the anger of the people diffusive or representative is over but rather the contrary from it s not having appeared violent And indeed as that heat of the body that is acquired not by an approach to a blazing fire but gradually by gentle exercise of the parts is most lasting and most agreeable to its constitution so is it with that heat of popular anger that is the Result of the exercise of mens mindes and of several laboured intense thoughts most durable and salutiferous to the body of the Kingdom It hath been observed by a Man of no Vulgar intellectual Tallents Mr. Philip Nye a Man indeed of great Sagacity in his Generation as I find it in his Book called Beams of former Light viz. We know that in near a hundred years the Reformation gained little upon Popery and Superstition more then was gotten by the first assault nay it decay'd and Popery grew under it so fast as at last we were almost returned into the same condition that we were reformed from and this he sayes may be the cause why the first Reformation prospered no better there were the like severe impositions and Laws made upon occasion of difference among the Protest ants and then advantages were taken thereby and many put out of the Master-Role for Nonconformity who were of greatest courage and most faithful Resolution against Popery and Superstition the then common Enemy The silenâ—cing and ejection of Ministers in Queen Elizabeths dayes reformation being newly begun and the Enemies to it many the friends and those that faithfully engaged few was looked on by the godly prudent of that age as very unseasonable yea the their crimes had deserved it because of the searcity of Preachers at that time There is nothing more frequent in our Suffering Brethrens writings that were then published against the Hierarchy then a bemoaning the great loss to the cause and people of God thereby I will mention but one considering the season saith Mr. Parker though we were worthy yet should we least be deprived now when Popery riseth like the swellings of Iordan yea maketh invasion like an Armed man when there are wanting many on the other side in many Parishes to stand up in the gap against it Doth not the Canon Law it self spare depriving for greater faults when there is penuria sacerdotum quando utilitas ecclesiae exigit Thus far Mr. Nye who whether he has assigned non causam pro causâ or no as to the Vigorous encreasing of Popery after the Reformation I shall not say and shall forbear even with the tenderest and gentlest hand to touch the sore place of the difference among Protestants till we are secured against the Rough hands of any Esaws touching Gods Annointed Nor shall I now debate of which perswasion among Protestants should strike Sail to the others till we have put off the Fire-ship that hath grappled us but shall here say that I think one cause why the Protestant Religion hath not since its first assaults against Popery gained ground of it proportionably was what is necessarily incident to humane Nature and even in the most generous and particularly English Spirits after a great overflowing of passion to find in themselves the lowest ebb to succeed the highest tide and our boyling blood to be the more dispirited afterward by reason of its former heat and for us instantly to fall asleep when our spirits are taken off from the wrack that passion extended them on and to try to recruit our spirits again by the passion of Pitty or Shame which we had wasted by that of Anger like men that after one excess refresh themselves by another And as the great expenses of War which is the passion of Anger raging in the body of a whole Nation Necessarily at last end in a peace that continues till mens plenty blow them up into War again so doth the spending and wasting the Treasure of our Spirits by Anger necessitate us into a quiet that lasts till being thereby recruited we are again capable to take Fire from a fresh provocation and to trouble our selves and others But as men grow older and wiser they grow abler to moderate their passion of Anger and make it like Fire not a bad Master but good Servant to themselves and the Public not a Fire that acts as natural agents ad extremum virium and so as anger acts and rests in the bosom of fools who are so far natural agents only as not guided by reason but as in the Breasts of the Wise where reason rests and makes all passions as its Messengers and Ministers not unresembling what is said of the most High that he makes his Ministers a flame of Fire and so by God-like men who love others like themselves their passion of Anger is made like a Guardian Angel to themselves and others and by thus according to that precept being angry and sinning not the fire of Anger in the Protestants here against Popery having long been light and restless is at last got to its proper Element where it doth not Levitate and where it hath no burning but only a purifying quality and thus the hatred of the English Protestants against Popery may be said to be as the Scripture expression is a perfect hatred being now come to its height and proper Element which perfect Hatred to Popery may always consist with a perfect love to Papists and cinge not a hair of their heads more then a Lambent Fire My Lord I account that we do but Justice to the Persons of many of our Roman-Catholick Acquaintance in pronouncing of them that they have no PLOT but to get to Heaven and to follow the last Dictates of their Practical understandings as to the Mind of God reveal'd in the Scripture I shall tell your Lordship that I entertaining my thoughts sometimes with the great pacificatory ones of our Divines have observâ—d things there said with sharpness enough against the Errors of Papists and yet with great sweetness as to the persons erring and not only exempting these from odium in their holding Problematick Tenets contrary to ours but asserting their just liberty so to do And because one of our Church of England-Divines who hath writ at that rate hath done it with a graceful mixture of wit and frankness I shall here entertain your Lordship with some of his passages about it I intend here to refer you to an excellent Sermon of Dr. Ingelo's Preached at S. Paul's and Printed A. 1659. and where in p. 129. he saith I am afraid that Christian Religion will not recover for a good while that honour which is lost by the uncharitableness of the present Age. God grant that we may return speedily to the sincerity of the Protestant Principles We know not what the Christian Religion is but by the Scriptures and by them we may know for there it is plainly and fully set down In things doubtful if every Christian may not interpret for himself how shall
