Artifices of its Favourers for some Ages But the Patience of Man has bounds and the Propagators of such Usurpation who had so long maintain'd a separate Soveraignty here the which is like an Animal living within an Animal did find that as the lesser creature is evacuated by the greater or destroyed therein or doth else destroy the greater Animal it was so held to be in the case of such Power among us and as no doubt it always will be by your Lordship When your Travels were ended and you had with the help of the Education your Father gave you saved him by your knowledge of the Lex terroe from falling as a prey to Arbitrary Power and thereby shewed your self both a good Son and great Patriot the first Scene of publick Employment wherein your Lordship appeared with Eminency was as Governour of Vlster by Authority under the Great Seal of England a Charge of difficulty when the Forces from Scotland under the Command of Major General Munro had so long ruled absolutely there that the English Interest had suffered a great eclipse and diminution How you managed Affairs during your Government there and how by your Councils the most pernitious and potent Rebel Owen Roe O Neil was opposed and his design to swallow up that Province and the Province of Connaught disappointed and the Protestant Interest in both united and encouraged and under your Conduct and Command the Titular Popish Archbishop of Tuam taken and by the seisure of his Cabinet and Papers the Popish design upon Ireland discovered and broken in due time I doubt not you will more particularly inform the World. From that Service your Lordship was upon the ill success of those Commissioners who were first sent to the then Marquess of Ormond employed to make the Capitulation with the said Marquess then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the Surrender of the City of Dublin and all other Garrisons under his Command into the Parliaments hands for securing them from the Irish Rebels who had invested and streightned the same Which happy work was effectually accomplished by the Articles made with the said Marquess already published to the World And so the Protestants Interest in that Kingdom made entire and so considerable that they daily gained ground of the Confederate Rebels till at length they were wholly subdued and vanquished After those Articles concluded and reception of the said City and Garrisons your Lordship was called back into England where being a Member of the House of Commons you shewed your self no less useful to this Kingdom And have since in Parliament and Council and other great Imployments in both Kingdoms shewed your self an Eminent Instrument both in his Majesties happy Restoration who entirely trusted you with the Management thereof and in other great Affairs of State and Government to general satisfaction being never by those that knew you so much as suspected for Evil Council or want of Zeal and Faithfulness to your King or Countrey but every day gaining more the Love and Esteem of Protestants and Patriots as you had incurred the implacable hatred of the Popish and Arbitrary Factions I cannot here but observe That a little before the Kings Restoration the spirit of the people universally shewing its resentments so strong and vehement against Lambert and his Committee of Safety and against all the propounders of projects of Government that nothing but his Majesties return to the Throne of his Ancestors could quiet the people and your Lordship then as President of the Council by your great Wisdom Contributing highly to the dispatch of many arduous and intricate Affairs requisite to make that great Revolution without bloudshed when things near their Center were moving so fast it may well be reckon'd among impossible things that your Lordship should now espouse the Papal interest when the Vogue the Humour the Sense and Reason and Spirit of the People are bent against it with as keen and strong and general an antipathy as can be imagined And when I consider that great real power you had in the Kingdom at that time testify'd not so much by your signing all the great Commissions then for Military and Civil Employments as by both the King and the best and wisest of the people in the Three Kingdoms putting themselves in your hands and having their eyes chiefly upon you as to the management of the Political part of that mighty concern I cannot but thinking of your Lordship whom thus the King and Kingdom delighted to honour apply to you these words in Valerius Maximus where he speaks of Agrippa Menenius whom the Senate and People chose Arbitrator of their differences and to â—ompose matters between them Quantus scilicet esse debuit arbiter publicae salutis Yet as great as this Man was he could have no Funeral unless the people had by a pole given the sixth part of a penny to defray his Funeral Charges But your Lordships case in one particular seems harder then his for they who unjustly go to take away your good Name and to make a Papist of you go about to bury you alive Had your Lordship after the King's Restoration aspired after the power of a chief Minister or suffered any such to be committed to you you must have took it with the concomitance of universal envy that hath always in England been fatal to such power England having always thought such power fatal to it 'T is the power it self of such a Minister that is look't on as a popular Nusance and t is impossible for such a great Man by raising his power only to what he thinks a moderate height to keep it secure and lasting For tho a Steeple be built with firm Stone great Art and but with a moderate height yet are there Clouds charged with Lightning and Thunder and moving in the Ayr sometimes not higher than the top of such a Steeple and the Pryamid or sharpness of such a Steeple then as I may say tapping or broaching such a Cloud that comes that way is instantly Burnt and Thundered down And the Multitude of the
Primier Ministres adorers who are always pleasing or troubling him with their sacrifices do all with sudden confusion leave him when he begins thus to fall as if Thunder-struck from Heaven We find in Rushworth that Iune the 13 th 4 Caroli it was ordered upon the Question That the excessive power of the Duke of Buckingham is the cause of the Evils and Dangers to the King and Kingdom And we may well suppose that if a Parliament doth still as one man set themselves against a Monopolist but of one little pedling commodity that they will look on a Chief Minister as one that would or in effect doth monopolize the Beams of the Sun I mean the Kings Eye and as one that alone hath the Kings Ear and as one that is the great forestaller of the Court-market of preferments And happy it is for a Chief Minister that the way of Parliamentary Impeachment hath been in such antient usage for that rids the people of the outrage of that Minister and that Minister of the outrage of the people Our Stories speak How barbarously Cruel the brutish Rabble was to Dr. Lamb called the Duke's Conjurer and the reason why the people hate those they call Conjurers so much is because they think such have a power to hurt their Children or Cattel and the same reason makes them hate one that they look on as a Kings Conjurer who they think can hurt their Property and one who on occasion can raise up Domestick and Foraign Devils to molest them and especially if he cannot lay those Devils when he has raised them and who can if he will put the People to charge and to the danger of starving to feed his familiar spirits When once the people find by any mans power the fence of the Law begun to be broken down they will go in at the gap and 't is nothing but the Law that secures a chief Minister and them against one another St. Austin therefore doth rationally in his De Civitate Dei charge the miserable condition of the Romans on the contempt and breach of their Laws and saith he people were promiscuously put to death not by Judgment of Magistrates but by Tumults Neque enim Legibus ordine potestatum sed turbis animorumque Conflictibus Nobiles ignobilesque necabantur Your Lordship therefore when you had been a repairer of the breaches of the Nation and of the Law therein and in the Scripture expression a restorer of paths to dwell in as easily and unconcern'd gave up the great depositâ—m of power the King and Kingdom entrusted you with as ever you restored the least to a private person and have ever since among the Councellors of your Prince both endeavoured to make your Country safe by giving Counsel against any Neighbour Nations being too powerful and to make your self secure by your not grasping more power than you saw in the hands of each of your honourable Colleagues as well knowing that any single Minister that shall here set up to be a Dispenser of the Soveraign Power had need either still wear a Coat of Male and an Iron Brest-plate or bind the whole Kingdom to the Peace Your Lordship can hardly look into antient History without meeting Examples of the People like the Leviathan playing in the Ocean of their power and spouting out their censures both with fury and wantonness when they are dooming the great You know the Lacedemonians did reprimand their Lycâ—rgus because he went with his head stooping the Thebans accused their Paniculus for his much spitting and the Athenians Simonides because he spoke too loud the Carthaginians Hannibal because he went loose in his garments the Romans Scipio because he did snore in his sleep the Vticenses Cato for his eating with both Jawes the Syllani Iulius Caesar for wearing his girdle carelessly the Romans were angry with Pompey for scratching himself but with one finger and likewise for wearing a garter wrought with Silver and Gold on one leg saying that he wore such a Diadem about his foot as Kings do on their heads though yet it seems the only cause of his wearing it was to hide a Sore place there And in these above-mentioned cases we are not to think that those Ancient and wise people who thought the rest of the world barbarous could censure those persons so barbarously for those sensless reasons but out of a hatred to the persons Censured were resolved to strike at the first thing they met how innocent soever in it self in persons they thought they had reason to represent odious A late Great Man who in a Public Speech in Parliament render'd the English tongue as having the Monopoly of the term good Nature found that they had not engrost the thing when they imagined that his Ministry Monopolized much of the Regal power And another eminent person afterward a Minister to His Majesty Suffered as a favourer of the French at whose imprisonment I have heard that the Lovâ—re rang with as much joy and triumph as if they had carried the point in a great fight at Land or Sea and he likewise suffered obloquy as if concern'd in the infamous murder of Sr. Edmond Godfrey from which he was certainly as free as from having killed Iulius Caesar And how far the embroider'd garter about his leg made him like Pompey Envyed I know not But as I said 't is a chief Ministers power the people of England strike at who may not be unfitly resembled to Alexanders Bucephalus that would let none but Alexander ride him nor could Alexander himselfe do it till by holding him against the Sun he kept him from being frighted with the sight of his Shadow And when one Subject seems to be the representative Shadow of the body of the whole people the Sight of him frights them so as to make them uneasie to be ruled And therefore I think his Majesty did rationally provide for the public Security when he signified His pleasure in a Speech in a late Parliament about not Ruling us by a single Ministry I should not wonder if your Lordship were called a Papist if you had been the possessor of any such power that name being now the angriest the people can throw at any one as it was before the late Warres when Archbishop Laud who had writ so well and so much against the Papists fell under the weight of that name But really by the power of that chief Ministry he had in the State of England after the death of the Duke of Buckingham And at that time the currant definitions of a Papist and of one who enjoyed Arbitrary Power were the same And the things made conveâ—â—â—ble or Devils dancing in the same Circle And so likewise the Vouge at this time obtains among the populace who cannot see through the hard words and things in definitions and if you ask them what is a Papist they will tell you he is one that is for Arbitrary Power and asking them what is one that
you are bold to brag that at this present there are within the Realm more Catholicks and Catholick Priests then there were forty years since Math. Kellison in his Survey in the Epist. dedic almost at the latter end They afterward in their Supplication use the word Catholickly affected to make it comprehensive of both parts of Parsons his distinction of Papists more open and close and therein have the honour of the Invention of the Phrase of Popishly affected that hath so much gall'd them since and at this day continues to do and I shall accord with them that the Number of Papists or of Popishly affected was apparently grown great in the juncture of time after King Iames came here to the Crown but 't is not deniable that after the Epoche of the Gun-powder-Treason it did more sensibly decrease for they cannot say that by the intended blow from the Gun powder they designed to make him Catholick in order to make him continue a King. The Dean of Bangor in his excellent Sermon in Print and Preached at St. Martins on the 5 th of November 1678. Speaking p. 29 of the Conspirators in the Gun-powder-Treason saith judiciously For the Number I believe the design it self was known to few but that there was a design was known to many more King James himself tells us so in his works p. 291. A great number of my Popish Subjects of all Ranks and Sorts both Men and Women as well within as without the Country had a confused Notion and obscure knowledge that some great thing was to be done in that Parliament for the Weal of the Church tho for Secresies sake they were not to be acquainted with the particulars And no doubt but that great Number took occasion to slip their Necks out of the Collar of Misprision of Religion as well as of Treason thereupon and a vast encrease of the Numbers of the Protestants was thereby occasioned But there afterward appeared another Conjuncture of time in which the Catholickly affected did in his Reign multiply in the which however implicit faith could never come so much in fashion but that as Gondomar observed in the Kings Chappel when ever the Preacher quoted Texts of Scripture the Auditors would immediately turn to their Bibles to find them Mr. Pryn saith in his Introduction to the Archbishop of Canterbury ' s Tryal p. 13. That the number of Priests and Popish Recusants enlarged out of Duress by King James if we may believe Gondomars Letter from hence to the King of Spain or the Letter of Serica that Kings Secretary Dated from Madrid July 7 th 1622 to Mr. Cottington was no less then 4000. He had before in p. 10. and 12. set down the Petition and Remonstrance intended to be sent to King James by the House of Commons in December 1621 where among other things 't is said That the Popish Recusants were then dangerously encreas'd in their Numbers and complaint is made of the swarm of Priests and Iesuites dispersed in all parts of the Kingdom 'T is probable that not many Papists except Priests were then imprison'd and it may be conceived that the Number of Priests who escaped the Net of Imprisonment was more then double to that which was took therein and that the Number of Lay-Papists was very growing in that Conjuncture Mr. Iohn Gee's Book of the Foot out of the Snare of 4th Edition Printed in London 1624. mentions the Names of many Romish Priests and Jesuites resident about London in that year and begins with the Bishop of Chalcedon and shortly after him mentions Collington the Titular Arch-Deacon of London and Wright Treasurer for the Iesuites and Smith Vicar-General for the South parts of England and Broughton Vicar-General for the North parts of England and Bennet Vicar-General for the West parts of England and the whole Number of them there named together with the places of their Lodging is two hundred sixty one and the number of the Iesuites out of that Total is 72. Moreover out of that Total he mentions only 3 as having been formerly in Prison in England and but one who was at that time in Prison At the end of the Catalogue of the Priests there he saith These be all the Birds of this feather which have come to my Eye or Knowledge by Name c. yet above four times so many there are that overspread our Thickets through England as appears by the empty Nests beyond Sea from whence they have flown by Shoals of late I mean the Seminary Colledges which have deeply disgorged by several Missions of them as also is gathered by particular Computation of their divided Troâ—ps when as in one Shire where I have abode sometime they are reputed to nestle almost three hundred of this Brood In the following Pages he there Prints a Catalogue of Popish Physitians in and about the City of London and makes the Number of them 27 and no doubt but that in that Conjuncture of time the number of Papists encreasing there were enow Patients of that persuasion to afford Livelyhoods to so many Physitians In that Book immediately after p. 116. he Prints a Catalogue of such English Books that he knew of to have been Printed reprinted or dispers'd by the Priests and their Agents in England within two years last past or thereabout viz. 156. So fortunate was that Conjuncture to the Papists then that the odious Name of Puritan was bestowed on any of the Magistrates that went to put any Laws in execution against Popery as we find it from Sir R. Cotton in his serious Considerations for repressing of the encrease of Iesuites Priests and Papists without shedding of blood p. 33. his words there are There is no small Number that stand doubtful whether it be a gratful work to cross Popery or that it may be done safely without a foul aspersion of Puritanisme or a shrew'd turn for their labour at some times or other c. In the Petition and Remonstrance of the House of Commons in December 1621 before mentioned among the Causes of the growing mischiefs here the fifth Paragraph assignes one what would make Popery very prolific with Proselytes here viz. The strange Confederacy of the Princes of the Popish Religion aiming maiâ—ly at the advancement of theirs and subverting ours c. and another is assigned in the 6 th Paragraph viz. The great and many Armies raised and maintained at the Charge of the King of Spain the chief of that League and another in § 8th The interposing of Forraign Princes and their Agents in the behalf of Popish Recusants for Connivance and Favours to them But in fine in King Iames his Reign the gross of the Number of the Protestants was generally reckoned to be ten times greater then the Papists the which is hinted in the Posthuma of Cotton who then said To what purpose shews it to muster the Names of the Protestants and to vaunt them to be ten for one of the Roman Faction In the
thing that can happen and that whoever shall write the Story of your Lordships life after you have finished your Mortality will have cause to say of you as Mr. Fox p. 411. mentions that one who writes of Wicliff recorded of him that he persevered in his Religion ita ut cano placeret quod Iuveni complacebat that the same thing pleased him in his old Age which did in his youth Nor do I indeed doubt but that when your Lordship shall be upon your passage to the other World you will take your long leave of your friends in the Style with which Dr. Holland the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford was observed commonly to bid his friends farewel viz. Commendo vos amori Dei odio Papatus and that your Lordship who hath been so successful an Agonist against Popery will share in the Glories of that Promise from Heaven To him that overcomes will I give the Morning Star and that as the Morning Star is the same with the Evening one and in the Morning is call'd Phosphorus and in the Evening Hesperugo so the Protestant Religion will appear in the Evening of your Life with the same brightness that it did in the Morning thereof and so continue till you shall arrive at that Region where all the Morning Stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy How unreasonably rigid are they who when the Ministers of Princes are studying and procuring the ease of Mankind as your Lordship hath done will in spight of fate disquiet themselves in rendring the lives of such Ministers uneasie a temper that I think shewed it self over much in a late Speech in the House of Commons of Sir W. I. who if my Information be true did not reverently use the power of his Popularity when with much Acrimony reflecting on some in the Kings Council he was supposed to have aimed at your Lordship in words to this effect There is another in the Council a Noble Man too among the Kings Ministers and a Lawyer but if we cannot reach him do not impeach him intimating that he would have been glad of any being able with Articles and Proofs concludent to have reached your Lordship in order to Impeachment There is another Honourable Person who is your Collegue in the King's Council a Great Man and a Lawyer too whom I was sorry to find by the printed Votes of the House of Commons that were sent into the Country so many persons were endeavouring to reach with matter of Impeachment I mean my Lord Chief Iustice North. It seem'd to me a thing worthy the name of News that the advising and assisting in the drawing up and passing a Proclamation against Tumultuous Petitions should be thought a sufficient ground to proceed upon to an Impeachment against him for high Crimes and Misdemeanors The security and quiet of Kings and their People are to be so tenderly regarded that the drawing one Proclamation after another to prevent the blowing or breathing in the Kings Face I allude to the words in one of the Articles against Woolsy by Tumultuous Petitioners a thing punishable at Common-Law and likewise by the severity of the Council-Board seems strangely imputed as a Crime to a Judge and Privy Councellor The people petitioning in Multitudes are so far from being like the Horse not knowing his own strength that their coming in such numbers shews they have Calculated it and perhaps with more nicety than the Author of the Discourse before the Royal Society concerning the use of Duplicate Proportion had Calculated the strength of Animals the which strength he saith is as the square roots of their weights and substance and if 1728 Mice were equiponderate to one Horse the said Horse is but 1 144 part as strong as all the said Mice and so might easily strip the Horses Neck of the Thunder that God and Nature according to Iobs expression have cloathed it with and their petitioning in numbers being a real Proclamation of their power it was the part of so good a Councellor of State and Mathematician to advise his Prince and his Country not to be taken in a Trap by the Petitioning Mice and it was worthy of so knowing a Iudge to forewarn them of being entrapped by the Law and as the Millenary Petitioners were forewarn'd in King Iames his time What occasioned the Proclamation referred to by the House of Commons I know not but by what I have observed of his accurateness in the administration of Justice in his great Sphere and of his Mathematical Genius even not receeding from it self while on the Tribunal he in every Cause demonstrates the rationality of the Laws of England and makes Justice there in its Arithmetical and Geometrical proportion so visible to all and by what I have seen of the serenity of his temper in having had once or twice the honour of his Conversation I believe that as a Privy Councellor he would too as much occasionally assert any Legal Right the Subject hath to Petition his Prince as he would the Right of the latter not to be illegally and with the apparent Menace of Members addrest to a way of Petitioning that hath so often and so lately been the Prologue to the ensuing Tragedy of War. I was very much pleased to hear how this Learned Iudge being once moved to grand a Prohibition to the Court Christian in a certain Cause and that the Council fencing with Presidents pro and con that came not home to the point his Lordship declared in words to this purpose that in any proceeding that was against Universal Reason he would grant the Writ and I think it was as proper for him as a States-man to advise a Prohibition in the way of a Proclamation against Tumultuous Petitions than which nothing can be more against Vniversal Reason But if a person who is so great a Master of that Reason and indeed of Universal Learning and of that part of it that deserves the name of Real and whose single Learning would serve to vindicate a whole profession from Erasmus his Aspersion of doctissimum gâ—nus indoctorum hominum and of knowing nothing of the Sense and Reason of the World beyond Dover and the brightness of whose parts hath given a Lustre to the Science of the Law and by whom if by any of this Age that may be thought possible to be done that our Great Lord Bacon advised King Iames to Crown his Reign with namely the bringing the Body of the Common Law or our jus non scriptum into a Digest I say if a person thus accomplished cannot have the skill to walk through the World free from Impeachment it will be sufficient to make all men of Illustrious Abilities and Godlike Inclinations to do good retire from dangerous Mankind and not adventure to Aid Princes who are Gods Vice-Roys in the Government of the World and to be happy in themselves without preserving it as the first being was before he made
his Great thoughts intent on restoring England to its ancient Figure in the World namely of balancing it and coming to the Throne when he found the Land so impoverish'd â—y the Witnesses Plot and the spirits of the Inhabitants so much intimidated with Fears and Iealousies he by his own noble Iealousie for the Honour of the Nation hath chased away all ignoble Iealousies for ever and by shewing so great an Example of Universal Confidence in his People hath by his Augusâ— Genius found out so expedite a way to make the Confidence between the Prince and People mutual and which is the hinge on which the Happy State of any Country turns as hath made any general Relapses into Principles of disloyalty during his Reign almost morally impossible For according to that Saying of Tully Perditissimi est hominis eum laedere qui laesus non esset nisi â—redidisset and the Common Notion that next to the being perfectly good it is the most difficult thing to bring Humane Nature to be perfectly bad we may well expâ—ct a general growth of Loyalty from the Effects of that great Confidence and the great Spectacle it affords the World that may be partly expressed in the words of the Prophet viz. The heart of the Father's being turned to the Children and the natural Consequence of the turning the heart of the Children to their Father a more noble work then for an Elias to come and solve Doubts And thus while the Principles of some narrow-hearted Divines might seem confined like the Sands in their Hour-glasses yet His Majesty's great Thoughts and largeness of heart given him by God being as was said of Solomon's like the Sands of the Sea shoar and he having without setting up Weigh-houses for Loyalty or Religionary Principles created universal Charity and Peace in the Nation and allow'd his Subjects a paulò majora canamus then verbal Recantations he by thus trusting his Subjects at once with their Consciences hath provided an otherguess Prospect for English Minds then what can rise from disputacity or the Ecclesiarum Scabies and hath likewise secured the transmitting of his Character into the English Chronicles with such Rays of Glory as are brighter then those that have there adorn'd our former Princes under whom the Roses and Scepters and Kingdoms were united through his having so much united the hearts of People of all Religions to himself and to one another My Lord It is here but just that I should acknowledge it to your Lordship that you have been and are Pars Magna in so highly Contributing by your great Figure at the Helm in the last and this present Reign to this happy State of England For while in that Reign so many were so intent by what an ingenious late Writer calls The Wheel within a Wheel i. e. the Real Plot within the Nominal one of the Witnesses and by Out-cries against the Church of Rome to bring in a Roman Republick your Lordship by your most wise Councels and indefatigable diligence in guarding the Monarchy and effecting that it should not be plotted away by Names or Things will appear in the History of the Age as one who perhaps beyond any one now a Subject secured the old Fundamental Government of England and upon which only the new future Happiness of it could subsist I have entertain'd the Reader with a new Argument of Republicks generally growing more impracticable but I shall do but justice to your Lordship in representing your very Character as an Argument of sufficient weight to poise the minds of the ingenious and the ingenuous against innovations by that sort of Government For the World would soon want the benefit of the Example of the perfect justice inherent in your nature that glorious Virtue that is the allow'd Continent of all the rest and necessarily attracting the Eyes and Hearts and Veneration of the Populace if Heaven had not fix'd you in the Sphere of Monarchy a dull Mediocrity of Vertue and of Wit and reason being only easie to a popular Government and nothing but an Oyster-Shell or an Olive-Leaf being to be there expected by a Person heroically just to his Country as his recompence and his being always liable to such liberae accusationes Calumniationes as were under what I have call'd the Martyrocracy here in the turbid Interval of the Plot-times and of the Fears and Iealousies Your Lordship was then by the help of your great Vnderstanding and excellent Temper and your constant Serenity of thought saevis tranquillus in undis and while so many of the timid were with their narrow spirits in that stormy Conjuncture toss'd about with excessive Fears and Iealousies and nauseous to themselves and others your Lordships great thoughts like a well built first Rate-Ship allow'd you both Ease and Triumph on the Sea of Time and in the Night of the Popular Fears your great Reason was directive to the Loyal tanquam lucerna in navi Praetoriâ how and where to steer their Course with safety to the Publick While toward the End of the following Discourse I recollected how much and how far my belief had been with that of many Loyal embarqued in the belief of a Plot or the Plot I there in p. 359 and 360. took notice that the Notions that men had of a Plot were very various Some then were so far gone in credulity as like the Fool that Solomon saith believeth every word they were resolv'd to believe every thing the Witnesses had said or would say the Loyal generally acquiesced in the Notification of it as Publish'd by the Government and I likewise call'd to mind what I had during my belief of somewhat of it mention'd in those hot Times and while I was writing the warmest part of my Discourse in that Conjuncture and when generally every heat of mens Passions was Feverish and every Fever Pestilential and when the Vitium temporis was Concurrent with the Faults of the Writer and there in p. 14. observing that since according to the expression of God's not being the God of the Jews only but also of the Gentiles so it being true that the King is King of the Papists as well as Protestants King of the Irish as well as English and a Common Father to them all it may be worthy of his royal goodness and a god-like thing in him to distribute to them all the kindness that would not undo themselves and others i. e. that they were capable of and having then in p. 44. urged the possibility of Recusants being a sound part of the State here as well as in Holland I held my self obliged to do them and the Course of my Impartial observing the right as toward the end of the Discourse to mention it that whatever petulance some of them were formerly guilty of yet that the deportment of the generality of them hath of late appear'd with such a Face of Loyalty as was necessarily attractive of our Christian Love and Compassion And