Populum on 1 Cor. 7. 24. pag. 195 and 196 speaking of the Monks saith It is well known in this our Land how both Church and Common-Wealth groan'd under the burden of these heavy Lubbers The Common-wealth while they becamâ— Lords of very little less by their computation who have travelled in the search â—hen one half of the temporalties of the Kingdom and the Church while they engrossed into their hands the fruits of the best Benefices of the Realm allowing scarce so much as the Chaff to those who tread out the Corn. This profession is God be thanked long since suppressed There is nothing of them now remains but the rubbish of their Nests and the stink of their memories unless it be the sting of their Devilish Sacriledge in â—â—bbing the Church by damnable Impropriations He had before said they were 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and Slow-bellies Stall-fed Monks and Friars who liv'd mew'd up in their Cells like Boors in a Frank pining themselves into Lord and beating down their bodies till their Girdles crackt But though it hath been truly observ'd That the not providing for the augmentations of the poorer Livings in England was a scandal to our Reformation in that it made so many scandalous Livings and consequently so many such Ministers and it has been in one of Queen Elizabeth's Parliaments notify'd by Dr. Iames as Townsend's Collections mention that of Eight Thousand and odd Parish-Churches then in England but Six Hundred did afford a competent Living for a Minister And it has been publickly aver'd by Archbishop Whitgift That there were Four Thousand Five Hundred Benefices which are not worth above Ten Pound a Year in the King's Books yet the dispersing of so much of the Church Revenue among the Laity hath had this effect namely to engage the possessors of so great a proportion of the Land of England to be Champions against Popery and one other good effect within my own observation it produced in the late times when Tithes themselves were thought Delinquent namely that the Impropriate Tithes saved the others And the not augmenting the poorer sort of Livings the which mostly were in Cities and Corporations in the Countrey hath not however prov'd any augmentation to the interest of Popery For though the Reliques and Images and Shrines of Saints there that brought a concourse of Offerers and Offerings thither enrich'd those places and the Churches and had the effect of Staple Ecclesiastical Commodities and Harry the Eighth's abolishing them reduced the value of the Livings there almost to nothing they grew by occasion thereof afterward to be receptacles for heterodox Divines who seiz'd on the Livings there in a manner derelict and finding the Genius of Trading people averse from Ceremonies did represent the few and innocent and indeed decent ones of the Church of England as odious to them and therefore were sure of pleasing their auditors by constant declaiming against those of Popery that were so many and cumbersome and had caused so much blood-shed and were known to be Ceremonies both mortuae mortiferae And as Doleman alias Parsons observed in his time that the strength of the Puritans lay in those Corporate Towns and Cities there will the hatred of the Principles of the Papists probably for ever encrease I have for this purpose found it truly observed in a Discourse in octavo concerning Liberty of Conscience Printed for Nath. Brooks at the Angel in Cornhil That the Puritan Preachers by their disesteem of Ceremonies and external Pomp in the worship of God were the more endeared to Corporations and the greater part of persons engaged in Trade and Traffic who hate Ceremonies in general and what does unnecessarily take up time And that persons who nauseate Ceremonies in Civil things will loath them likewise in Religious as a man who has an antipathy against Muscadine in his Parlor cannot love it at the Sacrament And that if we reflect on those who did most love Ceremonies heretofore in our Nation we shall find them to have been persons of the greatest Rank and Quality who did effect Ceremonies in Civil things or of the poorest sort who did get their daily bread by the Charity of the other So natural is it for men to Paint God in Colors suitable to their own fancies that I do not wonder at Trading Persons who hate Ceremonies that they thus think God in respect of this hatred altogether such as themselves That Discourse had before set forth That 't is natural to Men who live by Trade and whose being rich or beggars depends much on the honesty of their Servants to be enamoâ—â—â—â— on that Preaching that is most passionate and loud against what looks like luxury and is apt to occasion unnecessary expences to them And therefore no humane Art will ever Reconcile them to one Casuistical Tenet that is so so branded in the Pope's said Decree of the second of March viz. Servants of either Sex may secretly steal from their Masters for the value of their service if it is greater than the Salary which they receive The Mystery of Iesuitism letter 6 pag. 80 cites for this Tenet Father Bauny's Summary p. 213 and 214 of the sixth Edition viz. May Servants who are not content with their Wages advance them of themselves by filching and purloining as much from their Masters as they imagine necessary to make their Wages proportionable to their services On some occasions they may as when they are so poor when they come into service that they are obliged to accept any proffer that 's made to them and that other servants of their quality get more elsewhere At the rate of this Moral Theology no Tradesman knows what Mony he has either in his Pocket or Compter or what Cash in his Closet nor indeed any King what Treasure he has in his Exchequer But notwithstanding the aversion of many persons of high Birth and Breeding and who are lovers of Pomp and Ceremony in matters Civil and likewise in Religious from the contrary humour of Trading Men yet is there one thing that hath and always will in spight of all differences in Religion occasion an entercourse of Civility between the former Class of Mankind here and the latter and 't is that necessity of nature that makes the Borrower a Servant to the Lender namely that the expensive former Classe taking up Mony at interest from the more frugal latter obligeth them to give the Lenders the respect of fair quarter And thus according to that Bull in Tacitus That in some parts of Scotland the Sun shines all night long there will still during the contrariety of their tenets and humours and which are as opposite as light and darkness occasionally arise a clear understanding between them And of the Redundance of Money the Puritans party had in the late times and of their designed employing it for the greatning the interest of their party the establishment of Feoffees by them for purchasing Impropriations is a great
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
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
Guymenius shortly after in that year appearing in Print as a Champion for the Principles so damned the College of Sorbon shortly after that damned the Work of Guymenius in the 11th of May the same year and that in the latter end of Iune so shortly following in the same year the same Pope Alexander the 7th damned that very Sorbon Censure of Guymenius and that therefore 't is possible the great Scene of Vertue appearing in this Popes said Decree may with a short turn of Apostolical Power receive too the Fate of Pageantry and presently disappear and that the great Mountain which his Faith hath removed into the midst of the Sea may in little more than the twinkling of an Eye return to its old place But in Answer to which I shall do that right to the Papacy to clear the mistake in the objection and inform the Reader that tho Alexander the 7th did Ex Cathedra damn that Sorbon-Censure as aforesaid yet it appears out of the Condemnatory Bull it self that what that Pope there did was not out of favour to Guymenius or the Iesuites themselves or their Tenets and that to satisfie the World in that point he there gives the reason for his damning the Sorbonists Censure namely because it intermedled in Censuring some other Propositions or Principles of the Jesuites that concerned the Authority of the Pope the Iurisdiction of Bishops the Office of the Parish Priests and the Privileges granted by Popes and but for the Sorbons complicating which with their Censure of the other Scandalous Principles of the Iesuites no doubt but the Sorbon Censure had stood as a Rock unshaken Let therefore such who fear every thing fear that this great Pope will after his said Condemnatory Decree appear 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or Self-Condemned while I observe it for the honour of his Iustice that he made that Decree and for the honour of his Prudence that before Nature had caused the detestable Principles therein censured silently to evaporate he gave the World this loud warming of them as it likewise may be for the honour of that great Seminary of the Divines of our Church of England our University of Oxford observed that before the Seditious Principles and Tenets of Iesuites and some Dissenters came to be naturally exterminated out of the English World by fear and shame they notified them to this Age and to Posterity There is no Subject that hath since the year 1641 more employed the English Press than that of Liberty of Conscience pro and con and the fiercest and sharpest of the Writings concerning it were what passed between the Independents and Presbyterians on the occasion of Presbytery's great Effort to make the English Nation by one short general turn Proselyted to its Model and when it pushed for the auspicious fate of former great Religionary Conversions happening as it were simul and semel and when Nations seemed to be like the Hyena which having but one Back-bone cannot turn except it turn all at once But the Independents observing the Kingdom and Presbytery frowning on one another thought they could do nothing more popular than to take the Arguments they found in the many Pamphlets of the Presbyterians lying on every Stall for toleration under the old Hierarchy and turn them upon Presbytery and every one then who had fears and jealousies of the Arbitrariness of Presbytery seem'd to be a well wisher to those Books for Liberty of Conscience and the destroying of the Credit of Presbytery by Books that had so much contentious fire in them was really an acceptable sweet-smelling Sacrifice to the Nation And after the King's Restoration tho some few Books were writ of that Subject and with much more Candour than the others yet the Yoke of the King 's Ecclesiastical Laws was so easie to the People as that the Writing of Books against it was not encouraged by Popular Applause The King's Declaration of Indulgence afterward appearing and as not gained by dint of Pen but ex mero motu was applauded by some few particular Writers among the Popish and Protestant Recusants discoursing in Print at their ease of Liberty of Conscience But as if Nature meant that Books of that Subject should no more here divert the curious World the Empire toleration had thereby gained did presently labour under its own weight and the Non-Conformists being jealous of that Declaration proving a President of the Prerogatives suspending Acts of Parliament in general and suspecting that the Popish Recusants would have the better of that Game as supposed to have many great Court-Cards here and abroad in the World and likely to have more while the Protestant Recusants had not so good in their hands tho yet they had here what amounted to the point in Picquet I mean the advantage of their Numbers did presently thereupon cause all the Cards to be thrown up but first had in Concert with the dealers provided for the packing them to their own advantage in a new Deal In plain English some Loyal Persons and firm Adherents to the Church of England in the House of Commons thinking that Declaration illegal and whether justly or no I here presume not in the least to question endeavoured tanquam pro aris focis to get that Declaration Cancell'd and knowing they could not effect the same without the help of the Dissenters Party in Parliament engaged their help therein by giving them hopes to carry an Act of Parliament for their Indulgence but what a little fore-sight would have made appear to them impossible to be gained for many Considerations too obvious to be named And the natural result of this Fact which is on all hands confessedly true cannot but be the making of the former fashion of Polemical writing for liberty of Conscience to pass away We have since seen some few Florid Sheets published by some of the Dissenting Clergy on that Subject but they have made no other Figure then that of the poor Resemblances of Flowers extracted by Chimical Art out of their Ashes and any little shaking them in the Glass of Time must make them presently fall in pieces I have in this Discourse expressly owned my having no regret against any due or Legal Relaxation of the Penal Laws against Recusants but what any due or legal way may be therein I enquire not The power of the King in dispensing with the Penalties in case of particular Persons was not that I hear of in the least Controverted in the Debates of the Commons about that Declaration And Fuller in his Church History relateth that when Bishop Williams was Lord-Keeper there was a Toleration granted under the Great Seal to Mr. Iohn Cotton a Famous Independent Divine for the free exercise of his Ministry notwithstanding his dissenting in Ceremonies so long as done without disturbance to the Church and the lawfulness of which particular Indulgence I suppose none in that Age controverted as I think none would any thing of that kind in this