and Principles Religionary and indeed to speak more properly of that part of Mens Principles only that is Irreligionary and against Nature The words of exterminating and recalling are often used by Cicero as signifying the contrary and when Mr. Coleman's Letters shewed such an imperious design in him for the Revocation of Popery that had been driven away and banished or exterminated hence by so many Acts of Parliament and even for the Extermination of Heresie out of the North as occasioned such apprehensions in the Government of what was intended by other innocent and modest Papists that made the gentlest of Princes in a Speech in the Oxford Parliament say and if it be practicable the ridding our selves quite of all of that Party that have any considerable Authority c. none need wonder at the past warmth of Subjects expressed against the Recalling of the Exterminated Papal Power nor yet at the warmth of their Zeal against the Principles of the Iesuites propagating an Internal Power here when they had been exterminated from Rome it self and when the Lord Chancellors Speech to both Houses had mentioned the Proceedings against Protestants in Foreign Parts to look as if they were intended to make way for a general Extirpation They are poor Judges of things who think that Doctrines of Religion cannot be said to be exterminated out of Kingdoms and their Laws without the Banishment of the Persons professing them Who accounts not Protestancy sufficiently exterminated from being the State-Religion in Italy and yet Sandies his Europae speculum tells us That there were 40000 professed Protestants there Is not Iudaism sufficiently Exterminated from being the Religion at Rome tho thousands of professed Iews are there tolerated 'T is the publick approbation of Tenets or Doctrines and not any forbearance or indulgence to persons who prosess them that gives Doctrines a place within the Religion of a State for to make any State approve of a Doctrine contrary to what it hath Established is a Contradiction But the truth is the famous Nation of the Iews formerly Heavens peculiar People on Earth having not been more generally guilty of Idolatry during their prosperity than of Superstition during their Captivity and Oppression and Extermination from their Country hath taught the World this great truth that the readiest way to propagate Superstition and Error is by the Exterminium and Banishment of Persons Whatever Church any men call their Mother if the Magistrate finds them to own the Interest of their Country as their Mother and to honour their true Political Father they cannot wish their days more long in the Land than I shall do I remember under the Vsurpation there passed an Act of Parliament as 't was called for the banishment of that famous Boute-feu Iohn Lilburn and under the Penalty of the Vltimum supplicium and he shortly after returning to England and being tried in London where he was universally known and the only thing issuable before the Iurors being whether he was the same John Lilburn those good men and true thought him so much transubstantiated as to bring him in not guilty and when ever I find any Papist not only willing to change the Name Papist for Catholick but the thing Papistry for the Principles of the Church of Rome under its first good Bishops and before Popes beyond a Patriarchal Power aspired to be Universal Bishops and Universal Kings and that even a Iesuite instead of the Rule of Iesuita est omnis homo hath alter'd his Morals and Principles pursuant to the Pope's said Decree so far as truly to say Ego non sum ego I shall not intermeddle in awakening Penal Laws to touch either his life or liberty Nor can any Presbyterians with justice reflect on the Zeal of any for the Continuance of the Laws for the Extermination of Presbytery when they shall reflect on the Royal Family having been by their means as is set forth in this Discourse exterminated out of the Realm into Foreign Popish Countries and of which they might easily have seen the ill effects if their understandings had not been very scandalously dull But there is another happy Extermination that I have in this Discourse from Natural Causes predicted to my Country and that is of the fears and jealousies that have been so prevalent during our late fermentation concerning which the Reader will shortly find himself referred to in many Pages in this Discourse and to have directed him to all of that Nature would have made the Index a Book I have in this Discourse designing to eradicate the fears of Popery out of the Minds of timid Protestants by the most rational perswasions I could shewed somewhat of Complaisance in sometimes humouring their Suppositions of things never likely to come to pass I have accorded with them in the possibility of the Event of Arch-Bishop Vsher's Famous Prophecy tho I account the same as remote from likelihood as any one could with it and do believe that if that Great and Learned Man could have foreseen the mischief that Prophecy hath occasioned by making so many of the Kings good Subjects disquieted thereby and which by at once Chilling their Hearts and heating their Heads hath rendered them less qualified for a chearful and steady discharge of their respective Duties he would have consulted privately with many other Learned and Pious Divines about the intrinsick weight of the matter revealed to him before he had exposed it to the World for that in the days when God spake by the Prophets yet even then the Spirits of the Prophets were always subject to the Prophets and there is no Fire in the World so bad a Master as the Fire of Prophecy It is observable that there hath scarce since this Prophecy been a Conjuncture of time wherein men uneasie to themselves would make the Government so but this Prophecy hath been reprinted in it and cryed about and few Enthusiasts but are as perfect in it as a Sea-man in his Compass The substance of it was to foretel Persecution that should happen in England from the Papists in the way of a sudden Massacre and that the Pope should be the Contriver of it and that if the King were restored it might be a little longer deferred A person less learned than that Great Prelate could easily give an Account of the past Out-rages of Massacres that have been perpetrated by Papists and of the tendency of the Iesuites Principles to the very legitimating of Future ones but the most Pious and Learned Man in the World ought with the greatest Caution imaginable to pretend to Divine Revelation of Future Contingencies in a matter both so unlikely and so odious as this and which might probably occasion so much Odium to so many innocent Papists and so much needless trouble to so many timid Protestants That Pious and Great Prelate did not I believe foresee that at the time when his Prophecy should dart its most fearful influence St. Peter's Chair would be filled
Law Established and having conducted the Reader through the former more melancholy and strait and unpleasant passages in the Fabrick of this Discourse have took care to lodge him in a more Airy and Cheerful appartment and whence he may recreate himself with looking out on the Future State of England and remain assured that no frightful Spectrums and Fantoms will disturb him there when he is either at his Rest or at his Devotions and which I have for his diversion furnished with some such fair Pictures of his Countries Future State as may perhaps not much either shame it or my self in regard that I think in the draught and design thereof my Art has been according to Nature how carelessly laid soever the Colours may have been and where he moreover will have the Prospect I before described and if his sight be clear will find the Sky so more and more tho so many Politick and Lachrymist would-be's have told him of the contrary I believe that since the Predictions of the deluge by Noah to the old World there were never so many angry Predicters and Predictions of a general inundation of misery to any Country under a Future Prince as within these late years we have been overwhelmed with and that to the discomposing of mens minds in their common converse and while they did eat and drink as in the days of Noah and were so ready to devour all their Countrymen who believed not the same inundation with them But during this great Deluge of our popular fears of one of Popery I have ventured in p. 297 and 258 of this Discourse to express my presension of the Future State of England making men ashamed of their past fears and their former deference to ill boding Prophets and that our Melancholy Prophets will appear to be toto Caelo mistaken in their Auguries as much as Gassendus tells us all the Astrologers were in France when by reason of the great Conjunction of watry signs in Piscis and Aquarius in the Year 1524 they said that there should be then in the Month of February a second Deluge that should overwhelm France and Germany and by reason whereof many People went with their Goods and Cattel from the low Lands to the hilly Country and yet after all the fâ—rmentation those Astrologers had made among the Populace in France that Month of February as Gassendus tells us tho naturally rainy proved the dryest Month that ever was known in those Countries I account that the deluge of the popular fears did sensibly decrease after the year 81 and that to the great dissatisfaction of those whose broken Fortunes made them no worse under it than the Fishes were in Noahs The more rational and sagacious sort of Protestants who had been so long Sea-sick with that deluge and did nauseate the fears and jealousies that had discomposed them began to see Land when his Majesty with so just a Caution advised them in his Speech to the Oxford Parliament That their just care of Religion should be so managed as that unnecessary fears should not be made a pretence for changing the Foundations of the Government and his Declaration of the Causes that induced him to dissolve that Parliament signifying his Royal Resolution both in and out of Parliament to use his utmost endeavours to extirpate Popery and in all things to Govern according to the Laws of the Kingdom was in effect like the Olive-branch brought by the Dove into the Ark an happy indication of peace and settlement to the minds of the people and of the Waters being abated and indeed a demonstration to them that the Dove had found ubi pedem figeret and that our Laws and Religion had done so too and on that great Vision of the Lex terrae that so many mists had so long kept us from seeing there ensued a general shout of Loyal Addressers throughout the Kingdom like that of Sea-mens at their first seeing of Land after a long stormy Voyage and when they thought they had lost their Course and the hearing of those shouts from the several Countries served as a Call of invitation to the many Timid and Loyal and likewise to many unfortunate persons to return thither after they had flocked from thence to the Metropolis as an Ark for their preservation on the rising of the deluge of fears in some preceeding years and it served to some clâ—an and to other unclean Beasts as a Call of Nature that they were to March out of the Ark. By the unclean Beasts I mean the sturdy Paupers that I have in this Discourse spoke of who were observed shortly after the Alarms of the Plot from so many Proclamations to flock from so many parts of the Country to London like the Rustical Plebs I have spoke of naturally thronging to the shore when they see a poor Vessel contending with a violent Tempest near it and the next Minute likely to Condemn it as a wrack and furnish them with Gods Goods I mean such as they call wrack'd ones and when to prevent the Owners of them from the benefit of some coming alive to the Shoar they are so ready to out rage those forlorn Marriners they see swimming to Land. Many such Atheistical Ruffians of all Religionary Sects and who had been desperate in the Country might being come to the Metropolis there probably feed themselves with vain hopes of mischief to be done to or by some particular persons and would probably have been ready enough to be Mercenary Bravo's to either any Iesuites or fifth-Monarchy men or the Jesuited Protestant Patrons of the Doctrine of Resistance But this Scum of the Country was afterward as naturally thrown off from the well governed City as are the Purgamenta Maris from the Shoar without making any Heads or Arms ake to remove them and not finding more welcome harbour in the City than they had in the Country were I believe litterally thrown upon the Sea to Convey them to the Asylum of the Malheureus that we may call our Foreign Plantations and of the great and extraordinary Glut of the Advenae from the Country ceasing in London after the year 1681 the yearly general Bills of Mortality gave a sufficient proof and did as I may say include too the Burial of the Plot or at least of the popular fears of danger from it The critical Observator on the Bills of Mortality having long since told us That there come about 6000 yearly out of the Country to live in London and which swells the Burials about 200 yearly and likewise taught us the Rule of 1 in 30 there yearly dying I have in p. 155 Calculated by the yearly great encrease of the Burials from the Year 1675 when the fears of the Growth of Popery were so much in fashion how very great the encrease of the number of the living there was to the Year 1679 inclusive and the extraordinariness of which encrease was so justly imputable to that of the
the honour of their Religion thereby attacqued yet I gave no Rule about the Merits of the matter in my private thoughts till I saw in the Prints the Copy of the Order of Council of November 2d 1679. reflecting on the Treasonable Papers thrown into a Gentleman's Chamber by which divers Noblemen and other Protestants were to be brought under a suspicion of carrying on a Plot against his Majesty and which Order was after a Person was sent to Newgate by the Council for forging of Letters importing High-Treason and fixing the same in a Gentlemans Chamber and oâ— which Forgery I yet thought none but some few of the faex Romuli who believed and practised the Jesuites Doctrine of Calumny could possibly be guilty But I presently accordâ—d in my thoughts with the many Loyal Protestants and Papists who judged another Effort that pretended to be of the same Nature with the former and referred to a Plot of Protestants to be a poor vile Artifice or Shamm projected by some Calumnious Anti-Papists a shamm too despicable to be here named and obvious enough to detection from the Trite saying That they who can hide can find But the many pitiful Shamms whose humming noise did a while please our Mobile and were below the notice of the Government have had their triduum insecti and are not to expect to live in Story or to be there Entombed like the Fly in Amber The powerful Effects of the Royal Declaration freeing our Land from the Plague of Fears and Jealousies and the Annoyance of the Swarms of these Flies as Moses his intercession prevailed to deliver a Realm from the Judgments of other ones will be a more adequate Subject to a great Writers thoughts and especially when he shall consider that in the Course of Nature and without Miracle those great Effects could not but rise from so great an Efficient and as to which any one will perhaps be of opinion with me who shall consider that the most terrible of terribles in so many mens apprehension of Popery is its arbitrariness and that therefore the publication of the Royal Resolution to govern according to the Laws would effectually secure us against all Arbitrary Power whatsoever Mr. Hobbs saith in his Behemoth I confess I know very few Controversies among Christians of Points necessary to Salvation They are the Questions of Authority and Power over the Church or of Profit or of Honour to Church-men that for the most part raise all the Controversy For what man is he that will trouble himself or fall out with his Neighbours for the saving of my Soul or the saving of the Soul of any other than himself And no doubt it is not barely any mens believing the Doctrines of Purgatory or Trasubstantiation or Merit or Works of Super-Errogation that hath made the past ferment among us but the Arbitrariness of the Papal Power and the Complication of the Tenet of the Plenitude of that Power with those Religionary Tenets and the making of it Penal not to receive those or other Tenets from Rome and the making men Tenants in capite to a Foreign Head for their Brains and Estates and an outlandish Bishop who lives a Thousand Miles off with new Non obstantes outraging their old Laws and whom they can never see blush after it But his Majesty having declared That he would use his Royal Endeavours both in and out of Parliaments to Extirpate Popery of which its Arbitrariness was its great dreaded part and in all things to Govern according to the Laws of the Realm the People knew that the Laws had sufficiently provided against Appeals to Rome as well as against Appeals from the Country to the City and that Declaration naturally fortified the minds of the People as a Praemunimentum guarding them before hand as I may say with allusion to our Statutes of Praemunire against the Arbitrary Power either of Rome or Geneva and did in effect set up an Ensurance Office in each of his Majestie 's Courts of Iustice to secure them against Arbitrary Power as such in whomsoever and that they might in in utramvis aurem dormire as to any danger from the same and 't is therefore no wonder that the Reflux of People from the Metropolis to the Country ensued thereupon as I have remarked out of the Bills of Mortality and from which Bills perhaps we may divert our selves with the sight of the Burial of that Plot which some feared and others hoped would have been immortal who would have had it Entailed too on their Heirs and Successors tho they would not allow the Crown to be so to the Royal Line The Political uses that the Bills of Mortality may be put to being more various than the profound Observator on them took the pains to mention as I have thence by a glancing view of the gradual Encrease of the People coming out of the Country for several years to dwell within the Compass of those Bills and likewise of the gradual decrease thence deduced given an account of what I thought might in some measure deserve the name of an Indication of the diminution of the popular fears resulting from the Burials after the great auspicious year of the Royal Declaration so I could in order to the lessening of the fears of the encrease of Dissentership within the Circuit of those Bills from the Total of the Christenings in the respective years since that of 81 give what I might without Vanity call more than Indicium and which perhaps would be by Critical Persons allowed for somewhat like a Demonstration of the Encrease of the Numbers there as I may say born into the Church of England and to what proportion and that very particularly and make it out thence that above the proportion between the Burials and Christenings that was in the Year 81 there were Christened 1084 in the year 82 and that the disposition of People for baptizing their Children in the way of the Church of England did encrease near a 13th part in the year 82 and that above the proportion between the Burials and Christenings that was in the year 82 there were in the year 83 Christen'd 2146 which is near a 6th part that the Baptizing of Children in the way of the Church of England hath gained and Dissentership hath lost ground in that year Nor do I find cause to alter my opinion of such baptizing in the way of the Church of England having lost but rather on the contrary gained ground in this year 84 tho to what proportion I cannot positively judge by reason of what I before hinted namely of the extraordinary proportion of the Burials this year arising from the Accidents of the great Frost and which Physicians by comparing the encrease of the particular Diseases by which so many died this year more than in the former happening from those Accidents have judged to be considerably above 3000 and likewise by reason of the Births having this year been reverâ considerably
fewer according to the Rule of the Observator on those Bills That the more sickly the year is it is the less fertile of Births All who have been in the least conversant with those Observations of his know that the Births in ordinary years are equal to the Burials or rather more and I have observed the same from the Paris Bills where the Christenings do generally much exceed the Burials and as particularly appeared by the Total of the Burials in the year 1683 being 17764 and the Total of the Christenings being 19717 but by the Christenings among us registred and reckoned in our Bills we know thence when the disposition of the People to baptize their Children in the way of the Church began to encrease and Dissentership consequently to decrease and accordingly the ground gained by the Church of England and lost by Dissentership within the Compass of those Bills after the year 81 hath been by me sufficiently proved Quod erat demonstrandum I have in this Discourse given somewhat like a little Historical Account of the Numbers of the Papists since the Reformation to our late Conjuâ—ctures and have with honour mentioned the Vigilance of his Majesty's late Minister the Earl of Danby in directing a Survey of the Numbers of the People of several Religionary Perswasions in the Province of Canterbury and which was returned in the year 76 and whereby the Comparative Paucity of the number of Papists there is apparent as it is by themselves agreed on so to be as I have cited out of the Compendium But tho the Copy of that Survey is in the hands of so many Persons I would not have mentioned any thing thereof as to the Number of the Papists but that Dr. Glanvill had first published the same and whose Book I have referred to for the same Nor shall I therefore give any particular account of the numbers of the Non-Conformists resulting from the same But tho I think that the Number of the Non-Conformists was not returned perhaps in that Survey so justly and near the matter as was that of the Papists yet I am fully of opinion that if the number of Non-Conformists were thrice as great as that returned which I believe no man will reckon it to be their proportion with that of the Total of this great Populous Nation would be very inconsiderable But as to all the Writers or Discoursers of their proportion to that Total that I have conversed with and who have rendered the Quota of the Dissenters so vast with much positiveness I am able to say That I have easily perswaded them to desist from any positive magisterial determination therein by shewing them that their measures of the Total of the People of England have been but conjectural and depending perhaps on some Calculations too fine and subtle or others too course and gross and that no man can be a competent Judge of this Total who hath not seen the Returns on the Bishops Survey and likewise the Returns on the late Pole-Bills and of which latter under the Patronage of a powerful Minister of the Kings I obtained Copies and have thence in the following Discourse shewed the Total of the People of England and Wales to be probably much greater than any cautious Calculators have made it and some whereof made the Total to be 5 others 6 others 7 Millions I thought the doing of this an acceptable service to my Prince and Country and the rather for that several Authors among the Magna nomina have published it in Print that the People of England and Wales are but 2 Millions and which number if they did not exceed we might allow our Dissenters a considerable proportion therein tho yet nothing near so great even as to such a Total as some would have it But the Ebb of their Numbers is at this time so apparent if we respect the State of them in the whole Kingdom that their Out-cry of Implevimus omnia and The Nation and its Trade cannot subsist without us is very ridiculous and they are not in my opinion their friends who writing for them do so customarily magnify their Numbers and as if they were half the People of England as some have done and I believe the Gentleman whom I have cited for saying in a late Parliament that he observed That in the Choice of Knights of the Shire for the County he lived in that they could not bring one in twenty to the Field would if he had been at Elections in some other Counties have found they could not there bring in so great a number And tho the Puritans of old were very numerous in the House of Commons and our Dissenters in the King 's long Parliament made so great a Figure as to be able by their weight to crush the Declaration for Indulgence yet in the succeeding Houses of Commons the Dissenters were far from valuing themselves an their weight or numbers but of the Dissenters in that Loyal Long Parliament I believe there were not any who wished for the Yoke of Presbytery or thought its Platform practicable in this Realm I have in this Discourse mentioned one thing that made the most Eminent Presbyterian Divines after 41 think their bringing of the Yoke of Presbytery upon the English Necks practicable and that is their accounting according to the Pacta conventa between Them and the Parliament they should have the Bishops and Deans and Chapters Lands settled on their Church whereby their Discipline how defective soever in weight as to Principles of Divinity and Humanity would have made it self â—ormidable by its Balance of Land and 't is probable that in Scotland the Livings of the inferiour Clergy weighing more in value than the Estates or Livelihoods of the ordinary inferiour Layety hath supported that Clergy there in their pretences to expect somewhat of Power and which they yet enjoy in the Figure of the Church Government there Established under Bishops and altho King Iames in his planting so many Benefices throughout that Kingdom worth 30 l. per Annum with a House and some Glebe Land belonging to them never intended any advantage to Presbytery thereby he yet occasioned some by making so many Divines there more considerable in wealth but our Presbyterian Divines here having been so fatally disappointed about the Bishops Lands promised them all ingenious men must necessarily thereby be made apprehensive that they are never to hope to bring the terror of that Church Government upon us by that means It is moreover observable that most of the Race of our old Presbyterian and Independant Divines having been extinct some few of whom were Learned Men and gave some Ornament to their Tenets by their Learning scarce any new ones and who appeared not in the Church before the King's Restoration have since by the publication of any Theological or DevotionalWritings propp'd up the Credit of their Party and that of the Ecclesiasticks of those perswasions none have published any thing valuable against