and a printed Devotional Office called The Office of the immaculate Conception of the most holy Virgin our Lady approved by the Sovereign Pontiff Paul the 5th had been much in vogue in the Papal World yet the Pope by his Decree of February the 17th 78. damned that Office and as I may say threw it over board And of this the Author of Iulian the Apostate might have took notice if he had pleased when in his Comparison of Popery and Paganism he instanced in the transprosing of part of the Psalms to the Virgin Mary after the mode of this Office that had been suppressed about 4 years before The old stubbornness of Popes against the making any Reformation of Abuses and Errors in their Church hath been commonly observed but I believe that considering the great Figure England makes in the World it may not be unlikely that the brisk Spirit of Opposition against Popery that had displayed it self in England for about 8 years before the Plot-Epoche and the sharp and learned Books that were in that Conjuncture printed here against the Abuses of the Church of Rome might much contribute to the laudable Proceedings of this Pope in those Decrees I have mentioned And therefore when Nature had thus enforced the Papal Chair in so great a Measure upon Recantation and a great deal of pretended infallibity was thrown over-board and that even relating to some Principles that might be called Religionary it may reasonably be thought that the same operation of Nature will produce among our little Protestant Recusants a tacit renuntiation of the Irreligionary part of those very Principles that both the World and themselves must needs see they have transcribed from Popery The Complication of the Principles of Irreligion that hath joyned the Iesuites Popery with that of our former Presbyterians Popery hath long been as visible as the great Isthmus I spake of that joyns the Mexican and the Peruan parts of the new World and as I being to explain as in a Dictionary what I meant by Popery I would not expose my self to the Critical Religionary Controvertists by nicely defining Popery the Observation being no less than a Rule in the Civil Law that omnis definitio in jure Civili periculosa est parum est enim ut non subverti possit but gave the Description of my sense of it as before in this Preface so if I were to give a Description of our Scotch Presbytery as Covenanted to be here introduced I would take the said Description of Popery and only mutatis mutandis say that by Presbytery I mean the power of our Presbyters in imposing Creeds and Doctrines and Rules of Divine Worship on men and the Presbyters jurisdiction interloping in that of our Princes and their Laws and the doing this by the Charter of Jus Divinum and as they are Christs pretended Vicars and do account that its intended Arbitrariness here in England justly appeared as terrible as that of Popery and that our Consciences being enslaved to a Foreign Bishop is not more inglorious than their being so to our fellow Subjects and that a blush being divided among ten thousand Ecclesiasticks after they had out-raged our Laws and our Consciences would have here been no more seen by us than one at Rome on occasion of any Popes there blushing after they had so done I have observed in this Discourse how that part of Presbytery that may tho erroneous be called Religionary as practised in some Foreign Churches hath here decayed and must so naturally more and more and was glad to hear That since the putting the Laws in Execution against Protestant Recusants those of them who were called Presbyterians have on recollection of thought and after Conference had with our Divines forborn their former Schismatical Separation from our Churches and that particularly in our Metropolis they have in all things been ameinable to the Doctrine and Discipline of our Church except as to the submitting to have their Children baptized with the use of the Sign of the Cross there and their Superstition in not complying with which will I hope not be long lifed The gradual encrease of the Christenings in some Parishes in the Country that I have seen Accounts of and in which places the Dissenters formerly were very numerous hath been to a far greater Proportion than the gradual Encrease by me remarked as to London and within the same years And a Learned Divine who is Minister of a Parish not far from London hath acquainted me That the number of Communicants being there about the beginning of those years but a 100 hath since arisen to 400 and I believe that generally the numbers of Conformists may have much encreased in the Country beyond the proportion of their Encrease in the City and may probably do so for some years Tho there are several Merchants and rich Traders in our Metropolis who are Dissenters yet I have observed that the gross of their numbers consists there of ordinary Retail-traders and as these have been naturally Sufferers there by the Cities so much removing Westward and by the Retail-trade being so much gone to the other end of the Town and are likely so to be more and more so it hath been and will be natural to them to be more and more querulous according to the saying of Omne invalidum est Querulum And in this Case it will be natural to them both to support their decaying Trade by Religionary Combinations and perhaps to fancy Religion it self breaking together with their Bankrupsy and both for the Consoling one another as Socii doloris and likewise relieving one another thereby to endeavour to keep Heterodox Religionary Societies as long and as much as they can But Necessity the known Mother of Industry must naturally in time cure them of their Poverty and Temptation to Heterodoxy thereby Our Quakers are by many thought to be a kind of a Roma subterranea but whether justly or no I enquire not nor shall I give my opinion in it till the Principles of their Light within shall be exposed to that without many of which Principles have hitherto been by them kept as hid from the World as were the Subterraneous Lights preserved in the Roman Monuments and as to which Principles they are perhaps conscious that when they shall be exposed to the Air and Light of the Sun they will be as naturally extinguished as those Monumental Lights were when occasionally brought into the open Air. But one of their known Tenets being the unlawfulness of Oaths I account they have an advantage thereby beyond the Presbyterians or Independents in their Claim to Indulgence by demanding it in a Doctrinal point wherein there is Dâ—gnus vindice nodus by reason of some words in the 5th of St. Matthew and 5th of St. Iames seeming primâ facie very emphatically and vehemently to forbid all manner of swearing as the Commentators generally observe And in this point they are entituled to a very true and
great Compassion because of the very false Comments so many true Protestant would-be's Actions have made on their great promissory Oaths beforementioned and for that they have not out-raged their Natural Allegiance by Rebellions as many other Dissenters have done If therefore to those Yea and Nay Men the King should grant such a Charter as the men of Rippon had from King Athelstan namely Quod homines sui Ripponienses sint credendi per suum yea per suum nay in omnibus querelis curiis licet tangentibus Freed-mortel c. I should not grudge it them And to speak frankly I know not but this their sullen Principle may be subservient to some great Birth of Nature that may happen perhaps within an Age or two when shame may in the more populous World have so far exterminated Fraud and Cozenage and the danger of Perjury as that the manner of our Oaths Assertory before Tribunals may grow obsolete a thing I account not altogether improbable since I my self observed that in a Case that happened before some of the greatest Peers of the Realm Authorised to give an Oath as being the Lords Commissioners of Prizes in the first Dutch War it appeared that there was somewhat in Nature that had greater weight than an Oath among some men namely Reputation for many Merchants being present at a sitting of theâ—r Lordships and one of them claiming a Ship and lading before them as wholly belonging to Hamburgers and shewing himself ready to swear the same before their Lordships one of the Lords asking him if he would on his Reputation declare that no Subject of the States of Holland was as Proprietor therein concerned he refused to do it But before this Golden Age of Morality may come and the bending Leaden-rule of Oaths hath been laid aside I expect that the Names of several of our Religionary Parties will be forgotten and be as insignificant as the word Lollards and Lollardies and to suppress which every High Sheriff is still bound to by his Oath and who perhaps may think that the Lollards were Papists or some Heterodox People or other And therefore were I Master of never so much leisure I would bestow no part of it on the writing against those Religionary Errors that have been so often confuted and especially when I see the Circumvallations of Nature so carefully wrought in its Siege against them as that it cannot miscarry and no man having fixed his Judgment of Natures Course need Spur it on and according to the Words of the Great Prophet He that bâ—lieveth shall not make haste Notwithstanding the severity of all our old Laws against Popish Recusants it hath been for the honour of our Râ—formation that the Government hath notified it in the times of Queen Elizabeth and Kâ—ng Iames that no Roman-Catholick here suffered death for his Religion and notwithstanding all the Penal Laws against Protestant Recusants and Recusancy our pious Princes have without any general Relaxation or Suspension of those Laws shewn signal favours and indulgences to many particular Persons who appeared to the Eye of the State to be really Conscientious and to hold no Principles that would create disturbance to it And as I have mentioned that Mr. Cotton was particularly indulged so I might likewise Assign many other instances of this Nature and particularly of the known Letter of Edward the 6th to Cranmer to omit some Rites in the Consecration of Bishop Hooper and of some Indulgences in Queen Elizabeth's and King Iames his time and others in King Chaâ—les the First 's in favour of particular Protestant as well as Popish Recusants And to this purpose the History of the Life of Mr. Hildersham one of the most Eminent Divines that Puritanism had bred mentions that on the account of points relating to Non-Conformity he was very frequently suspended ob officio beneficio and very frequently restored to the same and the same thing appears in the life of Mr. Dod an Antesignanus among them and both these Divines in their printed Writings asserted the Principles of their Loyalty and impugned the Doctrine of Resistance as likewise some others of the Puritan Divines did and were therefore particularly indulged And Mr. Prynn shewed himself extremely partial in reflecting on the Government as he did in his Seditious Book called The Popish Royal Favourite by not taking notice of the Relaxation of the Penal Laws made in the Case of particular Loyal Puritans and Non-Conformists as well as in the Case of particular Loyal Papists But if the Government thought it so often necessary for its safety to revoke its particular Indulgences granted to Hildersham and Dod for the former being silenced in Iune 1590 and restored in Ianuary 1591 was again suspended and silenced in April 1605 and after he was again restored in Ianuary 1608 was again silenced in November 1611 and being Iune 1625 restored to preaching was in March 1630 was again silenced and the latter of them found the like vicissitude of favours and punishments too tedious to be here inserted how can the Government be now secure in granting an Indulgence to other particular Protestant Recusants more than only duraâ—te bene placito or quam diu bene se gesserint after all the Dis-loyalty of the Principles and Practices chargeable on so many of them since 41 and not known to have been since abhorred by them But our Parliaments not knowing but only suspecting so many of their owning their former Principle of the Doctrine of Resistance and who did therefore in the toleration of any Heterodox Religionaries in their own Families restrain them to a number only of four other Persons to be present seemed with the mixture both of tenderness to the Consciences of those Religionaries and likewise to the publick Peace to draw the Copy of that Modus of their limited Toleration in some sort after the great Original of the old Decree at Rome against the Bacchanals and by which it was or dered that they should not as before be observed at Rome or in Italy but that Si quis tale sacrum solenne ac nâ—cessarium duceret nec sine Religione ac piaculo se id omittere posse apud Praetorem urbanum profiteretur praetor senatum consâ—leret se ei permissum esset cum in senatu centum nâ—n minus essent ita id sacrum fieret dum ne plus quinque sacrificio interessent But most certainly whatever Complaisance with the Consciences of any pretending Religionaries that Parliament intended had they had any Prospect of four Persons being present any where that held any Principles destructive of Monarchy and that inclined them to sacrifice our Princes and Laws as formerly they would have accounted those four too many to be tolerated And the dreadful Out-rage the Government conflicted with when Venner and the other few Fift-Monarchy men came out of the Tiring house of a private Religionary Meeting in Coleman-street to Act the part of Furies as they did
in our Mâ—tropolis and that beyond the wildness of any mad Bacchanal may well be an instance of Caution against many of a Party whose Principles are not known being trusted together with themselves Yet after all this as once in a little Nominal Parliament we had in the the time of the Vsurpation it was ordained That all Persons that could speak should speak the enjoyned words of Matrimony and that all that had hands should there joyn hands so I believe that in any future Conjuncture particular Persons who by the Loyalty of their Principles and Practices and by their being ready to attend our Divines for instruction can make it appear that they have Consciences will have no cause to complain of their being not free But by an Accident of Moment that hath offered it self to the consideration of our Protestant Recusants since the Epoche of Plots and Rumours of Plots I doubt not but they will find an imminent necessity to make it demonstrable to the World that they own no Principles destructive of it and that particularly the easie access that Witnesses have found to Credibility on their swearing Plots against Iesuitick Popish Recusants by the Precipice of the Principles on which they stood being so conspicuous to the World and from whence the very breath of their Adversaries of how mean and despicable parts and fortunes soever hath served to throw them down headlong into ruine