by them without paying the expected Civility and the Shot from which is not valued by Capital Ships that pass by them with a strong Gale of Wind and which perhaps think it not tanti to fire again upon the Fort nor doth that perhaps throw away more shot on them And thus stood this Munster Peace wrought as it were by the consent of the Crowned Heads and States of Christendom and thus it stands and any who will look into the Empire will find those Pacta conventa as to the part of the Emperor and Princes of the Empire outbraving the chances of time to this year how much soever the Emperor may be supposed to have been steer'd by Iesuites Councils and likely still so to do whereby the various Rights and Religions of Princes and their Subjects have been secured and whereby we may see how unstudied those men are in the great Book of the World who think that Popish Princes will not go on in the Course of their Politicks tho the Pope should seem in earnest or in jest to stop them and that they cannot tacitly reject the Papal Declarations of Nullity and yet continue Civil to the Pope and his Church The firm continuance of the Munster Peace to the year 1680 is mentioned by the Author of an ingenious Book called The Interest of Princes and States that year published and which goeth under the name of Mr. Bethel and where 't is moreover observed in p. 155. That among the Lutheran Princes the Prince of Hannover was lately turned Papist and likewise one of the House of the Landgrave of Hessen Darmestat and another of Mecklenburg lately turned Papist but their Countries do all continue Lutherans and among the Calvinist Princes he mentions the Elector of Brandenburg but saith his Dominions are most Lutherans and where in p. 156. 't is his Observation that of four Popish Princes of the Empire all their Countries are Lutherans and saith the Princes in this Country meaning Germany have no great influence on their Subjects in point of Religion and saith That in several Countries belonging to Popish Bishops and Abbots many Lutherans and some Calvinists have not only a Right but do also actually enjoy the publick exercise of their several Religions without disturbance and much more without Persecution and further instanceth in other places in Germany where the Proprietors are mixt of several Princes Earls Free Cities and Romish Ecclesiasticks which causeth in each of them the like Variety in Religion and some there being Lutherans and Papists and others being Calvinists Lutherans and Papists And thus we see instead of the Popes having nulled the Munster Peace cum effectu the Nulla fides servanda cum haereticis hath been nulled in Germany by Popish Princes and which if they had not done Luthers aforesaid nulli estis had been their doom and the Empire it self had scarce been more than a substantial Nullity as I may say alluding to what Vantius in his Book De Nullitatibus makes such In plain terms the Germans had not else been now a Nation nor would the Emperor again have been saluted by the Grand Signior as I have in some of the Comminatory Letters from the Port observed him called viz. Lord of few Regions and this any one I think will grant who shall consider that all the relaxation he hath had either of intestine troubles or Foreign between the years 1648 and 1680 hath made his Circumstances as to Power and Riches appear but just proportionable for holding his own with the help of his Neighbours against the Turk I have observed great right done to the Emperors Politicks in that Peace by a printed Panegyrical Oration made by Henricus Schmid a Famous Professor of Divinity in Tubing for the Celebration of the Munster Peace and wherein he saith That the Emperor preserved thereby at least the lives of eleven times a hundred and ninety two thousand Myriades of men that is of 21 thousand 1 hundred and 20 millions of men and whereupon the Panegyrist pronounceth That the World was blest by a new AEra from that Peace and some of the Expressions in that Oration for that purpose being very memorable I shall here set down viz. Ferdinande Caesar Auguste pie faelix triumphator salve Faelicior Iulio Caâ—sare qui gloriabundus fatebatur undecies centena nonaginta duo millia hominum praeliis à se occisa atque ita ut non veniat in hanc rationem stragem Civilium bellorum Tua Imperator quâ major esse non potest gloria claritudo erit totidem Myriadas aut plures non mactasse sed servasse Macte animo isto tuo imperator c. Tuis auspiciis novum Calendarium Iuliano longe melius ac emendatius orbi Christiano exhibetur quod pacis aera insignitur c. The Panegyrical Orator did in his Calculation of the Lives saved by the Emperor use more than Poetical Licence as any one will probably think who shall read what Sir W. P. in a printed Discourse hath mention'd of Critical Persons having judged that there are but 320 Millions of Souls now in the World and according to some ingenious mens Calculations I have seen in print concerning how much at a Medium each head may be supposed to add to the Riches of a State per year and thence making each to be therefore valuable at 80 l. Sterling the Panegyrick may be said to have made the Emperor preserve for the World by that Peace 1 Hundred 68 Thousand 9 Hundred and 60 Millions of Pounds Sterling But leaving so exorbitant a Sum for the disposition and Assets of Dego's Will and raillery apart accounting the lives of the hundreds of thousands slain in Germany on the Score of the Excommunication of Princes and Emperors as I have in p. 68 mentioned out of Erastus and suitably enough to Historical truth to have been valuable to the Empire at but half of 80 l. each it may well be supposed that it was a very vast Treasure that Germany hath lost by its Wars and preserved by its said Peace Yet is there one way assignable from which it may be deduced that the value of what the Emperor preserved was as much really too short as from the Panegyrists account it appeared extravagant and that is this viz. The Emperor by that Peace having kept so many from afterward destroying their own Souls by destroying others Bodies may be truly said to have preserved what was invaluable we know who having judged it that there is no proportion between the wealth of the whole World and one Soul. And now having by the deduction of the great Fact proved the Practicableness of the happy continuance of the luscious blessings of Peace and Unity of affections among Princes and their Subjects of different Religions I shall here in the Close of the Consideration of the same entertain the Reader with this last pleasant agreeable Scene of it which Scene will represent to him the fair Church
formerly observed to do upon the Worlds minding how much the Principles of the Iesuites had shook the Thrones of Kings and as particularly Father Caron in his Remonstrantia Hybernorum hath done and there citing 250 Popish Authors who deny the Pope's Power to depose Kings And no doubt but Dissenters late Omissions in this kind and Commissions in another will awaken the Magistracy to require from all Protestant Recusants such an exact Inventory of their Tenets as hath not yet been given it and the rather for that it is not by any Dissenters denied that the Sovereign is so far Custos utriusque tabulae as to be allowed to require all Religionary Parties to give him an account of their Principles and to live according to the Rule of them Thus in the Dutch States the Magistrates of every place where any Sect of the Heterodox is tolerated are religiously careful first to inform themselves exactly of all their Tenets and Principles and to see that they hold no opinion prejudicial to the Constitutions of their Government and none doubts but that the entire Body of the Tenets or Principles of the Dissenters to the Gallican Church is as conspicuous to that Church and State and indeed to the World as can be desired the present agreement of which with the Measures of Loyalty I have shewn in this Discourse Who hath there read the Hugonots Sayings published with any stain to their Loyalty or hath seen any of their Tenets branded for Sedition by an Vniversity or College in France But our Protestant Recusants having had here the liberty by Act of Parliament to enjoy their peculiar ways of Religious Worship in their own Families with the toleration of four others of the same perswasion to be present before all their Principles and Tenets have been notified to the Government is an instance of greater Indulgence shewn by the Government here to such Heterodox than I believe can be parallel'd in any Country whatsoever All dangers are naturally multiplied in the dark and it is a diminution of our dread of the very Iesuites Principles that they are generally known but if the Body of their Principles were as much unknown as are those of Protestant Recusants yet would the publick be more immediately concerned in having first an accurate account of those of the latter as being more numerous It may be well thought a Bankrupt Church whose Principles are latitant and any mens begging from the Magistrate Indulgence to a Principle of Sedition would be as shameful as the Insolence of a Beggar not only begging twenty Pound as our Comaedian said but begging a Leg or an Arm and not like a mans asking me who stands in my way as I am travelling on the Road that I would not ride over him but that he may mount into the Saddle whose Principles direct him to ride over me It was well observed by Lipsius in his Notes in Seneca That Naturae quodam Instinctu ea maleficia coercent homines puniunt quae societatem convellunt But as to any Out-rages from any Religionaries which are either prejudicial to the Bodies of particular Persons or even Convulsive of the Bodies of States and Kingdoms and to which the Actors might be inclined by their particular heats and not the general light of their avowed Principles I account that Complaints against such will soon evaporate into Air or be buried in Earth and with some allusion to the words of Let the dead bury the dead I may say let Plots bury Plots and Shams Shams and let any Seditious Protestants and Seditious Papists on the Compensation of their Crimes forbear troubling others by calling one another Criminals and the Figure of the Body of their Parties can no more be altered by the unevenness and exorbitance of the actings of particular Persons than is the rotundity of the Earth by the ruggedness of Rocks or protuberance of Mountains And that where one Papist goeth out of the World at the back door of Justice for the Treason of Clipping and Coyning twenty of the more numerous body of the Protestants do so is not to be wondered at but the id ipsum to be regarded in any reflections made on a Religion by occasion of its Criminals is its Principles and if it could be proved that any Caetus of men were allowed by the Church of England to assert the lawfulness of that Treason as both Papists and Presbyterians have the lawfulness of the Doctrine of Resistance that indeed would have the weight of a just Reflection on our CHVRCH Tho several dissolute and nominal Protestants may possibly have invented and forged as many Shams and Calumnious Accusations against other Protestants and Papists as if they had believed the Practice of Calumny to be lawful yet hath any of them published in Print the Tenet of the lawfulness of it or its being a poor Peccadillo Who knoweth not that some particular Divines of the Church of England by the turbulence of their several dispositions have enflamed differences and divisions in our Church and State But who can charge them from doing this by Communication of Councils with their Superiors and by instruction from them Were any of them charged by Proclamations for doing any thing of that nature as some Popish Recusants were by his Majesty 's of Ian. 16. 1673. for chiefly occasioning the intestine divisions among us and by his Majesty's Proclamation of December 2d 1680. for fomenting of differences among his Loyal Protestant Subjects But yet this Fact tho thus by the Government charged on some ill men of that Religionary perswasion would not have moved me to reflect with the leaâ—t heat on the Order of Iesuites in this Discourse by whom so many of our Roman Catholicks are conducted but for their own Proclamations of their Principles in their Books and particularly as to the point of Calumny the only Engine by which Divisions could be wrought among Protestants and but for their setting up that Doctrine heretofore without leave from the Pope's Canon Law and backing it with another to fright any Fools or Knaves from disparaging or even calumniating them and for their making use and application of these Doctrines since the Pope had damned them by a Proclamation I mean his Edict of March 79 and but for Father Parsons having so scandalously exposed the narrowness of his Soul and the poor Ideas he had of Humane Nature and even of the Character of a Gentleman by saying what I have in p. 61. cited out of his Book of The Succession viz. That many Iealousies Accusations and Calumniations must needs â—â—ght on the Party that is of different Religion from the State and Prince under whom he lives As there is very little in this Discourse that reflects on any Principles of the Romanists that may be called Religionary so neither have I troubled my self to attacque the Tenets of the Society of the Iesuites and of other Casuists condemned by this Pope that do not hominum societatem
let men see how the Pastorage of the Church of England treats them like Gentlemen and may serve to awaken their Compassion for their deluded Country-men whom they see frâ—ghtened by their Teachers into a fancy of the unlawfulness of a Ceremony and yet embolden'd by them into the belief and practice of a Covenant without the King's Consent and from which Persons we should perhaps quickly receive Alarms of Persecution if the Government should impose any Covenant or Test on them in order to Loyalty tho never so necessary for the publick Peace But the World is aweary of the umbrage Sedition hath found among denominations of Churches and of judging of Trees by their Shadows or otherwise than by their Fruit that is by their Principles and for the happiness of the present State of England after we have by many Religion-Traders been troubled with almost as many Marks of true and false Churches as there are of Merchants Goods Nature seems to have directed the People to agree in this indeleble Character and Mark of a false Church namely one whose Principles are Disloyal The Genius of England is so bent upon Loyalty in this Conjuncture that a disloyal Principle doth jar in the Ears of ordinary thinking men like a false string in the Ears of a Critical Lutenist and the which he knows that Art or Nature can never tune and upon any Churches valuing themselves on the intrinsic worth or the weight of their Principles as most opposite to Falshood men generally now take into their hands the Touch-stone and the Scales of Loyalty and do presently suspect any Church that refuseth to bring its Principles to be touch'd and weigh'd and they will not now allow the Reputation of a visible Church to any body of Men whose Principles relating to Loyalty shall not first be made visible Nor can it be otherwise thought by the impartial than that Mens Consciousness of somewhat of the Turpitude of some of their Principles restrains them from bringing them to appear in publick View and according as Cicero in his de fin bon mal answers Epicurus who said that he would not publish his Opinion lest the people might perhaps take offence at it viz. Aut tu eadem ista dic in judicio aut si coronam times dic in senatu Nunquam facies Cur nisi quod turpis est Oratio I who thus urge the Reasonableness and Necessity of mens being Confessors of their Principles of Loyalty have frankly exposed one of mine own in p. 131. and which I say there that I account the great fundamental one for the quiet of the World as well as of a Man 's own Conscience viz. That no man is warranted by any Intention of advancing Religion to invade the right of the Sovereign Power that is inherent in Princes by the municipal Laws of their Countreys and I have mention'd the same in p. 136. as owned by the Non-conforming Divines in King Iames his time Tho I believe as firmly as any man that the Christian Religion doth plainly forbid the Resistance of Authority and that his Majesties Royal Power is immediately from God and no way depends on any previous Election or Approbation of the people yet since the Sons of the Church of England are sufficiently taught both that Doctrine and likewise that human Laws in the point of their Allegiance do bind the Conscience and since other men who err in Principles of Loyalty may sooner be brought to see the Absurdity of their Error by the known Laws of the Land than by Argumentations from Scripture which may admit of Controversy and since his Majesty hath been pleased to expect the Measures of our Obedience from the Laws and that our English Clergy while in the late Conjuncture they have so universally preach'd up Loyalty have so religiously accorded with the Measures of the Laws and have therein as I may say shewed themselves Apostolical Pastours and since the persons whose Complaints of the danger of Popery are most loud do joyn therewith their Exclamations against Arbitrary or Illegal Power and seem to joyn Issue in the point that they are willing that the Power that is by Law inherent in the Crown should be preserved to it I thought it most useful in the present Conjuncture to assert the Principle in these Terms I have done and I the rather chose to do it because I thought that the security of the Crown is by some Laws well provided for whose Obligation admits of no Doubt I mean those whereby Men have been obliged to take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy But moreover as I consider'd it to be one great valuable Right inherent by Law in our Princes to secure the Continuance of the Succession in their Line so I likewise judged the legal Right of Princes to Succeed according to Proximity of Blood to be unalterable and therefore having my eye on the prevention of further Scandal to Protestancy from the Exclusion I introduced that Principle so worded as aforesaid that by dilating thereon as I have done I might bring the Reader the better prepared to my Casuistical Discussion of the Oaths The Reader will find at the end of this Discourse the Casuistical Discussion of the Obligation to the King's Heirs and Successors resulting from the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy by me promised in p. 214 and the occasion of my writing which is likewise there mentioned It was wholly writ in the time that the Question of the Succession made the greatest noise among us and was then by me Communicated to several of my Friends in Terms as herewith printed without any thing since added or diminished and both it and the Discourse which contains so many things naturally Previous to the Consideration of that Question would have been long since published but partly for the various Accidents of Business and Sickness that necessarily interrupted me in the Writing of the latter And tho perhaps the Publication of the former in the time of the Sessions of our late Parliaments might have been more significant than after the Volly of Loyal Addresses shot of manifesting the general just zeal against the Exclusion of which Addresses I yet observed none to mention any thing of the Obligations to Allegiance to the King's Heirs and Successors from the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy it may be said that the subsequent Births of Fate have not restrained the possibility of its usefulness in future times and tho Heaven may be propitious to our Land in the blessing it according to the Loyal Style of the Addresses namely in his Majesties Line continuing on the English Throne as long as the Sun and Moon endure yet many and many may be the Conjunctures when a supposed Heterodox Prince shining like the Sun in the Firmament of the English State and regularly moving in the Line of the Law and his own Religion may attract the dull Vapours of Fears and Jealousies again as another glorious Prince hath done and
about any Clause in any Oath or Covenant forbidding obedience to the present Government and Authority by adding to it the consideration of obeying it when no other Government can be had and of the Common-wealths going to ruine if the present Government were not obeyed and having thereby insinuated that the Obligation of the Oath ceased was so horribly impolitick as to prop up that insinuation by a passage cited for that purpose out of a Popish Casuist who saith That when a thing sworn is too difficult or he that swore is by change of Abilities or Estate rendred less apt to perform or lastly when the thing sworn is an hinderance to the swearer from consulting the publick good then there is a lawful Cause of DISPENSING in the Oath We have here then found a Protestant and a Casuist-would-be exalting himself above all that is called God to Dispense with Oaths a thing that Protestancy abhorreth and a thing that the Oath had precluded in these words I do believe and in Conscience am resolved that neither the Pope nor any other Person whatsoever hath power to absolve me of this Oath or any part thereof Thus as the Author hath by his interpretation of the word Successor qualified an Vsurper to have the benefit of the Oath of Allegiance to our lawful Monarch so he hath bare-faced made himself Successor to the Pope and an Vsurper upon Oaths by dispensation More instances need not be given of the hortor of Heavens withdrawing its ordinary influences from particular men of extraordinary parts who after they have despised Dominions and Dignities and their Oaths to them would be Critical inventors of new Rules concerning the Allegiance to Kings and the Oaths about the same but who have thereby appeared more despicable than the Pedants who call themselves Criticks whose skill in the Minutiae of words or trivial Niceties in the learned Languages hath yetâ—secured their pride from being humbled by erring in the sense of words in their Mother Tongue When I was writing the former part of the following Discourse out of my just Compassion to my Country as well as to the Noble Lord and others who suffered so unjustly by Oaths Assertory in the time of the Martyrocrasy as I called it when every single Witness was almost as considerable as Ingulfus the Abbot of Crowland Confessor to William the Conqueror was in his time of whom it was said that Quoâ— voluit humiliavit quos voluit exaltavit and when if the number of Witnesses had continued to encrease and swarm as it began it would in time have scarce left any to be Judges or Jurors and when some of them who were bread-worshippers were yet almost as much adored by the Mobile of Protestants as the Host is by the Papists I had thoughts to have entertained our English World with an account of the particularities of the usage that Witnesses in the Case of Treason find in the World abroad and to have shewed how the Custom and Practice of Nations and their Laws have with all the Critical Nicety of Politicks imaginable provided that such Witnesses may neither be too much discouraged by fears nor encouraged by hopes and that it frequently there happened that in the discharge of the Office of Witnessing men were to expect so great an allay of trouble and so much exposed to depend on the next World for the reward of their Veracity in this as to prevent in this an allay of truth with falshood in their Testimony and that sometimes when Paupers come to be Witnesses in Criminal Causes they have not Beds of Roses provided for them but are put to the Rack and that ordinarily the bodies of such Witnesses are â—acked on their being found vacillant and halting in their Testimony and whereby they had given Iudges occasion to think that such Witnesses had first tried the Rack upon their Souls and Consciences But tho I thought any Scene of that would appear horrid to an English Eye as it doth to the Eye of our Laws I have yet in this Discourse mentioned how the Iewish Law by God's express Command took care to prevent mens ambitus in standing for the Office of Witnesses by tacking thereunto the standing Office of Executioners and I have in my Notions of infamous Witnesses exactly accorded with the Justice of our English Laws our lex terrae being the allowed Land-mark for all to go by in matters judicial and I have endeavoured by that to stop the Course of an infamous Person when from an Accuser â— he would presently grow to be a Witness and è Serpente factus Draco or as I may say be always growing in Arbitrary Accusation and like a Crocodile never come to his full growth and I have not robbed him of his right of being an informer in Cases where the lives of Princes are concerned and have moreover represented such a Malefactor capable by his penitence and subservience to the great influx of Providence on the safety of Crown'd Heads of being thought his Countries Benefactor and a piece of a Founder to it and could have gone no higher without following our profanum vulgus in making every Informer and Witness a Saviour a word that Cicero was much scandalized at and taxed Vèrres about because he found him at Syracuse written 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a Saviour and said that the Style of such an one could not be expressed in one Latin word I have moreover fairly stated how and when and by what exercises performed relating to Moral Philosophy an infamous Person may as a Witness commence graduate in Credibility But Moribus antiquis stat Res Britannica and so I desire it may while the World stands and as I have occasionally mentioned Boccaline's Character of the best Reformer viz. One who leaves the World as he finds it so I have took care to be no Propounder or Innovator about new Methods or Systemes of Politicks in the point of Accusation or Testimony which is so extraordinarily tender and wherein I have found the wisest and greatest of the Ministers of Princes to whose Custody the depositum of their Masters Crowns and Lives was committed to appear undetermined as to their measures And of this D' Ossat's Letter 150th and to Villeroy in the year 1602 hath transmitted to the World a remarkable instance where he saith I have received advice from Lorrain that an English Divine called Pitts having held Communication with a French Divine called St. German about killing the King and the said St. German having dropped some words whereby another came to understand it the Bishop of Toul examining it caused the said St. German as well as the said Pitts to be put in Prison and by the Party accused denying the Fact his Condition is found better than the Accusers who hath no way to prove what the other said to him none else being present which proceeding whether 't was deliberate or by neglect tends to this that no man hence forward to
shall when he comes on shore by a protestation bid defiance to the pride of the whole Ocean he deserves not the name of a Hero that Safe-guarded by both the Land and the Law of the Land shall not on occasions offered continually have the courage to protest against the dammages both his King and Country have from the Rage of Popery My Lord I have been the longer in discoursing of the insignificancy of words or indeed ought but the emphasis of works requisite to shew a Protestant faith at this Juncture because I am sure you are willing as you may well be to joyne issue on that point and to be judged a Protestant in mans day by your works as you must in Gods stand or fall by the Test of them at the last Audit and to appear a Protestant too by works above the poor level of a dull opus operatum by works that represent the continual employment of your life with an Heroical vigour and your going from strength to strength as the Scripture expression is in the defence of Protestancy by works that speak you like the heavenly bodies incessant in your influence and haveing rest only in Motion 'T is not without wisdom ordered by the Pope That no men shall be Cannonised till after death for fear of Apostacy nor then likewise unless it shall appear that they wrought Miracles And the truth is our people were all so far born with Popes in their bellies as to this point that they will not now Cannonize any Great Men for Protestant Saints unless at this time they do Miracles and indeed I think they have reason to insist on their doing as great miracles for our Religion as any Papal Saints dead or alive have done against it And when I consider the real Great Things that have been by the heads and hands of your Lordship and other Noble Persons performed for the Statuminating of the Protestant cause and enabling us to say to our underminers with the confidence of the Psalmist As a bowing wall shall ye be and as a tottering fence I do think you may expect with Justice that which is greater then our praise the acclamations of our blessing as Aristotle saith that to heroick qualities in men not praise but pronouncing blessed is due 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and as St. Paul saith it is more blessed to give then to receive And here my Lord going by this exact Rule of measuring things by things and not by words your Life hath enabled me to give the strictest Aeropagus of Censurers the world can produce and who would damn the use of Proems and the art of moving passions by words an irrefragable instance how you have secured the Nation formerly from being enslaved to and by Popery and at that time when we seemed to our selves as secure from it as from Mahumetanisme which was when you were the great Conductor of the Publick Councels in the Conjuncture that brought in the King and hindred Lambert's usurpation of the English Scepter who tho at that time he was not generally suspected to be a Papist was on very rational grounds believed to be such then by many very knowing particular persons and that too to be not only a Papist but a Iesuited one He was at that time suspected by some for having advised at a military cabal of the then great ones that the Cavaleers should be Massacred a cruelty that could enter into no breast but one abandoned to Jesuitisme And as on such a Monster your Lordship then had your eye on him and of his being such some of the depositions and examinations took about the late plot have been very particular and satisfactory Nor is his haveing petition'd some few years before the discovery of the late Plot That he might have his Liberty and of a very great Roman Catholic Lord's having then offer'd to be security for his quiet demeanor Now unknown so that the Kingdom then scaped falling into Popery before the danger was by it apprehended like the Man who in the Night scaped that of Rochester Bridge and whom the light of the following day almost confounded with his deliverance Your Lordships activity and prudence appearing in the public Councels and in your Secret correspondences to the defeating of the councels of that Romish Achitophel and seisure of his person will no more be forgiven you by the Papists of England then it either by the Papists of England or Ireland will be forgiven or forgot that you shew'd your self a true Father of your Country in Ireland in the Conduct foremention'd of that great Affair of the Metropolis and many Garrisons of that Kingdom being wholly put into the hands of the Parliament rather than the Child as I may say should be divided between any of his Majesties Subjects and the Pope the pretended supream Father of that Country and that you preserved it to come into the hands of the true Supream One. Your Lordship and other well-wishers to the Crown then were not of the humour of some of our young vulgar Protestants who as the Papists parrots have been by them taught to speak it commonly That they love a Papist better than a Presbyterian 'T is sinful not to love the persons of both but ridiculous to love the Yoke of either opinion and it seems his late Majesty of glorious Memory and his Councel and his noble Lieutenant of Ireland and your Lordship thought it safer for the Crown for Ireland to be trusted with that sort of disobedient Children that depended on no forraign Ecclesiastical Head then on such as did And it is to be acknowledged to your Lordships care of the freedom of your Country that when you sat in the long Parliament till you and other Members thereof were torn thence by Cromwel's Souldiers you crusht the Iure-divinity of Presbytery in the Egg by its being ordered to be setled only for three years so that it saw it was to be expeditated at the end of three years and had no power to trample upon the consciences of others and in effect had but a tolleration I think that no Church-Government at all is better then that rigid one of Presbytery intended then by some Zealots As the good and learned Dean of Canterbury said in his Sermon on the Fifth of November before the House of Commons That as to Popery 't were better there were no revealed Religion and that humane Nature were left to the conduct of its own principles and inclinations then to be acted by a religion that inspires men with so wild a fury and prompts them to commit such outrages c. and there renders Popery worse then Infidelity or no Religion and so indeed in fact the Kingdom had then no Church-Government paramount at all in it and instead of the imagined fierce pedagogy of the Scotch Presbytery that made every Levite a Rabby Busy every Pulpit Rhetor a Consul and every Lay-Elder Major General of the Parish we had a tame insignificant