so easily will be an effectual Document to all Recusants who would prevent the danger from Plot-Witnesses that the very next thing to be done by them is their bearing their Testimony against Principles of Dis-loyalty The late Bishop of Winchester to the Character of whose Loyalty and Learning Christendom is no stranger having his thoughts on the Wing and ready to take their Flight to that Region of Bliss where none are admitted but Souls that part hence with a noble disposition to Charity for all Humane kind thought fit in his Prospect of that World and in the great Interval of his Preparation for it to send to the Press his Book called His Vindication c. printed in 1683 and in the Conclusion of it to transmit his opinion to the Age and Posterity that ever since the Reformation there have been two Plots carried on by Papists and Dissenters and that the same would long continue He had there mentioned Mr. Baxters justifying the late War and quoted him for saying that as he durst not repent of what he had done in the aforesaid War so he could not forbear the doing of the same if it were to do again in the same state of things 'T is true indeed saith the Bishop he tells us in the same place That if he were convinced he had sinned in what he had done he would as willingly make a publick Recantation as he would eat and drink when he is hungry and thirsty But neither he nor any of the Non-Conformists that I have heard of hath as yet made any such publick Recantation and therefore we may rationally and charitably enough conclude That they are still of the same Iudgment they were then and consequently that their Practice will be the same it was then when any opportunity invites them to it c. And then proceeds to say For mine own part I must confess as I always have been so I am still of opiniâ—n that ever since the Reformation there have been and are two Plots carrying on sometimes more covertly and sometimes more secretly the one by those that call themselves the only true Catholicks the other by those that call themselves the only true Protestants and both of them against the Government as it is Established by Law both in Church and State and as there always hath been so there will be Plotting by both those Parties until both of them be utterly suppressed for as for making of Peace with either of them I take it by reason of the perverseness of the one and peevishness of the other and the Pride of both a thing not to be hoped for How much my poor Measures of Futurity do differ from his Lordships in the Case of our Popish and Protestant Recusants the Current of my Discourse shews and am sorry that he having used this harsh sounding word of Plots described not his Idea of the particulars thereof relating to the time to come and that he innodated in this his Censure as it were the Body of the two Religionary Parties without any exception of the Loyal in both But I have observed it in a printed Letter of this Reverend Prelate to the Earl of Anglesy of the Date of Iuly the 4th 1672. where having spoke of the keeping out of Popery now it seems to be flowing in upon us as his words are that he saith You know what I was for in the late Sessions of Parliament I mean not a Comprehension but a Coalition or Incorporation of the Presbyterian Party into the Church as it is by Law Established and I am still of the same opinion that it is the one only effectual expedient to hinder the Growth of Popery and to secure both Parties and I am very confident that there are no Presbyterians in the World the Scotch only excepted that would not conform to all that is required by our Church especially in such a Conjuncture of time as this is My Scope by quoting this Letter is to shew that about 10 years ago the Bishop was not of opinion that Nature had condemned the Presbyterians to eternal Plotting against the State but that a Coalition between that Party here and our Church would then naturally happen and as to which I have shewn how far he was fortunate in that his Conjecture by the late great advance of those called Presbyterians toward Conformity and that therefore his Opinion varying in 83 from what it was in 72 as to the Presbyterians it might had he lived longer to have writ again vary perhaps as to the Papists being Plotters with a Continuando and he might have recanted that opinion as much as he would have had Mr. Baxter recanted his And I would from that his Letter shew that we have the less reason to be mortified with the fear of the continuance of these 2 Plots or to be tempted to uncharitable thoughts of the whole Body of the Papists upon this Bishops opinion as delivered in what I have cited out of his Vindication because one expression of it includes so much of Humane Frailty and Error viz. his Lordships saying That he was ALWAYS of opinion that since the Reformation these two Plots were and would be till both the Parties were utterly disabled and suppressed for when he writ the said Letter his Opinion appeared otherwise And there is another use I would make of this Pious and Learned Prelates having given such an Alarm to the World concerning the Plots of these Heterodox Religionaries in future time and of his having made them as to Disloyalty to be in a manner
settlement of the same proving Abortive in several Parliaments ib. The French King in the last War did forbid the Importation of Sail-Cloath to England ib. A presage of the future happy State of England and the Authors Idea thereof at large ib. and p. 252. An account of the Rough Hemp and Flax and Sail-cloth and all other Manufactures of Hemp and Flax yearly brought into England and from what Countries deduced out of the Custom-house Books p. 254. All the Hemp and Flax sown in England is observed to be bought up by the years end p. 257. Almost as much Hemp and Flax yearly brought into Amsterdam as into the whole Kingdom of England ib. The Authors judgment of the effects of the necessity that will drive us on to the Linen Manufacture ib. An Account of the fine Linen lately made by the French Protestants at Ipswich and of the Flax by them sown ib. The Author's Censure of the excessive Complaints of the danger of Popery ib. His belief that the future State of England will make men ashamed of their pass'd fears of Popery ib. The Vote of the House of Commons for the recalling the Declaration of Indulgence carried by the Party of the Nonconformists p. 258. Most of the Papists of England in the Year 1610 computed to be under the guidance of the Jesuites p. 260. Many Popish Writers have inveighed against Gratian the Compiler of the Decrets of the Canon Law ib. That Law never in gross received in England ib. Binds not English Papists in the Court of Conscience ib. A Tenet ridiculously and falsly in the Canon Law founded on Cyprian ib. Gratian's founding it on Cyprian gives it only the weight it could have in Cyprian's Works p. 261. Pere Veron's Book of the Rule of Catholick Faith cited for Gratian's Decrees and the gloss claiming nothing of Faith and Bellarmine's acknowledging errors therein ib. One definition in the Canon Law and gloss held by all Papists ridiculous ib. The Author thinks he has said as much to throw off the Obligation on any Papists to obey the Pope's Canon Law as they would wish said ib. He thinks himself morally obliged in any Theological Enquiry to say all that the matter will fairly bear on both sides ib. Heylin and Maimbourg cited about the firing of Heretical Villages in France p. 262. Parsons and Bellarmine cited by Donne for rendring some things obligatory that are said by Gratian p. 263. The Author expects that the growing populousness of England will have the effect of rendriâ—g men less censorious of any supposed Political Errors in the Ministers of our Princes p. 265. Mr. Fox cited for his Observation of many Excellent men falsly accused and judged in Parliament and his advice to Parliaments to be more circumspect ib. The Author minded by that passage out of Fox to reflect on the severity in a late Parliament in their Votes against the King's Ministers ib. The injustice of the Vote against the Earl of Hallifax p. 266. The Earl of Radnor occasionally mentioned with honour ib. The Constancy of the Earl of Anglesy to the Protestant Religion further asserted p. 267. Mention of his Lordships being injuriously reflected on in a Speech of Sir W. J. ib. The unreasonableness of the Reflections on the Lord Chief Justice North for advising and assisting in the drawing up and passing a Proclamation against Tumultuous Petitions ib. The great deserved Character of that Lord Chief Justice p. 268. throughout A reflection on the popularity of Sir W. J. and on the â—â—â—essive Applause he had from the House of Commons after his Speech for the Exclusion-Bill p. 269. Sir Leolin Jenkins mentioned with honour ib. The Cabal of Sir W. J. observed to be full of fears of the Exclusion-Bill passing and their not knowing what steps in Politicks to make next ib. The Earl of Peterborough at large mentioned with honour ib. and p. 270. A further Account of the Authors prediction of England's future happy State ib. and p. 271. The Author observes that the most remarkable late Seditious Writers have published it in Print That they feared the next Heir to the Crown only as Chief Favourite to his Prince and that they judged that the Laws would sufficiently secure them from fears of his power if he should come to the Crown p. 271. An Assertion of his never having advised his Prince to incommode any one illegally and of his not having used his own power to any such purpose ib. The Author judgeth such Persons to write but in jest who amuse the People about being Lachrymists by that Princes Succession ib. The Author reflects on our Counterfeit Lachrymists for not affecting as quick a prevention of any future growth of Popery as was 〈◊〉 care of in Scotland p. 272. He observes that few or none in Scotland fear that Popery can ever in any Course of time there gain much ground ib. The Papists in that Kingdom estimated to be but 1000 ib. The Author believes that the fears of Poperies growth will be daily abated in England and in time be extinguished ib. More Popish Ecclesiasticks observed to be in Holland then Ministers in France and that yet none in Holland pretend to fear the Papists ib. The Authors judgment of the Dissenters Sayings being usefully published ib. Some Notes on the Geneva Bible seditious ib. The same Tenet of firing Heretical Cities that is in the Popes Canon Law founded on the 13 th of Deuteronomy is chargeable on our late Presbyterians ib. The Assemblies Annotations cited to that purpose ib. The Church of England illuminates us with better Doctrine p. 274. Bishop Sanderson cited for that purpose ib. Calvin as to this point did blunder as shamefully as our Assembly-men p. 274. Several of the Calvinistick and Lutheran Divines imbibed the error of Hereticidium from the same mistaken Principle of Monk Gratians ib. The Presbyterians here fired the Church and State with a Civil War ib. The Authors belief that there will never be any new Presbyterian Synod in England nor General Council beyond Sea ib. The Popes Pensions in the Council of Trent that sate for 18 years came to 750 l. Sterling per Month â—b The Author predicts the extermination of all Mercenary Loyalty in England ib. The reason of such his Prediction p. 275. The Lord Hyde first Commissioner of the Treasury mentioned with honour ib. What the new Heaven and the new Earth is that the Author expects in England ib. The reason that induced false Prophets to foretel evil rather than good to States and Kingdoms p. 276. at large The same applied to our Augurs who by enlarging our fears and jealousies and their own fortunes thereby rendred the Genius of England less august ib. The Authors measures of the future State of England are taken only from Natural Causes and Natures Constancy to it self p. 277. A short account of several great Religionary Doctrines having naturally pierced through the sides and roots of one another p. 279. The
and likewise any one that owned any of those Pernitious Principles that strike at the heart of the Civil Government and that they would presently give his Majesty an accompt of all their own Names Places of abode and Numbers of their Families and that they would not live in nor come to the Court nor into any of our Cities or great Towns without leave obtain'd pursuant to the Statute of the 35 th of Elizabeth Ch. 2. wherein 't is Enacted under several Penalties That they shall not remove above Five miles from their dwellings and to give in their Names to the Constables Headborough and Minister c. and that the people might be delivered not only from any danger by them but any fears that might fall on a wise man either of their power or numbers encreasing I should joyfully entertain such an invention But what way of that kind is practicable I am altogether ignorant But do suppose that the present Lawes Oaths and Tests ought to continue till with the Consent of His Majesty and Lords and Commons in Parliament we are further secured I know that we ought to be much more vigilant over English Papists then over any Forrainers for that 't is a kind of a Rule that Angli nil modicum in Religione possunt and therefore that no Popish Priest who is a Subject to England can with the public safety live here Your Lordship hath I think as comprehensive a knowledg of the affairs of Ireland as any man can have and therefore I shall here tell you that a Gentleman of Ireland told me that in the times of the usurpt powers 't was in the Act of Settlement for Ireland by the Parliament declared that it was not their intent after almost a National Rebellion to extirpate the whole Irish Nation but that after an exception of certain persons as to Life and Estate the Act orders some Irish to be banish'd the Kingdom and other Irish to be transplanted to some part of Ireland allowing them such proportion of Land and Estate there as they should have had of their own elsewhere in Ireland if they had not been removed What effect that Transplantation had I know not but I suppose it easier to remove a handful of men from one corner of the Land to another then 't was to