of lust try to puzzle the Cause of Religion and by distinctions to make Golden Bridges for Men to retreat from Morality And this Course the Iesuits have took By their Casuistical distinctions they have broke both the Tables of the Moral Law into innumerable pieces they have broke not only the least but greatest of the Commandments and have taught men so to do and how to do it with a Salvo to them and how Salvo metu fide peccare and by being Casuistical Splitters of Sin have been as troublesome to the World as Splitters of Causes are to a Country The Christian Religion that great Tye intended by Heaven to be like a substantial and great Cable as I may say to supply the great Anchor of our hope they have made it their great business to untwist by their nice distinctions and to make it so fine that it will not hold and by encouraging Lies and Calumnies for the honour of Holy Church they have help'd the Politic-Atheists-would be to a new occasion of trying to insinuate that old impotent-Slander that Religion it self is a Cheat and moreover since it is on all hands Confessedly true that Religion is necessary for the Government of the World and that every Ligament of Humane Society without Religion is but like a rope of Sand 't is probable that the Iesuits Morality being destructive of Religion that the Nations of the World will look on it and their Society as an Association against Humane Society and that one Nation after another will declare themselves Abhorrers of it And it must by necessity of Nature appear that they cannot be Confessors of truth nor Martyrs for any but the Devil that make lying venial nor can their fate who pretend to be Witnesses in the Cause of Religion be any other than is that of some according to the Law and Practice of Nations who are Witnesses in any Cause to have their whole Deposition rejected upon the Discovery of one falsity therein And since 't is confessed to be the Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church and particularly of the Trent-Council that the intention of the Priest is necessary to the validity of a Sacrament who can promise to himself safe anchoring in the Depths of a Jesuits intentions to make the Sacrament while he makes Cheating lawful If any one shall say that so vile a thing is not to be supposed in a Priest as upon any occasion not to intend the making of the Sacrament let him consult the Additionals to the Mystery of Iesuitism and there he shall see p. 95. Proposition 23. no meaner a Iesuit than the Great Casuist Escobar cited for this Assertion That it is lawful upon Occasion of some great fear to make use of Dissimulation in the Administration of the Sacraments as for a man to make as if he Consecrated by pronouncing the words without attention Escobar Theol. Moral Tom. 1. l. 6. Sect. 2. C. 7. Prob. 26. p. 27. And in this point the Pope's said Decree is infallible namely to shew the fact of this Doctrine of Devils having been own'd by Jesuits and Casuists as appears by the Proposition 29th in the Decree viz. Vrgens metus gravis est Causa justa Sacramentorum administrationem simulandi O Blessed Jesus can any Jesuit think it is lawful for him so far to fear those that can kill the Body as by his Dissembling his making of thy Body to destroy anothers Soul by Idolatry 'T is among both Papists and Protestants confessedly true that if the Host I worship should not be the Body of Christ I were a great Idolater and therefore if a Priest by that incident Passion of fear may lawfully forbear to intend to make the Body of Christ I may well have such a constant fear as do's cadere in Constantem virum of the danger of my worshipping only a Wafer and consequently of my being an Idolater and since a Miracle is Heaven's Broad Seal to the truth of any Doctrine and since Transubstantiation is the greatest Miracle that can be thought of I may well conclude that God will not commit the Power of making Millions of Miracles every day to men that make Cheating lawful more than a Prince will commit the Custody of his Broad Seal to a professed Impostor And therefore I shall 〈◊〉 the way affirm that the Protestant Religion not making the intention of the Prâ—est essential to the Sacrament of the Eucharist is more strongly assertive of the Real presence there then is the very Popish Hypothesis The truth is 't is a very inglorious and a very imprudent thing to use fraud even in the Conduct of Political Government My Lord Herbert in his Life of Harry the Eighth speaking of a foreign Monarch saith with great Judgment but while he escaped not the Opinion and the Name of false which yet his Country Writers pallâ—aâ—e no otherwise than with calling it Saberraynar he neither comply'd 〈◊〉 his Dignity nor indeed the Rules of Wisdom true reason of State consisting of such solid Maxims that it hath as little need of Deceit as a sure Game at Chess of a false Draught there is no use of it therefore among the wiser sort it being only a supply of Ignorance among the Ruder and worse kind of Statesmen Beside it appears so much worse in Public Affairs as it is never almost hid or unrevenged Reputation again is still lost thereby which yet how much it concerns Princes none can better tell than such as Imagine them without it But to use Fraud in or for that great concern of Mankind call'd Religion is more absur'd and 't is the vilest Nonsence imaginable for Men to talk deceitfully for God and that style of a foreign Monarch of Dissembling his Indignation need not be used by him who made the World with a fiat and can unmake it with a thought and whatever Religion in the World is true I am sure that is and must be false that attempts to support it self by falshood or fraud and by the Violation of Faith given For I am sure that to stand to Promises to abhor Deceit is a thing in its own nature simply good and that it is impossible that God should lye and if it be simply good in God it is necessarily so in Man whom he hath made after his own Image the Image being to answer the Archetype and that Religion therefore that doth approve of falsarii and which cannot have the true God for its Founder and in which every honest man may justly say to the Deity of its worshippers Stand by thy self come not near me for I am holier then thou as the Scripture expression is must expect to be exterminated out of the Knowing World. Such worshippers can be no more judged parts of the Ecclesia Catholica than Pick-pockets in Churches are of the Coetus fidelium there and as when these petty Larceners are there discovered they are glad silently thence to steal themselves away such perhaps will the
by Some non-Papists I know not My Author for it is Mr. Iohn Gee Master of Arts of Exeter Colledge in Oxford in his Book 4 to Call'd New Shreds of the Old Share p. 103. Printed at London in the Year 1624. In any such wretched Contention between the faex Romuli and any of the Protestants here who should become most impure by Calumny as the Protestants being much more Numerous than the Papists would be able to out-shamme them and to make the more plain detections of the Shammes contriv'd by their Adversaries it would likewise go the harder with any Sect that the Majority of Numbers would thus run down with Shammes in this Nation at this Conjuncture of time when the many swarms of those who offer at Wit and think they merit the being call'd Witts by doing the exercise in a Coffey-house Call'd Baldring that is with a serious grave face telling idle feign'd Stories farced with particular Circumstances to ensnare the belief of the Credulous which kind of ungenerous triumphing over weak Understandings by ridiculous Shammes is a false sort of wit and humour below not only the gravity of the English Nation but the levity of the French and used by none but Fools who stand for the place of being Knaves There is no doubt but the talent of these foolish Shammers as their interest and dependances or humors incline them to wish well either to Popery or Protestancy extending to abuse the belief of the unthinking Vulgar with little romantic Stories concerning those Religions helps to Convey them into the Press which gives wings to these Shams presently to fly round the Kingdome If the Papists think the Press hath not in any of the Pamphlets it dayly spits charged them with Calumny and of Such a Nature as to bring universal odium on them by alarming the Kingdom almost as much as it could be by forrain invasion and occasionally laying a Tax on men to buy what Arms for their defence the Law allowes I will ask them what they think of one of our printed Intelligences that Came out on the 26 th of February 1680 1 wherein 't is said Last Fryday came a Letter from Stafford directed to one Bacchus Tenant to the Lord Stafford from one Wilson in Cheshire but ordered to be left with one Finny of Stafford to be sent to the said Bacchus but Finny observing Letters so directed to pass through his hands and apprehending they might relate to some dangerous Correspondence took the liberty to Open this and therein to his great surprize found directions to Bacchus for burning of Stafford and several great Towns upon which making a speedy discovery to a Magistrate Bacchus was sent for who after some evasions did confess he had received Letters to that purpose And just now the said Wilson is apprehended and committed and confesseth he was by the order of a Certain Lord to fire Stafford Drayton Shrewsbury Nantwich Chester Congerton New-Castle Under-Line and two more and that he was to have 900 l. for fireing those Nine Towns. I having never heard of any Proclamation or proceedings either of the Magistracy or Lievtenancy of this Kingdom after such an alarm of public hostility and of a Rebellion hatch'd in the Kingdom nor of the last punishment inflicted on the pretended Certain Lord that was the General of those Incendiaries did look on them under the Notion of an Army in disguise But whatever ground the Protestant Religion hath got or shall get by these poor means I desire that it may go to the Next occupant for not only the ayr it exhales is Pestilential but it includes that ayr in it which may produce Earthquakes which dangers therefore the New Popish or Jesuited Religion must be exposed to by the ayr of Shams and Calumnies My Lord I shall here entertain your Lordship with somewhat very Remarkable out of the Book of Father Parsons of the Succession whereby you will see that instead of Allowing the oportet esse haereses he doth in effect tell us that while the Kingdom has two Religions in it oportet esse Calumnias that great Jesuite having with much agility danced on the high rope as to the Casuistical part of the Question of the Succession affects to do it too in the Politics but miss'd his Center of gravity in his motion both as a Divine and a States-man and did shamefully fall in either Capacity as your Lordship will find by the reading of his words He saith p. 217. being near the Conclusion of the first part of his Book And thus much now for matter of Conscience But if we Consider Reason of State also and worldly Policy it Cannot be but great folly and oversight for a man of whatsoever Religion he be to promote to a Kingdom in which himself must live one of a Contrary Religion to himself for let the bargains and agreements be what they will and fair promises and vain hopes never so great yet seeing the Prince once made and settled must needs proceed according to the Principles of his own Religion it follows also that he must Come quickly to break with the other party tho he loved him never so well which yet perhaps is very hard if not impossible for two of different Religions to love sincerely but if it were so yet many jealousies suspicions accusations Calumniations and other aversions must needs light upon the Party that is of different Religion from the State and Prince under whom he lives as not only he Cannot be Capable of such Preferments Honours Charges Government and the like which men may deserve and desire in their Commonwealth but also he shall be in Continual danger and subject to a thousand molestations and injuries which are incident to the Condition and state of him that is not Current with the same Course of his Prince and Realm in matters of Religion and so before he be aware he becomes to be accounted an Enemy or backward man which in Mind he must either dissemble deeply and against his own Conscience make shew to favour and set forward that which in his heart he doth detest which is the greatest Calamity and Misery of all other tho yet many times not sufficient to deliver him from suspicion or else to avoid this everlasting perdition he must break with all the temporal Commodities of this life which his Country and Realm might yield him and this is the ordinary end of all such men how soft and sweet soever the beginning be This Iesuite who was before mention'd to have been Call'd one of the greatest Men that his Order has produced was here it seems a States-man in his heart and no More and has very honestly foretold all Protestants that shall live under a Prince of another Religion how dishonest Roman Catholics will prove to them The Jesuite was here an Almanac-maker who predicted nothing to Protestants but Lightning and Thunder and too the Continual Raining of Snares upon them during such a Conjuncture and
be affirm'd That all Monkish hopes of our Ploughmen happening again to be over-run by Shepherds are very extravagant and Popery will grosly err if it shall think that Poverty will ever compel this sort of men to the turpitude of taking up illegal Arms for it or that it can eradicate their innate hatred against it The Subsistence that the Plough afforded our Husbandmen in their Trade made few of them in Comparison of those of other Trades become Souldiers in our late Civil Warrs Nor were they then observ'd to favour those hyhocritical Religion-Traders the Land was then pester'd with Nor indeed can they who really Till and Improve the Earth naturally affect those who pretend to Cultivate Heaven and by necessity of Nature it must still come to pass that they who acquire their own bread by rearing it for others with hard labour will have an aversion against those who can subsist luxuriously by cheating others of it with easie Tricks and against any attempts for a Resetled Monkery which would after the mode of the Pyed Piper demand an unconscionable rate for trying to rid us of a few haeretical Mice and which too tho our Land should pay would yet depopulate it of its Children And here I cannot forbear to Observe That there happen'd one thing so momentous that it can never be forgot while the English Nation has a Being and which did among our people in the Country Convey a fresh sense of the Pestilential nature of Popery and of the encreasing Danger of its infection and that is that the Body of our Clergy of the Church of England did generally from the Press and Pulpit for some Years together send so many strong Antidotes against Popery round the Kingdom Every Pulpit almost from one end of the Land to the other did resound as I may say with a Seasonable discourse against Popery It may be with Justice apply'd to those Discourses of our Divines That they alarmed more than our English World or perhaps the Roman and that the World elsewhere did ring with their 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 I here allude to those words in the Epistle to the Romans 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Their sound went into all the Earth and their words to the ends of the World. There is no doubt but their Sound was heard to Rome by the help of the Iesuits intelligence and that our Divines knew when they so Preach'd and Writ they had pass'd the Rubicon and that 't was in vain like Cranmer to try to be reconciled to irreconcileable Rome and that 't would be as much in vain in any Course of future time to use politic whispers in Commendation of Popery after their former loudness against it as for one who told a Husband that he saw such an one strugling to ravish his Wife to say afterward that he was a very Civil Gentleman Our Fanaticks therefore do by nothing more deserve that Name then by nick-naming the Body of the Clergy of the Church of England as fautors of Popery since 't was but of yesterday that almost all our First and Second Rate Divines did like Capital Ships as I may say one after another attaque the Fleet of the Romanists and discharge their Thunder upon them but as my Lord Bacon hath observ'd That in great Sounds the Continuance is more than momentany and that the noyse of Great Ordnance of which the Sound is carry'd many miles on the Land and much further on the Sea will there come to the Ear not in the instant of the shooting off but an hour or more later the which must needs be the Continuance of the first Sound Thus too I hope that the aforesaid late 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of our Capital Divines against Popery which has been heard far and near among our Countery Inhabitants and will I believe Continue audible among them during the hour of life will in part of that hour sooner or later be heard with regard by our weaker Brethren But what a Daemon then in understanding or God of Eloquence had he need to think himself and to be thought too such by others who Imagines to talk England both out of its Manna of Religion and what is better then its Flesh-Pots too and to persuade us by bringing in Monkery again to have our Land ore-run with Flocks of Sheep and to want hands to Work their Fleeces or as I may say to fancy to have Manufacture without hands and for want thereof to make our Sheep almost useless but only to eat and in that way too to be chiefly appropriated to the Stomachs of Lubbers and who would allow our Land Flocks of Sheep but not Dogs to guard them I mean a sufficient growing Populacy in the Land to defend both it and the very Flocks in it and I may add too who would almost make the Wooll of our Sheep useless but only to send into Forrain Parts and who would abdicate from the Land that benefit of the continual passing of our Wooll here through so many hands busy'd in Trade and thence fill'd with Wealth in the way of Interest upon Interest intended by Nature for the maintenance and subsistance of our People so multiplying as aforesaid and preparing Tables for all new Guests here let them come into the World never so fast and would have us Consent to the diminution of the Number of our People when for want of our being fully stock'd with them so great a part of our Land lyes fallow every Year as doth not in Countreys sufficiently Populous and where the Lands value will quit the cost of the Manuring Alas when through the Divine Blessing England shall arrive at the state of being fully Peopled and being got beyond Pasture that first improvement of a thin Peopled Country shall likewise have Compleated that second of Tillage that our being better Peopled will occasion there will lie a third in our View to employ the Labours of our Consummate Populacy namely that of Gardening and to oblige us that the Earth shall produce nothing but what is exactly useful and instead of going back from Tillage to Pasture we must naturally go forward from Tillage to Gardening whereby one Acre may be made to maintain Twenty persons whereas now 't is observ'd that 20 Acres generally throughout England maintain but a fourth of that number viz. 5. persons And when we are thus furnished with as many People as by Tillage or Gardening can well live on the Land 't is then and not before that our encreasing Populousness will push on greater numbers of our Inhabitants to live on the Sea which none will choose to do that can live on the Shoare and 't is only such a state of populacy that can naturally make us Masters of the Fishing-Trade to compass which all our Projects before whether by Acts of Parliament or Companies and Stock will be but Chymerical Moreover 't is only such a state of Populacy that will exonerate us of those burdens of
their Guardian and account it a very preposterous thing that since our Saviour refused to divide an Inheritance his pretended Vicar should do nothing else Moreover Holy Churches resuming all its Lands out of Lay hands would appear the more strange in England when we see as my Lord Primate Bramhal saith in his vindication of the Church of England p. 212 that the very Kings of Spain impose Pensions usually on Ecclesiastical preferments to the 4th part of the value and particularly one Pension on the Arch-Bishoprick of Sivile in favour of an Infant of Castile of greater value then all the Pensions there imposed by the Pope and when we know that the French King doth for the behoof of so great a number of Lay-men impose so many and great Pensions on the Abbeys without saying to the Abbots more then Car tel est nostre plaisir Sir Edwyn Sands in his Europae Speculum writ in the Year 1599 and in the time of Harry the 4 th of France speaking of that Kingdom saith That there the Church Prelacies and other Governments of Souls are made the Fees and Charges of meer Courtiers and Soldiers and our excellent Animadverter on Monsieur Sorbier reflecting on that Country Intimates in effect how there the chiefest spiritual dignities are entailed upon Families and possest by Children They who unjustly cry out of the Constitution of the Church of England for interrupting the Trade of the Kingdom would be loud enough in their Complaints of Omnia comesta à Belo under Popery He who knows not that the Revenue of the King now depends in a manner solely upon Trade and that Trade depends on populousness and that the encouragement of people to live under any Government is that great thing call'd Property in their Estates Religion and Laws and that therefore any thing that calls it self Religion that goes to exterminate above a hundred and fifty persons for every one it leaves for so the Proportion between Non-Papists and Papists by the Bishops survey made about the Year 1676 was return'd to be and to call them Hereticks and which makes their Goods and life ipso facto a forfeit of the Law will not ipso facto exterminate Trade is fitter for the Galleys or a Trading Voyage to the Anticyrae then for any discourse of Trade and Commerce Your Lordship hath in your Travels sufficiently seen it long since exemplified that the Protestant Countries for the quantity of Ground exceed the Popish in Trade and numbers of People and that thus the Protestant Hanse Towns have eclipsed their Roman Catholick Neighbours and Amsterdam Antwerp and the Vnited Provinces Flanders and that in Flanders where the Ecclesiasticks are Proprietors of seven parts of ten of the whole Country Levies of Men and Money for the defence thereof have been made with so much slowness and difficulty and been so inconsiderable as not to have secured themselves against Invaders Nor did the Ecclesiasticks there think it worth their while to strain themselves in Contributions to resist an Invader who is of their own Religion the which made the French Kings Victories there flie like Lightning more then our over-rich English Regulars did to oppose William the Conqueror when he came here under the Popes Banner And thus were they here and in Flanders are like Wenns in the Body which draw to themselves much nourishment and are of great trouble and no use and thus ridiculous is it that so over great a part of the property of the Land should be linked to persons who are no way linked to the interest of the Country more then professed Gamesters and Empyrics and Soldiers of Fortune and are no more damnified by Popish Invaders then Fishes of the Sea are by Earth-Quakes But on the other hand in the United-Provinces how easily and soon are vast Taxes raised when their All is at Stake to what a prodigious encrease of the numbers of their People have they attain'd since the Reformation insomuch that the Author of a Political discourse of the Interest of Holland Printed in Dutch in the Year 1669 and Licensed by Iohn de Witt and by Van Beaumont makes the People in the Province of Holland to be 2 Millions and 400 thousand and so likewise doth Pellerus in his Learned Notes on Klockius de Aerario p. 300. and there cites that Book of the interest of Holland when as Gerard Malynes in his Lex mercatoria makes the People in Flanders in the Year 1622 to have consisted of a hundred and forty thousand Families and he reckoning each of them one with an other at 5 persons makes the Total of the people in Flanders to have then amounted but to seven hundred thousand Souls And yet as that Author of the interest of Holland saith the Province of Holland can hardly make 400 thousand profitable Acres or Morgens of Land Down and Heath not put in and that the 8 th part of the Inhabitants of Holland cannot be nourished with what is growing there but tells us what prodigious Granaries they there have and that Amsterdam that in the Year 1571 was about 200 Morgens or Acres of Land was in the year 1650 enlarged to 600 Morgens or Acres of Land in Circumference and to have in it three hundred thousand Souls And the defence of the Zelanders Choice Printed in the Year 1673 mentions Aitsmas Liere to have reckon'd the publick Incomes of Holland alone in the Year 1643 to have amounted to 1100 thousand pound Sterling and the Author of the Interest of Holland saith that in one Year in a time of Peace viz. In the Year 1664 the Inhabitants of Holland did over and above the Customes and other Domains of the Earls or States of Holland pay towards the publick Charge as follows viz. To the States of Holland 11 Millions of Gilders To the Admiralty of the Maze 472 898 Gilders To the Admiralty of Amsterdam 2 Millions of Gilders To the Admiralty of the Northern Quarter 200 thousand Guilders Which comes to in all about 14 hundred 87 thousand Pounds Sterling How meanly do the Atchievements of Venice and their Efforts to aggrandize their Republick compared with Hollands shew in story for the quantity of years many times doubled since the Dutch threw off the Yoke of the Papacy History hath recorded the longevity of the Venetian Government as it has of Methusalem of whom we read not 〈◊〉 great thing he said or did or attempted but a few days of the short life of Alexander in the Ballance of same weighs down the 999 years of the other The very Religion of Popery makes the Venetians more narrow in their principles and even in their Rules of Traffick then are the Inhabitants of Protestant Countries The Popish Religion doth hamper its devout Professors as to Trading with Hereticks and holding Communication with such as are ipso jure ipso facto excommunicated and giving any Quarentine to men said to be infected with Heresie insomuch that we are told in D'
rate the people of England and Wales will appear to be 10 Millions The slowness of believing great things which is incident to Humane Nature and my inclination to desire that any thing may be proved to me by ocular Demonstration where the Subject Matter will bear it do make me as to any of the greater forementioned Quotas of the People of England contended for by Calculators to reserve my Judgment till some such accurate Survey hath been made thereof as I have heard Sir W. P. that Mathematical Statâ—s-man wish for But this I will venture to affirm that by what may be observed out of the Returns on the late Pole-Bills and the Bishops Survey 't is very highly probable that the Total of the number of the people here will upon any actual view hereafter to be made by publick Authority appear very considerably greater then any cautious Calculators have made it Another account of the same great Quaesitum was sent me into the Country from a Gentleman of London who acquainted me that he received the same from a very knowing and ingenious person whom the late Lord Treasurer as great a Master of the Science of Numbers as perhaps ever any that Acted in that high Sphere of State employed to effect an Impartial Return of the number of the people in London and in Middlesex and every other County both in England and Wales and the Total resulting from them was as I cast up the same 8,272,062 But I judge that this account was not taken upon ocular View of the several Counties but by way of Estimate not absolutely perfect and by Calculation or comparing several former accounts together There is no doubt but the most satisfactory way that we can at present take for our Estimates and whereby we may Trace the Numbers of the people from somewhat that looks like matter of Record is as I hinted from the Returns on the Pole Bill and the Bishops Survey And as to the Poll-money of Anno 1666 2 hundred thirty seven thousand Pound was the gross Charge and if on the consideration of Counties whereof the Charge was not returned as Buckinghamshire Durham Northumberland Kent Oxon North Wales Brenoc Radnor Glamorgan Pembroke of which the proportions in numbers with the Counties return'd are not hard to be Calculated and of the omissions perhaps through partiality whereby great numbers of persons chargeable were not returned and withal on a supposal that there had been in the Act no qualifications and exceptions of many persons from being Charged and particularly of persons under the Age of Sixteen and of Paupers c. we may further venture to make the Total chargeable to be 600,000 l. and every one paying for his Head there would then apppear 20 times as many people i. e. 12 Millions I know that out of such a Sum as 600,000 l. supposed chargeable it will be obvious to consideration that what was paid by the Nobility and by Titlers and Officers must be substracted but when it shall be likewise considered that in that Poll-money that of the Peers paid into the Receipt came to but 5693 l. 6s 8d and that perhaps as much went beside the Nett of the Receipt under the notion of imaginary Paupers and by persons not return'd as came into it from the Officers and Titlers and that the persons excepted under the Age of 16 were about a Moiety of the people the supposition of 600,000 l. chargeable by way of Capitation will not seem so strange as at the first view The great difficulty of having the Total of the people chargeable by any Poll-Bill exactly and impartially return'd appears in the Case of a PollTax in Holland The Author of the Interest of Holland mentions that Anno 1622 The Tax of Poll-money was laid on all the Inhabitants of Holland and none excepted but Prisoners and Vagrants and those that were on the other side the Line and all strangers and that then there were found in South Holland no more then 481934 Souls though yet the Commissioners instructions were strict for the making true returns and the particular returns are thus Registred in the Chamber of Accounts viz. Dort with the Villages 40523. Harlem with the Villages 69648. Delft with the Villages 41744. Leyden and Rynland 94285. Amsterdam and the Villages 115022. Goud with the Villages 24662. Rotterdam with the Villages 28339. Gornichem with the Villages 7585. Schiedam with the Villages 10393. Schoonhoven with the Villages 10703. Briel with the Villages 20156. The Hague 17430. Heusden 1444. In all 481934. And supposing that West Friesland may yield the 4 th part of the Inhabitants of South Holland it would amount to 120483. In all 602417. The Author there delivers his opinion That many evaded the being return'd on that Poll and that the number return'd was very short and defective but adheres to the account of them being now as is before mentioned viz. 2 Millions 4 hundred thousand And this as it doth in some measure fortifie my foregoing notion of the prodigious growth of the people of Holland under the Reformation so it doth likewise afford an instance of the partiality used in the returns of the numbers chargeable in Poll-Money But that which doth chiefly induce me to believe the Total of our numbers may very much exceed the sentiments of Cautious Calculators in this point is the Result of the Bishops Survey which was made for the Province of Canterbury and wherein none under the age of Communicants or 16 were return'd and but very few Servants or Sons and Daughters or Lodgers or Inmates of the people of several perswasions of Religion and the thing endeavour'd was that the heads of Families or House-Keepers i. e. Man and Wife might be truly return'd and at that rate the Total at the foot of the account for the Province of Canterbury is 2,228,386 the which according to the forementioned currant Rule of Calculation to be necessarily about doubled on the account of the people under 16 makes the Total of the Souls in that Province to be 4 Millions 4 Hundred 56 thousand 7 hundred seventy two and the Province of York bearing a sixth part of the Taxes and having therefore the 6th part of the people that the Province of Canterbury hath which is 742,795 that being added to those of Canterbury makes 5 Millions a hundred ninety nine thousand five hundred sixty seven and since 't is apparent that not more persons were returned in that Survey then did really exist in Nature and live within the Province as return'd it will hereafter seem a very unnecessary thing and indeed absurd to question whether the people of England were not then at least 5,199,567 But since it appears by the inspection of that Survey that there was so vast a quantity of places that made no returns at all some of which presently occur'd to my view in the Cursory reading and taking some few Notes thereof and without my designing to make any Collection of all the
flatter a Prince with Insinuations of the Greatness and Extent of his Power is not more unusual then for Mendicant Poets to over-act their part in Panegyricks or for the Celebrators of any particular bright beauty in Verse to represent her as the Empress of all Hearts and thus the Famous Campanella after he had made his Present of the Universal Monarchy to Spain sent it too a Begging into France as appears out of Arch-Bishop Laud's Book against Fisher pag. 210. where he saith that lately Friar Companella hath set out an Eclogue on the Birth of the Dauphin and that permissu Superiorum in which he saith that all the Princes are now more affraid of France then ever for that there is provided for it Regnum Universale the Vniversal Kingdom or Monarchy The words there are in the Margin Quum Gallia alat 20000000 hominum ex Singulis Centenis sumendo unum collegit 200000 strenuorum militum stipendiatorum commode perpetuoque propterea omnes terrae Principes metuunt nunc magis a Gallia quam unquam ab aliis Paratur enim illi Regnum Vniversale F. Thoâ—ae Companellae ecloga in Principis Galliarum Delphini Nativitatem cum annot discip Parisiis 1639. Cum permissu Superiorum Yet with a Non obstante to the Politicks of Campanella and his pittyful great Flatteries I shall venture to pronounce the Great French Monarch who is certainly as great a Prince in the Intellectual World as in the other and is truly by the bright Sun of Reason non pluribus impar no Designer of taking the Dimensions of the whole Globe of the Earth with Chains and do think the most Christian King out of his Royal Prudence less inclined to favour the servile Flatterers who would set him up to be King of Christendom then was formerly the Catholick Monarch to encourage those who render'd him aspiring to be the Vniversal one a Title which according to the excellent saying of Mr. Cowly in his Brutus None can deserve but he who would refuse the offer Nor do I doubt but that if ever the greatest Prince in Christendom should be abandoned to the Vanity of attempting the particular Conquest of Great Britain and Ireland his Power in the Ballance of the VVorld would as soon and as sensibly grow insignificant thereby as did the King of Spains ' by the Design of 88. And as the Fate of the great temporary Disturbers of Mankind hath been their constant Augmentation of their own Expences which was a just pecuniary mulct from Heaven on their Ambition for their encrease of the charge of divers Nations in the posture of Defence so is it likely to be more and more to the end of Time And it was sufficiently exemplified in the Result of the Pope's and King of Spain's Politicks in 88 which reduced them to attempt the Remedying of the Prosuâ—ion of their Treasure by sending as I may say Canonical Waste-Paper to the West-Indies and the loss too of their Cargo of that as appears by Malynes in his Lex Mercatoria where he saith pag. 126. That in the year 1561 Pope Sixtus Quintus caused two Ships to be Laden out of Spain for the West-Indies with a 100. Buts of Sackâ— 1400 little Chests containing each of them three ordinary small Barrels of Quick-Silver weighing 50 l. apiece to refine the Silver withal in the VVest-Indies and a great number of Packs of Printed Bulls and Pardons granted at that time to make Provision against Hereticks because the year 1588 had so much exhausted the Treasure of Spain These two Ships were met with at Sea by Captain VVhite who was Laden and Bound for Barbary and brought into England by him where the Commodities were Sold But the Popes Merchandise being out of request and remaining a long time in Ware-Houses at the disposal of Queen Elizabeth at the last at the request of her Physician Doctor Lopez she gave all that great quantity of Bulls to him amounting to many thousands in number And he and another sent those Bulls into the VVest-Indies where they were no sooner Arrived but the Popes Contractors for that Commodity did Seise on all the said Bulls and caus'd an Information to be given against them that they were Infected as having been taken by Hereticks T was alledged that they were Miraculously saved but they were lost and Confiscated Malynes further mentions That he was employed to appraise the Lading of those Prizes and to certifie what it cost and what it might have been worth in the VVest-Indies according to the rate of every Bull tax'd at two Rials of Plate and some four and some eight Rials according to their Limitation every one being but one sheet of Paper and by Computation the Lading did not cost 50000 l. and would have yielded above 600000 l. He had before said That every Reasonable Soul of the Popish Religion in America must have one of these Bulls yearly and that these Bulls contained a Mandate that their Beds should be sold who would not take off one of them It seems by the way that all that Treasure of Indulgences bestowed by Queen Elizabeth on Doctor Lopez could not oblige him from designing afterward to take away her Life by Poyson But this was the result of the Trage-Comedy or rather Farce of 88. and Broyl on the Coast when Spains Invincible Fleet that had in it but 8350. Seamen proved the sport of Fortune and of the VVinds and the fatal VVrack of its Treasure insomuch that it could never since if then aw the world by the Number of Mariners Men who love not to be paid with Tickets even in this VVorld and much less to receive them as payable in another the which is the true Notion of Paper-Indulgences It is agreed on by all Writers that the Spanish Armada consisting of 130 Ships then had in it but the Number of Seamen before-mention'd and of those too a great part borrowed from diverse Countries and 19290 Land Soldiers which Naturally clogg'd its Sea Service for the Antipathy between those and Seamen in Ships is such that unless the Seamen are the Major part there they are apt to look on those as intruders and as such who stand in their way and in their light But in a Remonstrance to the Earl of Nottingham Lord High Admiral from the Trinity House Anno 1602. Extant in Sir Iulius Caesar's Collections 't is mention'd that in 88. The Queen had at Sea 150. Sail of Ships whereof 40 only were her own and 110 were of her Subjects and that in the same year there were English Ships employed in Trading Voyages into all Parts and Countries to the Number likewise of 150 Sail of about 150 Tunn one with another and that all those 300 Ships were Manned with 30000 Seamen that is the Queens Forty with 12000 and the 110 with 12000 and that in the other 150 were 6000 Seamen But it is not unworthy to be remark'd that notwithstanding the Concurrence of Providence with the Gallantry and Numbers
Coin in infinitum I mean its outward polity and denominations rather then that the Crown it self should be once more so fatally melted down by any of those denominations as formerly And as the Covenanting Divines of Scotland by at last consenting that some things in their Presbytery which whether tolerabiles ineptiae or substantially good I now enquire not should be preserved by Episcopacy's being the Paramount National Church Government have done that which would make it appear ridiculous for them ever again to attempt to replant Presbytery and extirpate Prelacy as formerly so likewise have the most eminent sort of our Presbyterian Divines who were associated with them by desiring since the King's Restoration to submit to Dr. Vsher the Archbishop of Armagh's Form of Episcopacy done the self same thing over and above their being then reordained by Bishops who had before received Orders only from the hands of the Presbytery and especially when it shall be considered that that Form of Episcopacy as described by that Learned and Pious Archbishop Courted them and was refused by them before our Civil War began wherein they were the Trumpeters and before three hundred thousand men were slain in England as Mr. Carew Reynel in his Book called the true English Interest Accounts the number to have been 'T is therefore with the justice of Fate that our old Presbytery too is gone among Pancirolls Res Deperditae and if it could be supposed that there was any Order of Forraigners whose avowed or known design it was by force or restless artifices and retaining Pensioners to revive that Government here in spight of our Laws I shall think the term of hostes with justice applicable to them too But there is another thing beside the Coincidence of some of the Principles of our Presbyterians with Popery that we have now too loud a Call to think of and that is that the great real part of the danger that we now are in of the inundation of Popery and its idolatrous worship is to be imputed to their having broke the Banks of the Regal Power and enforced the Royal Issue for the Safety of their Persons to be exiles abroad in Popish Countries for many years and where they might be in danger of the Poyson of Popery conveyed into them in the Vehicle of the Civilities they received from Popish Princes after they had been so barbarously treated by their Protestant Subjects who after they had by secret whispers calumniated them for being Papists here did in effect by the loud outrage of their Actions bid them go and be Idolaters there When I think of the cruelty in the late Usurpation they shewed to his Majesty in his being thus not led but driven into temptation by his Subjects I am minded of applying to it part of those words in 1 Samuel c. 26. v. 10. of David to Saul If the Lord hath stirred thee up against me let him accept an Offering but if they be the Children of Men cursed be they before the Lord for they have driven me out this day from abiding in the Inheritance of the Lord saying go serve other Gods as to the meaning of which words I shall consult no Commentators among the Critics but shall rather take it from the Assemblies Notes and I may say that in their Comment on it they write their own Commentaries and they thus à propos say I am now driven so as I cannot be present in the Tabernacle to worship God and enjoy those holy Priviledges but am forced to wander from place to place c. saying go serve other Gods that is tho not verbally yet really they have done it and as much as in them lies they have compelled me to Idolatry by forcing me an Exile to fly into idolatrous Countries c. It cannot have escaped the observation of a person so curious as your Lordship that among the many allow'd ways of Punishment among the Iews banishment was not one and the reason thereof is supposed among the Rabbinical writers to be this the Laws of the Iews and their Religion being the same thing to have banished men from their Country and the benefits of its municipal or Civil Law there had been to have banish'd them from their Religion and the means of their salvation and from doing with the Iews were so averse that even the Excommunicate among them were not removed from all parts of the Temple and were admitted there to a peculiar place But this cruelty to Souls unknown even among the stiff-neck'd hard hearted Iews was by such Christians as pretended to the greatest tenderness of Conscience practised toward their Soveraign and that to such a degree that as if they designed that the Lords Annointed the Breath of our Nostrils should be only in the infectious Air of Popery after they had exiled him from his own Protestant Realms they effected by the power of the prevalent Faction in Holland that he and his R. H's and their Adherents should be banish'd thence also nay out of France where the Air was less infected with Popery into one more pestilential I mean into the Dominions of Spain If therefore there is any number of men in these Realms that owns the old Scotch Plat-form or Presbytery and the former Methods to advance it here who shall be excessive in aggravating our danger of Popery I shall think that herein they practise a great deal of Self-denial and do not consult their own rest while they disturb that of the World and are of all men the most obliged to speak softly of that Subject But more then enuf hath been said to argue the paucity of the number of such in England The Bishops Survey of the number of the perverse Opiners in Religion mentions that two or three are called Self-willers professedly and by that number of that Sect for ought I know may be meant so many of the lovers of the old Plat-form and no name can better fit any who would maintain the Garrison of an opinion after their Commanders have slighted it then Self-willers But so much gratitude doth Popery now shew to Presbytery and to those who are call'd Presbyterians that because they magnifie and enlarge the Numbers of the Papists on all occasions the Papists do the like for them And because 't is now the mode of many timid Protestants to value themselves upon their Timidity's and on the fear of the Papists and their numbers being falln upon them as if Christ who commanded his little Flock not to fear could be pleased with his great Flock of Protestants here being in continual fear of Antichrists little one I shall now entertain your Lordship with an Account of the present number of the Papists here and some little historical Glanses about the gradual decrease thereof in this Realm in several conjunctures of time since the Reformation and in every one of which the highest tide of their numbers hath been but introductive to their lowest Ebb. Of all Nations the
not Published I think by a friend to the Papists for the Author there Names them and the respective Parishes they lived in and the total number of Men and Women there was 317 of which only one Man was there called Monsieur tho yet six others seem'd to me there to be of French Names and one there has a Dutch Name and only one person in there call'd an Italian so that notwithstanding the great Cry of Forraign Papists in and about London they did but little more then make a Number and the persons there reckoned for St. Martins in the Fields are but 22 and for Covent-Garden but 4 where yet the Bishops Survey makes 64 and for St. Margarets Westminster that Printed Paper makes but 4 of which the Number it seem'd in 41 proved so dreadful to Justice Howard St. Andrews Holborn has in that Paper but 6 which in the Bishops Survey has 13. St. Giles in the Fields has in that Paper but 23 which has in the Bishops Survey 126. The Savoy in that Paper has but 6 which in the Bishops Survey has just the same Number and St. Giles Cripplegate has there but 2 which in the Bishops Survey has 20. Of the care that was probably taken in those Parishes in London that made Returns in that Survey Covent-Garden-Parish and some others are Instances in one thing namely that there are near so many houses as Returns are made for or not many more Thus in Covent-Garden the Conformists return'd are 790 the Papists 64 the Nonconformists 6 and so Servants and Children and Lodgers being not return'd as Dr. Glanvile saith the persons of Men and their Wives return'd in all there are 860 which agrees pretty well with the number of houses there which are about 460. I suppose that Printed Paper by the Number of Inhabitants included only House-keepers as the Bishops Survey did and tho it is not to be doubted but that when that Survey was made there were in the respective Diocesses Deaneries and Parishes therein return'd at least the full Number of the Papists therein mention'd yet the Popish Plot about two years after occasioning the other Paper it may be supposed that what by many Popish Families removing out of the Realm and what by many of them coming to our Churches the Number of the Popish Recusants did there considerably decrease as it has from the beginning of the Reformation gradually done unless in some particular Intervals or Conjunctures and is likely so to do till the uncouthness and strangeness of their Principles and Scarcity of the persons that own them shall make them tolerable as Rarities I did before in this Letter thus far accord with Mr. Nye that Popery since the Reformation may have sometimes acquired a new vigour and that it hath not always since its first assaults against Popery gain'd ground of it proportionably but whatever the Fate of the Ejected Puritan Divines in Queen Elizabeth's days was and whether deserv'd or not and properly or not timed I enquire not tho yet in our days the plenty of Conformist Divines is such visibly that the supply of all our good Livings needs not crave Aid from Dissenters but do on all thoughts made persist in my opinion that Protestancy hath since its being first espous'd here as a Religion propagated it self by the great encrease of its followers except in some infectious Intervals of time as I may call them Thus tho the Obsarvator on the Bills of Mortality hath taught us as aforesaid that every Marriage with another produceth four Children yet in times of Pestilence we are told by him that the Christnings decrease and that a Disposition in the. Air toward the Plague doth also dispose Women to Abortion and considering this we may well infer when the Burials do much exceed the Births in any City reverà and not seemingly by the not Registring all the Births that tho the Bills of Mortality tell us that there dyed then none of the Plague and that there were then Parishes infected with the Plague none yet there is then a Pestilence there Reigning And thus is it a Pestilential time with a Church when more Apostatise from it then are born or as I may say regenerated into it or converted and therefore by such times we are not to estimate the encrease of the propagation of the Numbers of the Church of England There was a time in Queen Elizabeth's Reign that the Reformation was honour'd by all Englands populace being of a piece almost and worshiping God in the way prescribed with one heart and one mind and then as we are told by Sir Re. Cotton p. 42 and 43. Of his considerations for repressing the encrease of Papists till the 11th of her Reign a Recusants name was scarce known c. the name of a Papist smelt rank even in their own Nostrils and for pure shame to be accounted such they resorted duly to our Churches but when they saw their great Coriphaeus Sanders had slâ—ly pinn'd the Name of Puritans on the Sleeves of Protestants that encountred them with most courage and percâ—ived that the word was pleasing to some of our own side c. That saith he brought plenty of water to the Popes Mill and there will most Men grind where they see appearance to be well serv'd But the accidental encrease of their Numbers in any Conjuncture was carefully regarded by the State and to this purpose we are told it in Heywood Townsends Collections that Dr. Bennet acquainted the House of Commons that there were 1500 Râ—cusants in Yorkshire which he vouched upon his Credit were presented in the Ecclesiastical Court and before the Council at York Popery it seems then gain'd ground in the poor North having lest it in the warm South and to this day in the Northern parts of England where the Livings generally are poor the light of the Gospel hath not quite dissipated the Mists of Popery in somuch that if any one shall tell me that the Province of York which bears but a 6 th part of the Taxes and hath not in it much above a 6 th part of the people that the Province of Canterbury hath yet contains at least the half of the number of Papists that the Province of Canterbury doth I shall not contradict his Estimate It is the Observation of Dr. Fuller in his Church History of the part of England Trent North that 't is scarce a third of England in ground but almost the half thereof for the growth of Recusants therein And thus as the Observator on the Bills of Mortality hath observed that Northern as well as Southern Countries are infected with great Plagues altho in the Southern Countries they are more vehement and do begin and end more suddenly it may be said that the infection of Popery doth yet continue in our Northern parts But that the Papists valued themselves on their numbers throughout England toward the latter end of Queen Elizabeth's Reign appears out of that Pestilential Book
Chesible and other pretended holy Vestments and see him use Crossing Turning Ducking Lifting Whispering Gaping mingling of Wine and Water Lickings and other variety of Gestures and to hear Prayers in Latine and to the Saints and for the Dead and to have our Bells Baptised to have Vailes Holy-Water Holy-Ashes Palms c. Erasmus saith in his Epistles p. 108. Ep. 10. An hic sacrificulum illum malâ—unt imitari qui suum mumpsimus quo fuerat viginti usus annos mutaâ—e noluit admonitus à quopiam sumpsimus esse legendum The Verse of Scripture in which he read that word was Iosua 9. 12. En panes quando egressi sumus de Domibus nostris ut veniremus ad vos Calidos Mumpsimus nunc sicci facti sunt vetustate nimia Comminuti no other Verse appearing to me by the Concordance of the Vulgar Latine to have Sumpsimus in it And the folly of the Priest in so reading was so famous as to come to the knowledge of our Harry the Eighth and to occasion his saying as my Lord Herbert tells us Some of the Clergy are too stiff in their old Mumpsimus others too curious in their new Sumpsimus But that Verse in Iosua was as unlucky and as ill boding a one to Popery for a Priest thus to signalize en ridicule as any he could have found in Holy Writ and carries in it self a revenge for its barbarous usage For it naturally suggests to People that the Antiquity of the Doctrine of Popery is but a Gibeonitish or meer pretended one and that even its Transubstantiated Bread is not brought from so far a Country as is pretended and that it was no longer ago then Anno 1212 that Innocent the Third in the Lateran Council brought in Transubstantiation as an Article of Faith and Decreed those to be Exterminated who did not believe it And that Kings were to be compelled to Exterminate them and that the Pope had power to depose Kings an effectual way to put not only the nature of Things but Men on the Wrack and then make them say they believe any thing But we having been used to the New Sumpsimus these hundred years shall be so Curious in it as to make what is barbarous the object of our Mirth as much as Harry the Eighth and Erasmus did and the Novelty of Popery coming again here in the Masquerade of Antiquity would appear as nauseous as would the moudly Bread of the Gibeonites to the Men of Israel if they had come to treat them with it a Second time From what hath been in this Historical way glanced at concerning the gradual decreasing Popery here in the several past Conjunctures we may without the Amentia Prophetiae as Tertullian calls it say That in any Conjuncture that can hereafter come it will more and more decrease and that under any new Prince Protestancy will be the Rising Sun whose light will be then encreasing and Popery acquire no more lustre then the short one of a parelius Doleman alias Parsons in his Book Of the Succession publishing his thoughts how ponderous the Papists would be in the Ballance of State in the Conjuncture of time attending the next Successor speaks thus as if it were before him in Vision With these many others do joyn Et omnes qui amaro animo sunt cum illis se conjungunt as the Scripture saith of those that followed David ' s Retinue 1 Kings 12. pursued by Saul and his Forces which is to say that all that be offended grieved or any way discontented with the present time be they of what Religion they will do easily joyn with these Men. And when I consider how many there are qui amaro sunt animo by reason of their Condition being embitter'd by Poverty and that it hath pursued them like an Armed Man and is likely so to do when I consider that the Multitude of Free-Schools in the Kingdom diverting the Education of the poorer sort of our Youth from useful laborious Trades to the uselesly appearing Scholars and Gentlemen or according to the Dutch word Idlemen hath at last brought them but to fragments of knowledge and likewise of Bread and tho wearing better Habits then their Ancestors yet to be little better than Thiefs in a handsome disguise robbing the World of their Labour and its own quiet by their being Sollicitors Make-bates Informers proulers into the rights of other Mens Estates Tamperers with Witnesses Tales-men Promoters of Office Suers of others in the way of qui tam c. quam c. And when I consider what is so truly observ'd by the Author of Britannia languens That of all other employments we have the greatest questing after Offices that Men will almost give any thing say any thing do any thing for an Office so that some Offices that were thought hardly worth the medling with of late years will now yield near Ten years Purchase for one Life And when I every where behold the tâ—rn Limbs of the Estates of so great a Party among us as may be call'd the Luxuriants and who have sold the same Estates and Consciences three or four times over and do likewise recollect the Number of all such Idle men who have been observed of late years in Shoales so much to depopulate the Country to plant themselves about London insomuch that tho according to the Observator of the Bills of Mortality there usually did come out of the Country to live in London but 6000 yet there dying within those Bills 17249 in the Year 75 and 18732 in the Year 76 and 19064 in the Year 77 and 20678 in the Year 78 wherein the Popish Plot was discovered and 21730 in the Year 79 whence according to the Rule of one in 30 Yearly dying and there having dy'd gradualy above a 1000 a year since the year 75 to the year 80 altho all years of ordinary health so the remaining part in London did thence appear gradually encreased proportionably that is as a 1000 dy'd each year more than other so 29000 lived there each year more than in the other and that there lived in the year 79 in London 120000 more than did in the year 75 and that many of these People having broke in the Country through the Poverty that the Plot occasion'd came to London to hide themselves and their shame I say when I consider all these things I may well conclude that all these Indigents will be ready to hope for a Golden Age and call any thing a Religion that will bring it them And by a new shuffling of Religion will be indeed hoping for better Cards in this World. Some of those who have been Trumpeters to the Puppet-Shows of little Enthusiastick Religions and movers of the Wyres there would if ever the great one of Popery should come on the Stage be glad to be sharers or quarter sharers in it and to be either Actors or Ministerial to them and especially to be applauding Spectators
and five hundred of Prebends after so many shall have drawn Blanks in the Lottery of Preferment those few that shall draw those Prizes need not be envyed for what they have acquired by the Theological Profession It was both with Justice and Prudence by our Laws caution'd that so great a part of the Clerical Maintenance should arise from Tithes for by that means our Clergy are engaged to make the interest of their Country and its improvement their own and had they not had so much of their maintenance sounded on Tithes but on Money out of the Exchequer as they had before this time lost excessively by Religion so Religion would have lost their Calling for that the price of Silver falling by the plenty of it and the plenty or encrease of our people making all the Products of our Country dearer it hath been advantageous to our Clergy to receive their Tithes in kind as it hath been to Colleges to receive a Quota of their Rent in Corn. But that still the maintenance of the inferior Clergy was too mean will appear even by the late Enemies of our Hierarchy being Judges for Mr. Nye in that Book of his called Beams of former Light having spoke of the Ministers Calling being once a gainful one saith p. 123. It is vtterly otherwise now not but that there is a very liberal Maintenance appertaining to Ministers and greater by the bounty of the Honourable Parliament then the Preaching Ministry have formerly enjoyed The gradual encrease of our People and Trade hath proportionably encreased the Clerical Revenue which on the beginning of the Reformation was presently sunk so that Latimer in his Sermon before Edward the 6 th said We of the Clergy have had too much but that is taken away and now we have too little and what Iewel in his Sermon notified to Queen Elizabeth of that kind I have mention'd and so languid was the State of the maintenance of the Inferior Clergy in her time that She by one of her Printed Ecclesiastical Injunctions Anno 1599. did under great Penalties forbid all Priests and Deacons to Marry any Woman without the Advice and Allowance first had by the Bishop of the Diocess and two Iustices of Peace which I suppose was caution'd by the Queen that the many Ministers who had not competent Livings to maintain themselves might not marrying Wives without Dowries by new Births encrease the number of Paupers in Parishes It is observable that in the late times the Iesuites did publish many Pamphlets in Print against Tithes and did animate the people to make Tumultuary Addresses to the Usurpers to abolish that maintenance of the Ministers wherein as their Politicks were so unjust to our Monarch that had they succeeded they would have barricaded the way for his return in the minds of too many of the People for fear that the payment of Tithes should return too so likewise were they so ridiculous by cutting off all hopes of the return of Popery here in any Conjuncture of time that less then an Army of Bellarmines would never have perswaded the common People to hear with patience any talk of Holy Church's re-establishment here Tho as I have shewn that Tithes by reason of the equality in the Imposition of them and the diuturnity of time that hath habituated People to the payment thereof are a gentle part of the Yoke of our Ecclesiastical Government yet if the payment of them or any other Tax whether of Excise Customs or Chimny-money were for many years discontinued there would be no probability of bringing either the old Stagers or new Comers in the World to consent or hearken to their being re-established The Critical Observers of the Iewish State after Ten Tribes had made a Schism from the other two judge that there were two Conjunctures of time wherein their piecing together was fesable and that the great true Cause in Nature that hindred the Re-union of the Tribes was the aversion in the Ten Tribes to make three chargeable Journeys yearly to Ierusalem and to pay a double Tenth yearly out of their Estates besides Offrings and other Casualties to the Priests and Levites from which trouble and charge they had been relaxed by Ieroboam and by his Model of Idolatry and therefore the People having most inclination to that Religion that was cheapest and knowing that if they return'd to their old Religion they must likewise return to their old Payments to the Priests and Levites did venture to adhere to the cheaper Golden Calf and had the Iesuites here effected from the Usurpt Powers the Abolition of the Clergies Tithes which would have made the Return of the Church of England so difficult I may well argue that it would have made the Return of the Papal Religion and its chargeable Idolatry impossible whose Yoke of Payments neither we nor our Forefathers were able to fear But when senseless â—anaticks came with those Petitions against Tithes the more sagacious of the Usurpers knew that the hand of Joab was in them and they knew that hardly any Observation was more trite then that Popery gained ground chiefly in the poorer parts of the Kingdom where the despicable maintenance made the Ministry so too and where too the Pope would no more hunt for Converts then among the poor Norwegians but that it was of use to him to have the number of his Subjects increas'd in any poor places in a rich Kingdom where he tho a spiritual King might yet call his Subjects to Fight Sir Benjamin Rudyard takes notice of Popery's being an intruder among the poor Benefices of the North in the Speech before Cited and there saith p. 1. That to plant good Ministers in good Livings is the strongest and surest means to establish true Religion and will prevail more against Papistry then the making of new Laws and executing the old and there p. 3. relates what King Iames had done for the supporting of the Protestant Religion in Scotland where saith he within the space of one year he caused to be Planted Churches throughout that Kingdom the High-Lands and the Borders worth 30 l. a year a piece with a House and some glebe-Land belonging to them which 30 l. a year considering the cheapness of that Country is worth double as much as any where within an 100 Miles of London And p. 7. he mentions some Passages of Bishop Iewels Sermon before Queen Elizabeth where the Bishop having in general reflected on those that then caused the diminution of the maintenance of Ministers he further saith howsoever they seem to rejoyce at the prosperity of Sion and to seek the safety and preservation of the Lords Anointed yet needs must it be that by these means Forraign Power of which this Realm by the mercy of God is happily delivered shall again be brought in upon us Such things shall be done to us as we before suffer'd in the times of Popery c. 'T was there before mention'd how that Man of God with
the taking the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and thereby the laying on the takers an Obligation to the Kings Heirs and Successors that was to outlast the Life of the King and without any distinction of the Religion true or pretended of such Heirs and Successors Of the Obligation to the Kings Heirs and Successors arising from those Oaths Mr. Pryn in his Concordia Discors Printed in the Year 1659. hath writ usefully but because since the time of the late fermentation many Pamphlets have been writ pro and câ—n of the Political part of the Question relating to a Popish Successor and none that I have heard of has professedly writ of the Casuistical Part thereof and particularly with relation to those Oaths and because I have heard that in some discourse about the same in some good Company where the Obligation by those Oaths to the Kings Heirs in point of Conscience hath been asserted some good men have been blundered but of their apprehending the same by mistaking the saying in the Civil-Law that nemo est haeres viventis and likewise some things obvious in the Common-Law and I did fear that it might thence grow a common and vulgar error that there is no such Obligation resulting from those Oaths and that as a Supine neglect of the use of means to find the true sence of the same would be very culpable so that a serious and dispassionate representing the same would to all men that regard the weight of an Oath be very acceptable I have with as much recollection of thâ—ught as I could faiâ—ly and impartially writ my opinion thereof Casuistically and shall very shortly send it your Lordship for your perusal And indeed as I should not think I dealt candidly with any person of the Popish perswasion if I should be severe to him before I had a Moral Certainty of his having imbibed any of the Principles imputable to Popery that may be called unmoral or inhumane so it would especially seem to me somewhat like the drawing on a naked man for a Protestant at this time to write for the devesting any Popish Prince of his legal Property when few or no Writers of the Church of Rome either do or dare for fear of offending the Pope draw their pens for the preservation of such his property without respect to any Religionary Tenets he may hold What the Pope did to obstruct King Iames's Succession I have mentioned and what favour any Protestant Prince can hope for from the Holy See may appear out of D' Ossat's Letter to Villeroy in the Year 1598. Book 4th where having spoke of the Artifices used to the Pope to make him believe that if Harry the 4th recovered the Marquisate of Salusium it would be Commanded by Hugonots he thereupon adviseth the King to declare the Contrary to the Pope and adds I would not interpose to write this to you if I did not know that the Pope and all this Court hold that to maintain the Catholic Religion in a Country and to preserve it from Heresie his Holyness may and ought to deprive the true Lord and Possessor of it and give it away to any other who hath no property therein and who shall be more able and willing there to preserve the Catholic Faith. I met with some passages lately in a Pamphlet that concerned the Succession where the Author having liberally descanted on the words Heirs and Successors in the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy saith as I will not take up Arms without the Kings Commission nor enter into any Association to commence in his life time against his Consent c. so any one by whom or for whom any resignation of his Majesties Power shall be extorted shall not reign over me and there was another very course expression there applyed to a very fine Person and one so every way truly great that every Age doth not produce viz. That the House of Commons conned little thanks to George Earl of Hallifax c. but according to the licence of Speech used by that Author I shall venture to declare that where ever I have a Suffrage in the Choice of a Parliament-man if any Candidate shall tell me that he served in the place before and was for an Exclusion Bill rather then the Kings Offers and without advising with his Country would have any one of the Royal Line Secluded from his Title to the Throne on the account of any Religionary Tenet for our English Antiquities afford Footsteps of Parliament-men on some weighty matters consulting their Towns or Counties that chose them such a one if I can help it shall never represent me and moreover he who doth not with acknowledgments of Honour and Gratitude to the Earl of Hallifax mention that Bill that he brought into the House of Lords in order to the extermination of Popery that I spake of before and with it lodged in our Statute Book that man if I can help it shall never represent me I am not so rash in my efforts against Future time as perhaps that Author was and can cite a great Name for the reasonableness of Representatives advising with those they represent in matters of great moment to the State and to this purpose the Lord Viscount Falâ—land Secretary of State in a Printed Draught of a Speech concerning Episcopacy c. saith p. 4. Mr. Speaker Tho we are trusted by those that sent us in Cases wherein their opinions were unknown yet truely if I knew the opinion of the Major part of my Town I doubt whether 't were the intention of those that trusted me that I should follow my own opinion against theirs and thereupon his Lordship advised the House of Commons not to do any thing against Episcopacy and at least to stay till the next Session and consult more particularly with their Electors about it And if according to the example of that great man any of our Contenders against Popery had thought fit to consult with those they represented about the meeting those Royal and Frank offers with hearty embraces they would perhaps have found the generality of those they represented zealous for their so doing and if they that perhaps with a well intended Gallantry of Courage and scorn of Popery threw out the Bills that came from the Lords in the Year 1677 should ask those they represented if they do not now wish those Bills had then passed into Laws I believe they would say they did and if they were asked whether that Bill I mentioned before that was brought in by the Earl of Hallifax had not likewise passed into a Law I believe they would wish it had I presume not to inveigh against any of our late Loyal Parliaments whatever slips in Politics were by any there made or Arbitrary Votes there passed against particular Persons and am as impatient when I hear any inveigh against our Representatives who in the contention of Popery exerted all the strength of the faculties of their minds what
ever errors they fell into as I should be if I heard any Principal speak unkindly of his Second who contending for him in loco lubrico or fencing on the Ice did slip and shall be as apt as any to wish and hope that now such have consulted with their Country as the Agonothetae and know their opinions better then formerly that they will take other measures and especially when they see the present State of Christendom importuning us to be quiet more then formerly and thus in the old Agnonistic Games many of the lapsi athletae came to be Crown'd The Rule in those Games was that the Agonists were to make three Attaques on each other and he that did slip or go back in the first and second if yet he overcame in the third On-set was lawfully Crown'd and good luck say I have they with their honour who having an opportunity of a third Assault against Popery shall out-do not only others but themselves and I have the Charity to believe that what the great Athletae did in the Exclusion Bill was thought lawful by them and that they thought therein they did not transilire metas And 't is but with Justice that the generality of the People of England seem as Agonothetae to have judged of the temper of our Prince in this Religionary Certamen and I believe whatever time can cause that yet among all composed and sedate Minds his Majesties deportment in the late Conjuncture will never happen to be forgot and particularly his wrestling with his Parliaments as I may say by several Gracious Offers and Messages relating to the security of the Protestant Religion and to the making of English Men everlasting Comprehensors of the same He notified it to them by the Lord Chancellor on March the 11th 78. That this is the time to secure Religion at home and strengthen it from abroad by strengthening the Interests of all the Protestants in Europe c. The results of this Council seem to be decisive of the fate of this Kingdom c. And I must confess I wish that tempus acceptabile as I call'd it before had been accepted of that great Critical Moment of time when the curious needed no intelligence from that Oracular States-man of the measures taken abroad to extirpate Protestancy and when its Enemies in some Countries thought they had the life of that Religion as sure within their gripe as he had that of the Bird when out-braving the Oracle he ask'd if the Bird in the hand were dead or alive and when all his Majesties real acceptable offers were thus reiterated to all the noble Contenders and offered like the water of life to prevent their fainting in their Race and that without Money and without Price And because his Majesties Title hath appear'd as due to his Agonists Crown as to his Inheritable Royal one for having in the several periods of his life at home and abroad contended so earnestly for the Protestant Faith and purchased an immunity from Envy it self and that according to the right of that Law in the Code that restrains the obtaining of Immunities only to such a one who hath striven per omnem aetatem cum coaevis and hath to the Athlotletae given proof of his valour from his youth and who hath at least in tribus agonibus been Conqueror I think the rather that a Crown of Iustice is laid up for him both in time and in eternity for his preserving the property of his Line in some of those his earnest Messages aforesaid and for that he did not by the infringing the Legal Rights of that as I may say transilire lineas or by doing any thing of the Justice whereof he doubted and much more of the Injustice whereof he was fully convinced As the figure of a Crown must be entire so must every good Action consist of entire Causes that is to be rewarded with it and any Prince who doth deliberate of the doing a thing in it self unjust has need of the Caution given to the Angel of the Church in Philadelphia hold fast that which thou hast that no Man take away thy Crown and indeed for a Monarch to do an Act of Injustice is a greater misfortune to him than to be deposed the latter being but the evil of punishment and the former of sin I reading lately in Klockius de aerario was ashamed to see the 41. Summarium of Chap. 109th Book 2d to be this viz. A Iustitiâ licite in parvis subinde variariut in majoribus inviolata sit and ashamed to find in that Chapter Tacitus quoted by him for it and saying Habet aliquid ex iniquo omne magnum exemplum and Plutarch cited for saying A justitia in parvis rebus nonnunquam abeas si salvam eam voles in magnis But honest Cicero tells us better things and that Nihil honestum esse potest quod justitiâ vacat and the Christian Morallity I am sure prohibits the doing of one unlawful Act tho the effect of it would be the restoring the whole Creation in integrum to its first State in Paradice and it enjoyns the fortitude of not fearing those that kill the Body but are not able to kill the Soul as our Saviours words are in St. Math. 10. 28. and where he doth not say fear not those that can kill the Body but who do actually and frequently kill the Body but are not able to kill the Soul implying that unjust men often labour to do that and would do it if they could and their cursed sollicitude therein is not capable of being practised more then by endeavouring to prevail on Men by fear of imminent bodily danger to warp from principles of Justice and the Scripture doth annex the Crown of Life to the condition of being faithful unto death and to not fearing the things to be suffered as 't is said in Rev. 2. 10. the ominous Text Preached on at the Coronation of the Royal Martyr And as it is a saying that Must is for the King so he that Rules over Men must be just ruling in the fear of God as part of the last words of King David assures us and must not by fear of Man do any unjust thing that would imply his intermitting the filial fear of Heaven which is justly punished by being abandon'd to the Servile Fear of Man and to that fear bringing a Snare as that Kings Son hath in his Proverbs told us and when otherwise he might have made his own wrath as the roaring of a Lion as Solomons words are And 't is when exact Justice is as it should be fixed in the Firmament of a Princes Mind that its brightness is above being Ecclipsed by any popular temptations or fears that it resembles the fixt Stars whose great height dazles the eyes of gazers and which Stars cannot be eclipsed by the shaddow of the whole earth The Populace and their Multitudes and Commotions are in the Scripture frequently compared to
Person as of very great Abilities so of a great and frank inclination to employ them even to the over-obliging a Country and which though naturally attended with envy from some must too be with acknowledgements from others of that Dignity and Authority that his mind is possessed of and such as Valerius Maximus speaking of as innate in Famous Men who have no extrinsic Authority saith of it Quam rectè quis dixerit longum beatum honorem esse sine honore And he who in the course of his History and his other Works hath appear'd so Impartial and Accurate in his Observations of Men and things may very well be supposed not to have been partial in his comparison of Papists and Dissenters nor do I think he receded from his usual close judging of things when in one of his Books he said that it is not to be denied that it were better there were no Revealed Religion in the World then that Mankind should by its influences be so vitiâ—ted as to become more barbarous and cruel then it would be if Acted by no higher Principles than those are with which Nature inspires Men. I will not with our Learned and Reverend Iudge undertake to compute how many times Popery is worse then the Religion of the Romans but this I will say that had I been in the Roman Senate and had there heard any one propound to them a removal of their minds out of that Coast of Religion which by the light of Nature lay open before them into the Region of the Iesuites Morals I would have said My Masters let us keep where we are and should have expected that the Reasons I would have urged for their so doing would have had the effect of the good Omen that happen'd in that remarkable Crisis when the Roman Senators were debating whether they should quâ—t Rome or remove to Veij and when a Souldier then coming on the Guard and his Captain being heard to cry out to him Signiser signum statue hic optimè manebimus occasioned their adhering to Rome I think that no Protestant who compares the Tenets of the Nonconformist Divines in King Iames's time with the Tenets of Popery will prefer the latter before the former But it is not deniable that before King Iames's time and then and since many Puritans and Nonconformists have made great Schisms in the Church and disturbances in the State and that especially in some particular Conjunctures The great Epoche of 41 in England and likewise in Ireland will in our Histories preserve the Memory of the outragious Principles of many Presbyterian Divines in the one Kingdom and of Popish ones in the other but if any shall be so partial to the Papists as either to justify their Commotion in Ireland or to deny all part of the influence that Commotion had on ours here he will find himself a vain imposer on the World. A great inspector into our modern English Affairs I mean the late Earl of Clarendon hath in his Animadversions on Cressys 's Book against Dr. Stilling fleet said That nothing can be stranger then that Mr. Cressy should so magnify the general obedience of all Roman Catholicks that none of them was ever in Rebelâ—ion against the King or his Father when he knows very well and hath some marks of it that the whole Irish Nation very few Persons of Honour excepted joyn'd in Rebellion against the King but for that Rebellion neither Presbyterian Independant or Anabaptists had been able to have done any harm in England For the Scots Rebellion was totally suppressed and their Army disbanded before the Irish Rebellion begun It was that which produced all the mischief that succeeded in England and gave those Sects in Religion opportunity to bring in their Confusion to the destruction of Church and State c. But as to the Papists coming in for their share in the guilt of our Commoâ—ion here we have the incontestable Authority of the Royal Martyr who in one of his printed Declarations saith And we are confident that a greater number of that Religion meaning the Popish is in the Army of the Rebels then in our own and 't was there before said All men know the great number of Papists which serve in their Army Commanders and others The Author of the Regal Apology printed in the Year 48 in p. 36 answereth that part of the Declaration of the House of Commons that so unworthily râ—flects on his Majesty as to offering a toleration to the Papists in Ireland tontrary to his former resolutions which saith the Author was on great and pressing necessity which hath no Law and to that degree of necessity as the two Houses had driven him so the Consequences were to be set on their Score not his own yet even then in his Letters about that Affairs published by themselves he doth insist on it that the Bargain may be made as good as can be for him But I have seen other Letters from one of his Secretaries to the Irish which I am assured were true wherein where these expressions after expostulation of their delays in his Assistance He is inform'd that taking advantage of his low Condition you insist on something in Religion more then formerly you were contented with He hath therefore commanded me to let you know that were his Condition much lower you shall never force him to any further Concessions to the prejudice of his Conscience and of the true Protestant Religion in which he is resolved to live and for which he is ready to die and that he will joyn with any Protestant Prince nay with these Rebels themselves how odious soever meaning his two Houses rather then yield the least to you in this particular I should with extreme reluctance touch the Sores of these Sects who yet have both at several times given such deadly wounds to the peace of the Kingdom but that they are Nusances to the publick quiet in raking up the odious Comparisons of one anothers practices and that the Papists on the occasion of any of the worse sort of Protestants or Nonconformists being Convicted of Sedition or Treason a thing that may be expected from the degeneracy of Humane Nature to happen oftener from some of a Religion of so great Numbers then from a perswasion that has Comparatively but a handful of men for its Disciples just as accordingly perhaps where one Papist is hanged for Clipping or Coyning twenty Protestants are so â— are so apt to expect that the World should acquit the present Principles and former practises of that Sect from Disloyalty on their Out-cry that they are no Puritans or Presbyterians and as ridiculously as if a false Coyner Arraigned for the Fact should trouble the Court with a Plea and Noise that he was no House-breaker and but that on the detection of a Plot of Papists several persons that have in their publick Capacities done many Acts of Hostility to the Interest of the Kingdom yet entirely by being more
busie Anti-Papists then others have been immediately admitted to the good Graces of the People and cried up by them as Patriots and Hero's and by their afterward espousing the true Interest of the Kingdom as to the point of Popery all their former spurious Actions have been not only pardoned but almost according to the Canon Law legitimated and as the Popes in any Croysad for the Exterminium of Hereticks were wont to give plenary Indulgences for all Sins past and to come for many years so have the People heaped such Indulgences on such Persons that in any Conjuncture shewed their zeal in the extermination of Popery And though to an ordinary view these mens Title to their Fame may appear by some of their former Actings much incumbered yet who ever pryes into it is as much generaly hated as are those Projectors who rake for their Bread among the weak Titles of other Mens Estates and cry out 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 when they have found out a flaw there 'T is observable that S. Iames C. 2. in his Assertion of Justification by works gives two Instances of Persons so justified and that one is of Abraham and the other of Rahab the Harlot in v. 25. likewise also was not Rahab the Harlot justified by workt when she had received the Messengers and had sent them another way and yet too that senâ—â—â— the Spies another way as the Fact is Historically mentioned in Ioshua the 2 d would to some Scruplers seem unjustifiable Thus do the People in their way justifie all that they believe are assistful to them in the attaquing of the Romish Babylon and look on them as their Saviours and as captious as they are against others yet think of nothing but saving them and all that they have as was in the case of Rahab Nor is it to be wonder'd at that Men who have so much to account for to the Public should be thus discharged by the populace tho many of them are Gallios in Religion and were no more concern'd for the Eclipse of Protestancy or the light of the Gospel in the year 1678. or 1680. then they were for the four Eclipses of the Luminaries viz. two of the Sun and two of the Moon that will be in the year 1701. and particularly of that of the Sun which will be in Ianuary then and not seen by us but only by our Antipodes but there is that adherent to Popery that if it could rivet it self into our Law here it would make the light of the Sun not worth the looking on namely the Confiscation of the Goods and Estates of those that Holy Church calls Heretics and the throwing them into such forlorn Prisons where they could see neither Sun or Moon and therefore as the Devils those Seducers in Chains are hated by Men because they know those Fiends would destroy their lifes if they could for the same reason all that lye open to the Name of Heretics will be animated with a brisk hatred against Popery and magnify those as their tutelar Angels that shall pretend to defend them from it tho such did before conspire against them But therefore because a Zeal against Popery is a remedy so cheap and so easie to be had and yet so infallible a one against the Peoples being discontented with Men who did before so much by their Principles poison the Realm 't is the common interest of us all both Protestants and Papists out of love to our Country to wish that no Men may be tempted so fatally to injure it hereafter by being beforehand sure of purchasing both Pardon and Adoration from the People on such easie terms The strong currents of Inclination I find in my self and observe in others not only to Pardon but to extol and magnifie nay to bless all Men that help their Country as it is contesting with Popery or Presbytery or either of those or any Religion-trade and to say to them as the Expression is in the Psalms We bless you in the name of the Lord will I hope be accompany'd with such an Extirpation of it as will not leave any Fibre behind it in our English World. As it need not be told to our Divines of the Church of England that they are under no obligation to strain any point of Courtesie whereby to render the Papists generally not worse than Puritans and that their Character hath been by the Papists all along render'd more vile than that of the Puritans and that Doleman in his Book of the Succession weighing the Parties in England and having first spoke of the Protestants of the Church of England afterward p. 242. saith That the Puritan party is more generally favour'd throughout the whole Realm with all those which are not of the Roman Religion then is the Protestant upon a certain general persuasion that the profession of the Puritan Party is the more perfect especially in great Towns where Preachers have made more impression in the Artificers and Burgesses than in the Common People And among the Protestants themselves all those that are less interested in Ecclesiastical Livings or other Preferments depending on the State are more affected commonly to the Puritans c. And p. 244. The Puritan Party at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other that is to say most ardent quick bold resolute and to have a great part of the best Captains and Soldiers on their side which is a point of no small moment and that Weston Lib. 3. de Trip. Hom. Offic. Cap. 16. p. 226. in a very janty manner crying up the Puritans beyond the Prrotestants of the Church of England saith Protestantibus inâ—â— Sacrâ praestabiliores puritanos Qui enim estis Protestantes hominum judicamini ignavissimi omnium religionis etiam fuco destituti impiissimi aeruscatores parati jurare in cujusvis verba modò inde emolumentum rebus vestris accrescat and in p. 227. Puritani sane multò solidius ac syncerius sua dogmata profitentur So neither need it be told the Papists that the Divines of the Church of England did never prefer the Tenets of Popery or Professors thereof to those of Puritanism or Presbytery as such and that they never complain'd of the Protection the Dutch and French Churches have long here enjoy'd with Liberty to worship God according to their peculiar Rites and Church Discipline and that upon the late great migration of many French Protestants from their own Country hither under great Circumstances of want our Divines and particularly those in and near London shew'd all the efforts of their Art of Persuasion from their Pulpits to move their Hearers to liberal Contributions to them that they could have possibly done in the case of their own Countrimen or Kindred and that one of those Divines in one of the greatest Cures there being for his Learning and Life and Endowments proper to his Function a great Ornament to the Gospel when he with great Eloquence so pathetically bespoke
Archimedes his doing it would have been of any importance and the Papal Pride elevating him to say with Lucifer sedebo in monte testamenti in lateribus Aquilonis I will sit in the sides of the North would soon be attended with the Exclamation of How art thou fallen O Lucifer Son of the Morning c. and Is this the man that made the Earth to tremble France that I believe exceeded England by two thirds in the number of People in Queen Mary's time when Cardinal Pool made his Estimate thereof did securely heretofore suffer great numbers of its People to be unemployed in it as namely the Beggars and others of the lower ranks and through want of opportune means of subsisting at home to seek their Fortunes abroad and that not as 't is in the Case of so many Scots yearly leaving their Country the which perhaps is not able well to nourish more Inhabitants than it hath but through the abovementioned want of encouragement to continue in that opulent and fertile Kingdom a Kingdom that Grotius doth but right to when in the Dedicatory Epistle of his De jure belli pacis to Lewis the just having mentioned the Kingdom of Heaven he saith which Kingdom only is better then yours And 't is no wonder if the Ministers and Counsellors of State there did not concern themselves to make rational Estimates of the growing Populousness of the Northern Countries and particularly of England when nothing of that kind was perhaps so much as attempted here before the probable inferences of the Observator on the Bills of Mortality made about the same As to the former unconcernedness of France in preserving or encreasing the numbers of its People there is an observation of Sir Thomas Culpeper Knight in his Discourse about Vsury where he saith France tho so good a soyle lies half of it waste the Natives even loathing their own Country and burdening all the habitable World with their beggarly Colonies one third of the Lacqueys and Valets in Europe being French Men. Witness Dr. Heylin who tells us that once at Madrid they banished them all as dangerous for their numbers finding the French Servants in that Town alone to exceed Thirty Thousand so just and natural is it for oppression to disarm it self But I have already mentioned it that the present Great French Monarch not more renowned for his Armaforis then his Consilium domi and his able Counsellors there doth by Accurate Measures study the encrease of his People and 't is very remarkable that in the Code Loüys which he published in April 1667. he made some Ordinances with great care for the Registring the Christenings and Marriages and Burials in each Parish in his Realm as appears by Title 20. Article 8 9 10 11 12 13 14. there from p. 107 to 112. and with much more exactness then the Bills of Mortality in our Metropolis are ordered and the which that Great Prince thought worthy to be enjoyned in his Code of Laws having perhaps been informed by his Ministers that many Political Inferences as to the knowing the numbers of People and their encrease in any State are to be made from the Bills of Mortality on the occasion of some such published about 3 years before by the Observator on the Bills of Mortality in England and where tho many are apt to think that the Registring of the Births of People was first used and invented by Cromwel in Harry the 8 ths time yet is the thing as old as the ancient times of the Romans and among them introduced by Servius Tullius who to ascertain the number of Births and Burials ordered that when a Child was born the Kindred of the Child should bring a piece of Money into the Aerarium of Iuno Lucina and so likewise in the Exchequer of Venus libitina when any died or came to Age. And this Custom being quite abolished was revived by Augustus Caesar at the Birth of Children as Lips. on Tacit. observes But what was worthy of the French King 's providing for the stability of his Throne he further ordered an exact Registry to be took of the numbers of his half Subjects I mean the Regulars and Seculars by the following Articles there namely the 15 th 16th 17th in that Title Mr. Samuel Pepys that Great Treasurer of Naval and Maritime Knowledge and of that great Variety of the Learning which we call recondita eruditio having Communicated to me the sight of a Paper mentioning that in the whole Number of Men in the Realm of Spain long since when by secret Survey there were returned a 11 Hundred and 25 Thousand and 3 Hundred and 90 Men and which secret Survey I suppose was made some time before the Year 1588. I observed that the number of the Regular and Secular Clergy was not included in that Survey But I think the numbring of the many Regulars there who no doubt so often say in their hearts Nos numerus sumus c. had been of as much importance to the Government as the numbering of the Lay-men and for the number of which the Code Loüis hath as aforesaid so carefully provided and thereby made the prudence of this French Kings Code outweigh Iustinian's and hath discovered to the World the acuteness of his understanding to be not inferior to that of his Sword. And the Expences of the Crown being under the Government of this Monarch so very much greater than in his Fathers time have necessarily occasioned such an exact knowledge of the Numbers and Wealth of his Realm as hath provided him his strong Sinews for War. Thuanus on the Year 1615. tells us how that Lewis the 13th Having appointed some Persons to compute his Expences and Receipts for the Year 1614. That one and twenty Millions and fifty thousand Livres i. e. at 20d a Livre one Million 7 Hundred 54 Thousand 66 Pounds Sterling were issued out of the Exchequer and that 17 Millions and 8 Hundred Thousand Livres i. e. 1 Million 4 Hundred 83 Thousand 3 Hundred 30 Pounds Sterling were brought into it and so his Expences then exceeded his Receipts three Millions seven Hundred Thousand Livres i. e. 2 Hundred 70 Thousand 8 Hundred 33 l. Sterling and beside those Receipts and Expences the Historian saith that there were eighteen Millions of Livres Collected out of the Provinces i. e. 1 Million 5 Hundred 8 Thousand 3 Hundred Thirty Three Pounds Sterling and which were distributed in them for the Pay of the Officers there employed for other Expences there So that the Expences and Receipts of that Crown since the Year 1614. were more then quadrupled in the Year 1673 of the which I mentioned the Total before and abstracted the same from a Paper that some Merchants gave in to the Loyal long Parliament wherein the particular Sums accruing from the respective Generalities in France are set down as likewise others are in Klockius de aerario for another Year We have already found that it is
the Curious abroad shall send to their knowing Correspondents here for a Political Map or Scheme of our Affairs and ask what is become of the fantastick Vtopias Oceanas and new Atlantis'es that our late Visionaries and idle Santerers to a pretended new Ierusalem â—roubled England with and shall further send hither to their friends that old Question Quid rerum nunc geritur in Anglia The Return they will receive from England will be to the following effect viz. That People in that Noble and very Populous Country do there mind things that the Trade of words is spoiled that the business of sowing Tares is over and that he will be the inimicus homo to himself who doth it that the sowing the Wind of Errors in the Church and the reaping the Whirl-wind of Confusion in the State is grown hateful that they have done weaving of jus Divinum and dying of Religion with false Colours and preparing Nets and Snares of death for one another and that the most ungovernable Animals troubling others with Projects of Government of the Church is out of fashion that they have done there with Science falsly so called and quae non habet amicum nisi ignorantem and with Trade falsly so called the false Religion-one that hath no friend but the knave that their eyes are there opened and they see that res accendunt lumina rebus and their hands are at work in Trade and Lucre without turpitude that they can no more be brought like St. Francis his Novice to set Plants with the head downward nor at the instigation of factious Heads of Religionary Parties to do with their Notions as Fryar Iohn at his Abbots Command did with a dry withered stick which he planted and twice a day for a whole year fetched water two Miles off to water it and omitting it no Festival day that they speak more of Christ and talk less of Anti-Christ and do promote Christianity by solid Industry and Charity and the living there are Aparrel'd with their own Linen as the Dead are with their own Wooll and are grown so dexterous in the Linen Trade that it may be said of them what Klockius doth of the Dutch 't is to be doubted plusne in lanificio an vero in linificio illi praestent and thus by means of a true and undefiled and laborious Religion there Antichristus lino periit as I may say with Allusion to a forementioned Phrophecy The Genius and Interest that England hath in several Conjunctures been intent on devouring the Religion-Trade and which still hath slip'd from its seisure hath now at last effectually swallowed it up and just as a Cormorant swallowing an Eel and the Eel slipping out through its Body is soon by that potent Creature again swallowed and again slipping through its Body is at last certainly macerated and dissolv'd in its Stomach and still the Cormorant hath weakened the Eel in its passage through it thus hath it in England fared with the Religion-Trade that as Luther said of one great point in Religion it was doctrina stantis cadentis Ecclesiae the Notion of the not getting or losing by Religion there is accounted the Doctrina stantis cadentis Reipublicae That time hath laid so close and long a Siege to the Popish and Presbyterian Religion-Trade that as it was in the Siege of Ostend there is no more Earth left it to defend That as Physicians observe of superfetation in Women if it be made with considerable intermission the latter most commonly proves Abortive for that the first being confirmed engrosseth the Aliment from the other it hath happened so in England to the superfetation of Reformation That the Trade of Reformation unduely prosecuted by Art hath been diverted by the Reformation of Trade resulting from Nature and the over spreading the Land with such a great and useful Linen-Trade and Materials for the same as hath in a manner exterminated Poverty from the same And while now Nature seems to Court our Expectation with the probability of this new Scheme of Trade and Manufacture and which perhaps will stay with us till the Scheme or fashion of this World shall finally pass away I shall take occasion to discharge my self of a promise I long ago made to your Lordship when you were Treasurer of the Navy which was to send you an account of the rough Hemp and Flax and Sail-Cloth and of all the other Manufactures of Hemp and Flax imported into England yearly and now that it may appear what quantities of Hemp and Flax and the Manufactures thereof have been here imported and from what Countries and that thereby we may usefully take our measures about the proportion to which this new Trade and improvement of our Land should at least be advanced and because likewise the former measures of computing what Sail-Cloth and fine Linen have been here imported were taken generally from blundering Estimates and random Calculations and that we may see it possible tho France hath got the start of us in the Linen Manufacture that we may yet overtake it in the Race for that 't is apparent tho much Sail-Cloth yet little or no fine Linen hath thence come to us I shall here entertain your Lordship with an Account of the Linen-Cloth Canvas Linen Yarn Hemp Flax and Cordage imported into the Port of London from Michaelmas 1668. to Michaelmas 1669. which was drawn up for me by the favour of one of the late Farmers of the Customs I happened to make choice of that year for the quantity of those importations as being a year of Peace but was since told by the Merchants that that year being the second after the Fire of London there was then imported into London about a 3 d part less of those Commodities than was in common years the which happened because the year before being the next after the Fire an extraordinary glut of those Goods was then brought in Your Lordship thereby seeing what then came into the Port of London will in effect see what came into the whole Kingdom the Out-Ports bearing a proportion of a 3 d to that of London and by finding that we have so much Hemp from the East Countries now we are put to it to go to Market there with ready Money instead of our woollen Manufactures as formerly as we likewise do for our Pitch and Tar and Masts find that we are more closely concerned in point of interest to have our Hemp provided at home And it will appear high time for us to begin somewhat like a Linen Manufacture when a running view of this Account presents us with so great a quantity of old Sheets imported from Holland and France tho perhaps designed by us for our Plantations and of Linen Yarn and some Linen from Scotland and since in that year by an Abstract of the exportations of Ireland I have seen that Country so long unsettled had yet so much Linnen Yarn and Linen Cloth for its own use that 522
pieces of Linen Cloth of 40 Ells in a Piece and 4 Thousand 6 Hundred and 25 Hundred weight of Linen Yarn then were thence exported The Account I mentioned is as followeth viz. An Account of Linnen-Cloth Canvas Linnen-Yarn Hemp Flax and Cordage Imported into the Port of London from Michaelmas 1668 to Michaelmas 1669. viz. Holland Linnen Ells 764465. Cambricks ps 7614. Canv with thred ps 1856. Ditto with Silk ps 866. Holland Duck C Ells 1047. Packing Canvas C Ells 329. Old Sheets pr 42890. Linnen Yarn 1 6880. Steel Hemp C wt 1211. Rough Hemp C wt 1325. Rough Flax C wt 2731. Cordage C wt 601. Flanders Linnen Ells 598349. Cambricks ps 3601. Damask tabling yds 1093. Damask Napkin yds 2440. Diaper tabling yds 4387. Diaper Napkin yds 19974. Linnen Yarn l. 5600. Rough Hemp. C wt 1266. Â Â Â Â Germany Broad Germany C Ells 11783. Narrow Germ. C Ells 21172. Packing Canvas C Ells 407. Barras C Ells 3066. Hinderlands C Ells 1910. Sletia Diap tabl yds 16089. Sletia Diap napk yds 76198. Damask table yds 3148. Damask Napkins yds 11437. Sletia Lawnes ps 5505. Linnen Yarn l. 353690. Rough Hemp C wt 302. France Lockrams ps 23581. Vittry Canvas C Ells 6265. Normandy Canvas C Ells 3128. Quintons ps 1433. Died Linnen ps 557. Diaper tabling yds 7604. Diaper Napkins yds 33896. Old Sheets pr 2820. Poul Davies Bolts 50. Cordage l 15. Â Â Eastland Hinderlands C Ells 146. Packing Canvas C Ells 2491. Polonia Linnen C Ells 271. Quinsbr Canvas Bolts 1899. Poul Davies Bolts 90. Linnen Yarn l 9700. Rough Hemp. C wt 27251. Rough Flax C wt 5720. Â Â Â Â Russia Muscovia Linnen C Ells 256. Linnen Yarn l 3600. Rough Hemp C wt 237. Cordage C wt 30. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Scotland Linnen C Ells 1420. Linnen Yarn l 23680. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â East-Indies Callicoes ps 251986. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â That little sowing of Hemp and Flax here that hath been hath already met with as much encouragement as this comes to namely that 't is all bought up by the years end and in our way to the Manufactures of Hemp the above Account doth so far encourage us as to let us see that almost all our Cordage is made in England and since by some Accounts I have seen of the Importations in Amsterdam almost as much Hemp and Flax is there brought in yearly as into the whole Kingdom of England the necessity that will be driving us on to the Linen Manufacture will be accompanied with this comfortable Consideration that as 't is possible for us to overtake France therein so we may Holland at least in the making of Sail-Cloth in regard we may if we will have as much Hemp and Flax growing in our own Soil as they send for to Riga and elsewhere abroad The French Protestants at Ipswich have lately made finer Linen than ever was made in England namely of 15 s. the Ell and for which tho they had their Linen Yarn from France yet afterward they sowed Flax near Ipswich whereof to make Yarn and it was observed to grow so high that the People resorted from all parts adjacent of the Country to see it they having never seen any so high before A Judgment so penetrating as your Lordships will easily find how the said Account may be many ways useful to the publick in point of Trade as for example the Consideration is obvious that those Countries we receive no Hemp or Flax or their Manufactures from we may profitably in the way of Traffick hereafter carry them to and by that means know our proper Markets as particularly Spain Italy Portugal c. That great Bankrupsy in London that hath thence like a Plague infected so many of our Country Traders and laid there too so much Land in some sort desolate will by natural necessity oblige them to countenance this improvement of the Realm by new Commodities and Manufactures and that which hath in many of our poor Idlers Created such an Aversion from the sowing of Hemp and Flax namely the toyle of beating the same will soon cease by the acquainting them with the Invention of a Mill near a Rivolet by which as much Hemp may be beaten in a day as can be by two hundred men and they who have been incessant in complaining of others being French Pensioners and thought themselves slighted because they were not so shall by the Protestants of that Nation thus leading us by the hand to a rich Manufacture find France to have thus sent Donatives to our whole Land. And from the example of their innate Loyalty to their Hereditary Monarch and thankfulness to ours for their protection I doubt not but many of our Male-contents will imbibe principles of obedience to Government and a sense of their safety under that Asylum and such persons whatever their pretensions are will deserve ill of the Kingdom and its Trade and Manufacture who by their excessive Complaints of the danger of Popery and of the Fantome of that pretended Religion frighting us out of our Laws shall really deter more such Protestant Strangers from planting among us But as men may be said to be deterred by shame from fearing any thing in throngs and where they are secure from robbery and can suffer only by petty Larceny so I believe will this populous State of our Country insensibly wear off the excess of our fears and do expect such a future State in England as will make men ashamed of their past fears and their former deference to ill bodeing Prophets Gassendus in his Works tells us that all the Astrologers of France concluded that by reason of the great Conjunction of watry signs in Piscis and Aquarius in the Year 1524 that there should then be another deluge in that Realm and in Germany in the Month of February a rainy Month and that many of the People thereupon went with their Goods and Cattel from the Low Lands to the hilly Country and yet that Month proved the driest Month that ever was known and thus do I expect that many of our Melancholy Prophets in England will be toto caelo mistaken in their auguries And if natural Considerations did not induce me thus to foretel good to my Country another Consideration might tempt me to predict ill namely the warding off all the risque of a false Prophet for among the Iews if a man prophesied of future ill to a Person or State and it came not to pass he was not therefore pronounced a false Prophet by reason of the infinite goodness often inclining the Divine Nature to avert its threatned Anger but if he Prophesied of good Success and it happened not he was then reputed a false Prophet for that they said Heaven never cancelled a Decree of Mercy Considering how often things at random predicted have come to pass and tho like Seeds carelessly thrown
know that neither the Decrets nor Decretals were ever as such received as Law in England yet the Pope and Jesuites saying that they ought so to have been and that they were and are obligatory upon us it will follow that by reason of an unlucky Proverb of Ben Syrah Quantulus ignis quantam materiam accendit and which is used by the Apostle St. Iames saying Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth and for that there are some little People ready to apply that little fire when the Pope or Jesuites would have them the Majority of the Papists here being Jesuited as was observed and that part of them not being of the Gentry would not be byassed by generous education and temper against the Commands of the mercenary Pope or Jesuites and for that even in the Jesuited Gentry here there were Bigots found to plot and to prepare to execute the Gun-powder Treason it is apparent that the Pope may if he will be very troublesome to our Cities with his Writ de Civitate comburendâ and that he or the Jesuites can command numbers of instruments to execute that his Writ as I may call it who will think that therein that they do as lawful an Act as if the four first General Councils had expresly warranted the same He said that the Popes Decrets and Decretals are in several Popish Countries so much regarded that to encourage men to study the same Academick Degrees are conferred namely of Doctores decretorum and Doctores decretalium That in France where the Canon Law was never in gross received as Minier the President of the Council of Aix did set fire on the Heretical Villages as such so he hath heard that Boerius an eminent Lawyer of France and President of a Parliament there and who has published a Volume of Decisions hath in Tractatu de seditiosis asserted this Tenet of the Pope's power to burn Heretical Cities That the Christians of old when they groaned under the heaviest weight of the Pagan Persecution abhorred this revenge against their idolatrous Enemies as appeared by Tertullian's Apology and their sense of the ease with which this revenge might have been executed Quando vel una nox pauculis faculis largitatem ultionis posset operari si malum malo dispungi penes nos liceret sed absit ut aut igni humano vindicetur Divina secta i. e. One night with a few Fire-brands would yield us sufficient Revenge if it were lawful for us to discount evil with evil but God forbid that the followers of the Divine Religion should either revenge themselves with Humane Fire c. That the very Heathens of old accounted there was turpitude in promoting not only their own profit but that of their Country in firing the Fleet of proclaimed Enemies as appeared in Athens when Themistocles by order from the Senate had privately Communicated to Aristides how he could destroy the Lacedemonians by privately burning their Fleet and Aristides had reported to the Senate that the project of Themistocles communicated to him was profitable for the State but was not honest they unanimously resolved against hearing it as Tully tells us in his Offices and much less would they have deliberated of its turpitude That the Athenians in the time of open War with King Philip and when their Priests offering their most solemn religious Sacrifices to the Gods for the prosperity of their Country did Philippum liberos terrestres navalésque copias atque omnem Macedoniam exitiali carmine diris imprecationibus detestari yet intercepting some Letters writ by him they returned them to him unopen'd That the Pope and his Trent Council having never disown'd this power nor branded this Canon nor yet by any index expurgatorius damned the Writings of Gratian or Gundissalvus or the Famous Canonists by him cited for this opinion it was plain that they might therefore be said to approve of the same that Qui non prohibet cum potest jubet That the Trent Council had gone far in the Confirmation of the Canon Law and that the saying used by the Fathers in that Council was here applicable viz. Omnia nostra facimus quibus authoritatem nostram impertimur In fine he saying that every one ought to withdraw from a Church while it in effect approved Doctrines in the Faith erroneous and in practice impious and asking me if some of the Great Writers of the Church of England as namely Bishop Iewel Bishop Andrews Arch-Bishop Laâ—d Bishop Sanderson or any of them had industriously published it in Print that we might lawfully employ Emissaries to burn Rome or any City where all or the Majority were Papists and that such Writing of theirs was never censured by Authority and impugned by any of our Divines tho yet by occasion thereof no Anti-Papists had ever been the Incendiaries of Popish Cities I would not however withdraw from the Communion of the Church of England till I saw such Tenet of those Divines publickly branded and till such Writing had received the usage that the Canon Law had from Luther when he cast it into the Flames I plainly told him that I would and the like he said he was inclined to as to Communion with the Church of Rome if he found that the Fact of that fiery Tenet against Heretical Cities was chargeable on the Pope in his Law and in the Writers thereupon as aforesaid And as little Credit as I wish all Mushroom Prophets and Prophecies may find I am of opinion if ever any clear discovery should happen in time to be made of that Fires having proceeded from the Councils of great numbers of Iesuites Friars or other Papists a thing I never Expect that Popery would thereby be loaded with such a lasting general Odium here and in Forraign Countries both Popish and Protestant as it would hardly breath under the weight of and the Prophets of the effects of the Year 1666 would cry that their predictions did hit right and boldly say to us their upbraiders that 66 in its effects is not yet past just like the Sooth-sayer who being rallied by Caesar going to the Senate-House and saying the Ides of March were come replied to him that they were not passed There is another happy effect I expect from the grown and growing numbers of our populous Nation and all mens errors being necessarily the more visible to each other by their close Vicinage namely that men will be ashamed to aggravate the supposed Political Errors of the Ministers of our Princes as formerly and much more not to take it patiently when their Princes pardon them How shameful a thing was it that the Kings Pardon was not allowed as good by the Lords and Commons to Arch-Bishop Laud when nothing but that could save them from the danger of the Laws for taking away any mans life by Ordinance of Parliament But so sharp and perfect a haâ—er is your Lordship of all Cruel and Arbitrary Practices that I think I have
feed sleep in them they must work for it and that no Papists and Presbyterians will in their sleep cry out of Persecution as formerly and that no Papist will hereafter applaud either the Justice or temper of Mr. Coleman in writing as aforesaid to the Inter-Nuncio of the Execution of the Penal Laws against the Papists and saying Which are so insupportable that 't is impossible any that is reach'd by them to have wherewithal to eat Bread if they be executed according to the said Proclamation Nor I believe will such Complaining be heard in our Streets from any of the Non-Conformist Divines as I have read in Print from one Learned Divine of them viz. some of the ejected Ministers are so reduced and find so little succour that they live upon brown Bread and Water some have died through the effects of want we will be thankful to be under no severer usage than Colliers and Barge-men and Sea-men than begging Rogues and Vagabonds have But as among the Augurs of old the Poultreys not eating their Meat or Bread served as an indication that the Roman Army was not then to fight so I hope that the same thing was meant by the sullenness of Mr. Colemans Augury and the others Complaint and that both Papists and Protestants will here eat the Bread of Quietness with Thanksgiving And considering the great number of Attorneys and Sollicitors and Dealers towards the Law that hath long over-spread the Land and planted in the same such a general proneness to litigation and over-ran it so with Briars and Thorns of the Law that our Country is not more famous for our Wooll than infamous for our so much fleecing one another and considering how another thing hath occasionally put so many men to be skilful Masters of the Science of Defence with the Weapons of the Law I mean the farming of so much of the publick Revenue I may well predict that if such a wild probability should happen as any Princes hereafter endeavouring by any illegal Course to advance Popery that tho good and loyal people would be Lachrymists to him they would be soon apt to make all ministerially concerned therein to be Lachrymists to them Altho England had a King namely Harry the 1 st of whom 't is recorded that reforming the old and untrue measures he made a measure after the length of his Arm yet as we have one who hath graciously measured the Arm of his Power by the Laws so I may safely adventure to foretel what his lawful Successors will do and it is to this purpose in some of the most subtle seditious Pamphlets notified in Print by the ill wishers to the next Heir to the Crown viz. that they fear more mischief from him as Chief Favourite and Minister to his Prince than they would from him if ever he should live to wear a Crown for then say they we shall know how to be provided against him by the Course of the Law. Nor is it to be doubted but that he who never was known to advise his Prince to incommode any one contrary to the Law will never employ his own power to the illegal detriment of any man. During this time that his Prince hath so justly placed so much of the Royal Favour on him may he not as to his administration thereof say with the same Justice as the great Prophet Whose Ox or Ass have I taken May it not be asked whom of the mad sort of Cattle that with an infinity of Calumnies and Shams gored his reputation or wild Asses that kick'd at the same did he hurt with power or yet take the fair advantage of the Law against till his many loyal friends who were secret true Lachrymists for the publick false misreports spread against him did importune him so for the Kingdoms good to defend his honour and that they might no more be punished by seeing the limbs of his reputation lie torn and mangled in every Coffee-house who had so often exposed those of his Body to Bullets and Chain-shot in Sea Fights for the saving the life and honour of their Country Those therefore that could in earnest write to the effect abovemention'd in such seditious Pamphlets let them talk or look as gravely as they will I shall yet think but in jest while at other times they are amusing any with questions about their being Lachrymists under such a Prince and they put me in mind of a famous Musician we had in the Court in King Iames's time Dr. Iohn Dowland who printed a Book of Songs and Pavans for the Lute with the Title of Lachrymae and Dedicated it to Queen Anne and in the Table of the Book several of them are thus remarked viz. Lachrymae antiquae Lachrymae gementes Lachrymae verae and he observes there in the Epistle what is obvious enough that Tears are not always shed in sorrow but sometimes in joy and gladness But there is another thing of more weight that occurs to my thoughts from the remembring that Mr. Henry Peacham in his Book called the Compleat Gentleman doth on the name of this Lutinest Iohannes Dowlandus bestow the Anagram annos ludendo hausi and that is that many in several Parliaments who thought they could do no right to Protestancy but by doing wrong to the next Heir did too much and too long play with the Royal Offers and when they might if they pleased have effected as quick a prevention of the growth of Popery under any Roman Catholiek Successor as was took care of in Scotland Yet however I have said enough for my continuing to think that as in that Kingdom there are are few or none that fear that the belief of Popery can ever there gain much ground and ever be the Paramount Religion there and who think not that the words of arise Peter kill and eat will sooner bring the Scots to eat Hogs Flesh and believe there is a Divine Right for their so doing St. Peters Sheet from Heaven in the Vision having had that Animal in it than to swallow the belief of Popery or of the Iure-Divinity of the Pope so the fears of its growth in England or of any occasion for the Virtue of the Lachrymae antiquae of the Primitive Christians will daily grow more and more moderate and in time be extinguished The late Arch-Bishop of St. Andrews estimated the number of Papists and their Children in Scotland to be but about a thousand but their number in the States of the Vnited Provinces is vastly more insomuch that the ingenious Author of the Policy of the Clergy of France to destroy the Protestants of that Kingdom mentions that there are in Holland a Country of small extent ten times more Popish Ecclesiasticks than there are Protestant Mâ—nisters in all France which is very large There is a compleat Clergy and Hierarchy Amsterdam and all the other great Cities have their Bishops Those Bishops have their Chapter and their Priests There are even religious houses They
that it likewise includes a congruous judgment and internal affection in the which there is a kind of inward testifying before God and therefore the solid Office of HONOVRING doth chiefly depend on the inward acknowledgment of any ones worth or excellence And afterward referring to the express Command in St. Peter of honouring all men he saith Vix quisquam reperitur in quo non possimus aliquid observare in quo nobis est superior si ex humilitate judicium feramus Phil. 2. 3. and then speaking of impious men saith Quatenus boni aliquid habent justum ejus testimonium non est ipsis denegandum He afterward in his Chapter concerning rash judgment shewing that it is a Sin and how saith 1. 'T is a Sin of Levity against Prudence 2. 'T is contrary to the Principles of Nature Quod tibi non vis fieri c. for no man is willing that his Neighbour should judge rashly of him and his Actions 3. It diminisheth the good of ones Neighbour and opposeth his Right for that every man hath as much right to his good Fame as to a depositum in any mens hands till he himself has by his actings took it away 4. It begets contempt of ones Neighbour Rom. 14. 3. 10. by which means it happens that he is held unworthy of beneficial employments 5. 'T is an Vsurpation of the judgment and Authority of God who judgeth of hidden things and in that Chapter raising the Question Whether and how doubtful matters are to be interpreted in the better part he answers 1. That what is doubtful as to things ought to be weighed according to reason without inclining to either part 2. That what is doubtful as to Persons wherein their good or ill repute is concerned is absolutely to be interpreted in the better part 1 Cor. 3. 5. and that at least in such a Case we are not to judge ill of our Neighbour and further That we are so in common Offices or Duties to demean our selves to him as if he were an upright man since the contrary doth not appear to us This is the judgment of Charity And in his Chapter De exemplo bono scandalo he saith That there must of necessity be Sin in every Scandal because the ruine or Spiritual detriment of ones Neighbour is therein concerned He there moreover doth inculcate one great point of Morality in order to the avoiding of Scandal and saith Damnanda horrenda est illa perversitas judicii qua solent multi quorundam labentium Casu aut hypocriseos detectione alios professionem similem facientes hypocritas idcirco pronunciare Hoc est enim planè Diabolum imitari in piis accusandis iniquâ suspicione gravandis Job 1. 11. And having said all this may I not ask if he honoureth his Prince who doth not think him wise enough to choose his Religion When the fate of our Princes is usually to fix their Marriages with Relation to the wellfare of the State and when their Favourites are so seldom permitted by the Populace to lie quiet in their Bosoms and that 't is a Princes Lot thus not to be like others able to choose his Wife or his Friend shall he not choose his God since that Verse in Phil. 2d referred to saith In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves doth he observe that Precept who esteems not his Prince as fit to be trusted with the freedom of choosing his way to Heaven and the judgment of discretion as himself since there are many qualifications of Excellence for the discharge of the Regal Office that claim preference of a Princes Orthodoxy in the belief of the Mysteries of the Gospel doth he honour all men and particularly give honour to whom honour is due who when he sees the whole World agreed in the Fact of his Princes Heir being most signally perhaps beyond any one of the Age blest with those qualifications shall instead of testifying by words and actions such his Excellence and intrinsic worth and wherewith God hath honoured him try to exclude him from the Throne A Great Philosopher of our Nation and one who hath writ Philosophically of the Passions tells us That the value or worth of a man is as of all other things his price that is to say so much as would be given for the use of his Power and therefore is not absolute but a thing dependant on the need and judgment of another and then tells us That an able Conductor of Souldieâ—s is of great price in time of War present or imminent And any one that will consider what the present War-like State of the World abroad is and that by necessity of Nature in the growing populous World we must expect the peremptory noise of Wars and Rumours of Wars to be more and more calling on our attention will probably be of opinion that the High-born Lawful Princes of great Martial Talents will be the best Heirs and Successors Heaven can send any Countries That Author somewhat suitably to Ames his Notion of Honouring saith The manifestation of the value we set on one another is that which is commonly called honouring and dishonouring To value a man at a high rate is to honour him at a low rate is to dishonour him And I may add that an heroical Habit of Courage in any Prince is the more valuable or intituled to honour because it is by necessity of Nature accompanied with the highest Clemency and gentleness it being the excessive fear of danger that puts Cowardice on Cruelty The Author I refer to says likewise That to be descended from Conspicuous Parents is honourable because they more easily attain the Aids and Friends of their Ancestors On the contrary to be descended from obscure Parentage is dishonourable With how great an honour then and reverential awe ought we to think of the great Claim of Birth-right the next Heir of the Crown hath which may be lineally and successively derived from the British Scotish Danish Saxon and Norman Princes above two thousand years which is more ancient than any Prince in the World can shew and when God who finished his Work-man-ship of the World in Six days hath been two thousand years in making up the Hereditary Glories of this Line can we without horror think of any ones dishonouring it by breaking in on its Succession under pretences of Religion or honouring God when so many Fountains of Royal Blood have been filling this Sea of Honour two thousand years will a few men by their poor Sculls project to empty it or with the Breath of Sophisms to turn the Great Purple Tide that hath born down the World before it so many years But it is not only the thought of the Aides that the next Heir of the Crown may have from the Friends of his Ancestors that may make his Descent from Conspicuous Parents so justly to be honoured as was said but the sight of all the Lines of the Great
Advenae from the Country and to which it may be added that the Burials from what they were in the Year 79 viz. 21730 falling back about 700 in the Year 80 yet in the Year 1681 were in all 23971 and so for every Thousand gradually dying more in those Years referred to 29000 were supposed to have in the same gradually lived more than in the former and all which years before mentioned were of ordinary health But the Year 1681 having produced that Pacific Royal Declaration and the Congratulatory Addresses thereupon and likewise that encrease of the Burials before mentioned that might be supposed to happen partly by the Advenae from the Country being for some time necessarily detained in the Metropolis in making preparations there to leave it and by some of them in the mean time dying and partly from some new Pâ—upers then coming from the Country to hide their heads in obscure places in London and which they durst not shew in the Sun-shine that Declaration had made in the Country and partly by the deaths of many Loyal Persons in London whom the Addresses and expectations of Preferment for their Loyalty brought thither yet the Burials in the following year viz. 1682 being but 20690 was a considerable indication of the abatement of the popular fears which led so many timid Persons from the Country with hopes to find our Metropolâ—s to be the most quiet part of the Nation as the most quiet part of a Ship is naturally that which is nearest the Main-mast and the Burials in the year 83 being but 20587 gave an indication of the Advenae from the Country not then encreasing and although the Total of the Burials for this year 84 was 23202 yet it being most probable that there dyed above 3000 of Infants and of Aged and infirm and indigent People by the Accidents of the extraordinary Frost it may be well accounted that the popular fears have not been in this year augmented Altho during the so long continuance of the general ferment in the Kingdom after the Plot-Epoche and in which interâ—al so great a part of the following Discourse was printed Sheet by Sheet I could not after the King and Pope had both of them by written Edicts as it were denounced War against the Tenets of the Iesuites that included so much Hostility to the Church of Rome as well as of England but participate in the general heat against those Tenets and improve the occasion of writing polemically about the same yet I think none could more carefully observe the Laws of Military Discipline than I have those of Loyalty in not going beyond the Measures of the Government and in following the Standard of the Royal Pen set up in the Proclamations and likewise in the Declaration aforesaid Dr. Donne dedicating his Pseudo-Martyr to King Iames begins his Epistle by saying that as Temporal Armies consist of pressed men and voluntaries so do they also in this War-fare in which your Majesty hath appeared by your Books and not only your strong and full Garrisons which are your Clergy and your Vniversities but also obscure Villages can Minister Souldiers c. Besides since in the Battel your Majesty by your Books is gone in person out of the Kingdom who can be exempt from waiting on you in such an expedition That Learned Monarch in his printed Premonition to all Crowned Heads free Princes and States doth Magno Conatu go about to prove the Pope to be Anti-Christ and very subtilly discusseth the Moot-points out of the Apocalypse that refer to it and from that one word of Anti-Christ the Papacy hath since the Reformation received much more prejudice than hath the Reformation from that other famous word of Heresy and the Compellation of Anti-Christ is especially a more terrible weapon against the Pope when used by the hand of a King. But I must frankly say should my Prince Combat the Pope with this name in Print and descend to Command my poor Service in that Warfare I should humbly apply to him to excuse me therein and as it was observed concerning Aretine that he left God untouched in his Satyrs giving this reason for it Ille inquit non mihi notus erat so I shall say the same thing of Anti-Christ But when the Thunder of the Royal Power was in so great a number of Proclamations heard all over Christendom against particular persons and their known Principles and Designs his Subjects might well think it a part of Loyalty during that time to wear Clouds in their Brows and to be tributary to the Royal Cares by endeavouring in their several Capacities to support the Throne and to concur with the constant Practice of Nations in receiving the beliefs of Matter of Fact as stated by Soveraign Power according to the common saying of Imperatori seu Regi aliquid attestanti plenè creditur It is this Teste of the Sovereign as I may say with allusion to the words in our Writs of teste me ipso that will be the Clew to the Historians to guide them in that dark and intricate Labyrinth of time I before spoke of and will probably be helpful to any ingenious Protestants or Papists who shall write its History when they shall from the many Collections of the Pamphlets relating to that time treasured up by the curious see so many bold and contradictory Shamms and Affidavits fighting with each other for that belief in a Future Conjuncture that they could not obtain in the past and 't is nothing but the declared Sense of the Government that in such odiosa materia will qualifie a judicious Historian to do right to himself or his Reader or even to his History and keep it from being thrust down among Narratives It may be rationally supposed that when Princes and their Ministers do think fit to notifie their judgments of some matter of Fact wherein they might receive the first Information from Persons lyable to exception that there were many concurrent Circumstances lay in the Balance before them and which perhaps they might not think convenient to divulge and moreover it is a thing commonly observable that Divine Providence doth influence the understandings of Princes who are its instruments in the Government of the World more signally than of other men and that Crowned Heads are still blessed in some measure as of old by another Spirit coming on them than what animated them while private persons and that therefore their asserting of Facts of State is more to be revered than that of other men I therefore in the Case of the shamm of throwing the Odium of a Plot upon Protestants in one particular Conjuncture have not come short of or gone beyond the Measures of the Government nor do I believe that any Historian of it will. And when I did read the various Pamphlets and did confer Notes with some of the Curious about the last mentioned Shamm and participated with the Loyal Protestants in their Concern and Sollicitude for
many thousand years troubled so many Millions of Mankind seems lately to be retired to its Eternal Rest and the sullen World seems resolved to hear and read no more of it and none I believe will get or lose any secular profit by his Sentiments in that Controversie and 't is probable that the Controvertible part of Popery may thus go silently out of the Company of People in this Kingdom and without so much as troubling us by taking a formal leave give rest to it self and us and that none will in this our World get or lose by that part of Popery that can properly claim to be call'd a Religion I have usually in this Discourse called it an Hypothesis or Supposition which I chose rather to do then to call the entire Body of it a Religion which I know that it is not and cannot be and that Popery and the former Scotch Presbytery and Socinianism are not in the gross called Religions otherwise then 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 I will not quarrel with Papists for calling some Points before mentioned wherein Disputants will be still playing with the Dye of Controversie by the Name of Religion and I will give tho not grant them my Consent for applying that Name to the believing that the Pope is the Principium Vnitatis and there are not many Propositions in the Chronologia haeresium sectarum schismatum and in the Haeresiographis that many have Publish'd that I would think a man to have laesa principia that did call Tenets of Religion and there are in Popery many things enjoyn'd that tho I look on as needless impositions and new inventions for the diverting the Melancholy I shall not gainsay any one that shall call Religion and represent them as of Apostolical Practice tho the birth of many of them was reverâ but of yesterday And thus let the mixing of Water with Wine in the Euchaâ—ist and the fasting on Friday Pilgrimages to the Sepulchres of Martyrs the Priests using a low voice in Consecration and let the Canonization of Saints the institution of Saturday Mass in honour of the Virgin Mary the invention of the Red Hatts and Scarlet Cloaks worn by Cardinals the Institution of the year of Jubily the Popes every year Consecrating a Rose of Gold the sound of the Bell at the hour of Mid day the Rosary of the Virgin Mary and likewise the Baptization of Bells be all baptised with the name of Religion and many Notions and Practices likewise more peculiar to Popery And tho the denomination of things is from the better part as Mines are said to be of Lead or Silver c. from the quantity of the Metal there most valuable and so I can be content to call a Complication of Tenets of which some are erroneous by the name of a Religion yet in any Systeme of Religion or Confession that may happen to appear in the World more pure and exact then the Augustane or the Helvetian or the Saxonic the Gallic or English or Belgic or Bohemian and more accommodate to the true sense of the Councils and Fathers and the best Expositors then the former and containing more satisfactory explanations about the propagation and entrance of Original Sin the Nature Order and Offices of Angels and of the Consistency both of Gods immutable Decrces with the Contingency of second Causes and of the Efficacy of God's Grace with the freedom of Mans Will and of the Time Place and Antecedents of the last Judgment one single Notion relating but to a Commandment of the second Table incorporated with such a Confession of Faith would make the applying the Name of Religion to the whole to be very ridiculous and nauseous and make it more fit in the gross to be called a Confession of Faction or of Conspiracy against Mankind and any one will think so if that one Article should be thus inserted And we further think it commendable at some Seasons of the year to kill the next man we shall meet And yet as harshly as this sounds there is that in Popery and likewise in the Doctrine of the Resistance of Princes contrary to the Municipal Laws that doth hear worse and that is tho not ajustification of the killing the next man to be met with the effect of which would yet make men excite their natural Courage and fortifie it with skill and be provided with good Arms whereby to be always ready to defend their Country just as the Spartan Law of punishing no man for Theft that was not taken in the Fact made men more vigilant in the Custody of their Goods namely the killing Multitudes of the best men that can be culled and singled out of the faex of Mankind and such of whom the World is not worthy in so much that we are told by Alsted in his Chronologia testium veritatis that ab Anno 1540 usque ad Annum 1580 Novies centena millia Christianorum in Bâ—lgio Gallia Anglia Italia Hispania Religionis Causa trucidata sunt atque inter eos fuerunt 235 Barones 148 Comites 39 Principes and the killing of Ten thousand Subjects next met would not be so destructive to Kingdoms as the killing of one King for according to the computation and the Style of the Scripture he is worth Ten Thousand of us My Lord Arch-bishop Laud in his Famous Speech in the Star-Chamber p. 32 33 c. Answers some Mens Charge of Innovation against our Liturgy as to the Prayers set forth for the 5th of November and ordered they say to be read by Act of Parliament where one passage was Cut off those workers of Iniquity whose Religion is Rebellion and in the Book Printed 1635. 't is thus alter'd Cut off those workers who turn Religion into Rebellion His Grace in the p. 36. there weighs the Consequences of avowing that the Popish Religion is Rebellion and in the next p. saith That if you make their Religion to be Rebellion then you make their Religion and their Rebellion to be all one But in my poor opinion several of the great Points of their Religion so called as even transubstantiation it self and many others are not to be term'd Rebellion but other points before mentioned can properly be term'd nothing else and when all those Tenets are so complicated by them that they do all conjoyntly integrate their Religion then is there pretended Religion when really believed and practised a real Rebellion The best advice therefore that I can give to a Papist is that of the old Philosopher 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 simplifica te ipsum and that of a Iewish Rabbi Comede dactylos projice for as â—uritiem The World is a weary of seeing any men joyn what God and Nature have parted and of their projecting a Communion between Christ and Belial and making Christ the Minister of Sin as the Scripture expression is A great Master of Mechanics and of all sorts of refined Learning some years since brought to light
the Invention of the double bottom'd Vessel and a rude Description of it being sent me for News into the Country I easily guessed that such a Ship bearing much more Sail then other Ships must needs go a great deal faster before the Wind but I was not inform'd of the Provision that the excellent Artist had made against the danger of Divulsion it being obvious that in some Tempests 't is as much as one entire body can do to preserve it self against the â—ury of the Sea. This hath been the condition of Popery with its double bottom of Principles namely to bear a great wide spreading Sail and it has heretofore in a quiet World sail'd apace before the Wind and in fair weather but the Tempestuous Debates its Principles have raised here and abroad in the Sea of the People have made this old double bottom'd Ship of St. Peter in such danger of Divulsion that especially with such Pauls Marriners as it employs it can hardly escape I doubt not but the Papists as well as others of Mankind have a Right and Title to the free and undisturb'd worshiping of God and the Confession of the Principles of Religion purchased for them by the Blood of Christ for Religion being Mens Priviledge as well as Duty just as the Romans did account that they endowed any place with a Priviledge when they gave them their Laws they may thank their great Redeemer for being restored to it By the vertue of his Blood the Papists stand seiz'd of a good and indefeisable estate of Christian Liberty and they are bought with a Price and are therefore not to be the Servants of Men and one is their Master even Christ who is the Lord that bought them and they are therefore to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free Socinus saith he went on his Knees to God to find out the meaning of the 58th V. of the 8 th of St. Iohn And should I chance to over hear any one Member of Mankind at his Private Devotions and importuning Heaven to illuminate his mind with the knowledge of some point in Religion that he conceived necessary to his Salvation and acknowledging it to the praise of the Divine Goodness that excited him to the use of all means whereby to discover it that he had so far through the Efficacy of assisting Grace practised the Truths his understanding was possest with as to satisfie his mind that he was a serious Supplicant for its being the depositary of more I should be so far from wishing this man delivered over to Satan from differing for me in any controverted Point of Religion that I should think that if the truth he was in quest of imported his Salvation God would send an Angel to explain it to him But as to one part of the double bottom of Popery tho we should grant it laden with fundamental truths yet 't is notorious that the other is overladen with Fundamental Errors and such as are apt to undermine the Foundations of States and Kingdoms and there is no need of an extraordinary Messenger from Heaven to tell one embarked therein that the Pope is not to absolve Subjects from the obedience of their Princes nor to cause an eternal fermentation and inquiâ—tude in the World through his Kingdom that should not be of it at all yet being unbutted and unbounded by him in all the parts of it I will likewise tell any Soeinian that his great Master Socinus made such a double bottom of his Systeme of Notions that it hath forfeited its right to the Name of Religion by one Tenet complicated therewith and that he ought to throw that off and simplificare se ipsum Let any one if he pleaseth call the Socinians denying of the Trinity in Unity and Original Sin and the Baptism of Infants or the Divine Prescience and many other of their Notions by the Name of Religion but there is own of their Tenets that their Master needed no long wrestling with Heaven as a Supplicant to find out the truth of and which Notion when really believed is as pernicious to Crown'd Heads and their Subjects as the lawfulness of any ones sometime killing the next man he meets and that is that my Prince and I may not defend our lives against the next Invader who comes to take them away for as to that great Question An bellum offensivum vel defensivum fit licitum the Socinians answer is negatur which any one may see who pleaseth to consult the Themata F. Socini de officio Christi p. 7. Inter breves tractatus F. Socini and likewise his Epistle to Christopher Morstias p. 498. among his Epistles And thus let the well-willers to Presbytery call that erroneous opinion of their Church Government being founded on that Divine Right and the immediate Command of Christ and his Apostles a Tenet of Religion but to confront the Laws of Kingdoms in the settling it and to eradicate any part of those and especially to root the inheritable Monarchs Power in popular Election or Approbation and to make him but the Peoples Attorny and his Authority as revocable by them as a Letter of Attorney is abusively call'd Religion and is only properly to be term'd Sedition or Rebellion I have been so copious in insisting on the necessary separation of all Tenets that are denominable as Religious from those that are really Irreligious and Seditious under the gross name of the Religion in any Party as a thing perfectly just in it self and necessary for the quiet of the World and do hope that the Age that is so much addicted here to the improvement and polishing of our Language will incline it to do it self that right as not to give false Names to Things and Names of a contrary signification We know that the Standard of England in the Mint refers both to weight and fineness and tho a piece of Money may have the Royal Stamp on it engraven with all possible curiosity yet if it be not standard 't is so far from being allow'd the Name of any Species of the Kings Coyn that 't is instantly to be broken in pieces and as this is but just so is it but necessary for the quiet of the People who else detecting it would suspect the whole credit of the Mint as well as of that Species of Money and would either not take it or else with a Clamour raise the price of their Commodities for it And thus it is too a thing unreasonable and troublesome to the World for Men to Coyn false words or false denominations for any Tenet in Religion intrinsecally defective what curious stamp of the artifice of any Party soever it may bear its reprobate Silver is not to be call'd Religion and it makes Religion it self lyable to suspicion among the inquisitive it will trouble every hand it passeth to and from and in giving a value to it the People will raise the price of their tolerating it and