remove almost a Nation And do suppose there are some Papists in England as innocent of this late Plot as there were some in Ireland of that Rebellion The Dean of Canterbury doth in his incomparable Sermon before the House of Commons on the 5 th of November 1678 acknowledg the Piety and Charity of several persons who lived and dyed in the Roman Communion as Erasmus Father Paul Thuanus and many others who had in truth more goodness then the Principles of that Religion do either incline men to or allow of And so I think my self bound in justice to Judge in that manner of some Papists of my acquaintance Thus the Epicureans of old tho their Principle of making happiness consist in pleasure was detestable gained this point that many of their Sect were honest men And so much Tully acknowledged to be true but with a Salvo to his exception against their Doctrine Speaking of Epicurus and his Followers L. 2. De Finibus Boni Mali he saith Ac mihi quidem videtur quod ipse vir bonus fuit multi Epicurei fuerunt bodie sunt in amicitirs fideles in omni vita constantes graves nec voluptate sed officio consilia moderantes It seems to me that Epicurus was a good man and many of his Sect have been and are faithful in their friendships and constant and serious men in every condition of life and managing the conduct of their life 's by duty and not pleasure But then saith he hoc videtur major vis honestatis minor voluptatis and afterwards he saith atque ut caeteri existimantur dicere melius quam facere sic hi mihi videntur melius facere quam dicere As much as if he had said No thanks to their Principles but their honest inclinations the force of honesty shew'd it self more Predominant in them then that of pleasure and as other mens Principles are accounted better then their Practises these mens Practises are better then their Principles It is I think Gods standing Miracle in the world who is able to make a divulsion between the formal and the vital Act namely to make fire not burn to keep some men from undoing themselves and Mankind by the genuine consequences of the Opinions they profess in matters of Religion And thus it is happy for the World that Caliginosa nocte premit Deus nepotes discursus And he can by an Omnipotent easiness when he pleaseth Divert a mans understanding from seeing any first-born consequence from his opinion as well as a more remote one Moreover the Divine Power doth in the Government of the World interpose it self sometimes between professed Notions or Principles themselves and mans intellectual faculties Good men sometimes do not believe even the existence of that and of some other divine Attributes where the things to be believed are to be seen by the light of Nature And bad men habituated to lying sometimes do at last believe the lyes and shamms themselves made though yet for the most part it happens what is perfectly worthy of the Divine Power and goodness when men are with Candor and purity of mind seeking after Truth that-Heaven does so influence their understandings as that they are not by false lights artificial seduced to believe any thing against the light of Nature nor given up by weak arguments to strong delusions These things considered I think that that great Divine of our Age the Lord Bishop of Lincoln hath with a Noble modesty and charity in the Title of his unanswered and unanswerable Book against Popery exprest the Principles of that Religion when really believed to be pernicious And having said all this I need not trouble your Lordship or my self much further about finding a way to prevent the Papists from troubling us but do suppose that the Papists themselves are most concerned to labour in such an invention And instead of their being led by any hellish Principles to destroy any City of Course by Sinister means That is by burning it they may if they please in their Devotion address to Heaven for that favour to its old chosen People on Earth mentioned in Psalm 107. v. 7. And he led them forth by the right way that they might go to a City of Habitation I suppose that after so eminent a Person as the Lord High Chancellor of England in his Speech at the Condemnation of the Lord Stafford made that great interogation Does any man now begin to doubt how London came to be burnt and after the Vote of the last Parliament the last day of their Sitting in these words viz. Resolved That it is the Opinion of this House That
to every Member of that great Body wishing his happiness as your own extending the arm of your beneficence as far as it can reach to the remotest object without hurting your self by the straining it with a pitying Eye and a tender Hand and forgiving Heart guiding unhappy men out of the very Labyrinths they had brought themselves into by injuring you accounting your mercy to be justice to Humane Nature adorning greatness both in your self and others with goodness in the case of the injur'd poor and weak making oft the great and the mighty asham'd of their oppression by your reason and alwayes with Language as soft as the yoke they intended was hard when you could not make them afraid of it by your power and blushing your self for the degeneration of Mans Nature when you saw any that shame could not divert from the turpitude of injuring their brethren of mankind and by your compassion alleviating that burthen of the miserable that they had sunk under but by your Fellowship in their grief and never dispensing either the Kings reproof or your own to offenders without moderation and respect to the frail state of Humanity and without that mixture of benign advice that gave the Malheurevs a plank after the Shipwrack of their Fame and very often running the hazard of drowning your self by helping to save those that were sinking in the Favour of the King and Court and when their fate was such that all the rest of the herd avoided them as a wounded Deer In a word they that know your Lordship know that by arguments hard to be answered and a softness of words and Temper almost inimitable you have Proselyted several Papists out of their pernicious Principles and have taught them goodness by your example and by your having that happy inclination that Hillel a Famous Jewish Doctor who lived a little before our Saviours Incarnation so well advised Namely Be of the Disciples of Aaron who loved Peace and followed Peace and who loved Men and brought them near to the Law. Your Lordship by your being so well vers'd in our Statute Laws and Histories is able to acquaint them with the Justice of our Ancestors in the making of many fresh additional capital Laws for sanguinary they ought not to be called since just against Papists upon the detection of several fresh horrid Treasons particularly those against Queen Elizabeth and King Iames and that our Ancestors then having a great and violent indignation against Popery and Papists made Laws with the dread of the Vltimum supplicium therein and further the anger of Man could not go But it cannot scape your Lordships observation that the violence of Passion not being capable of lasting long in its highest rage how just soever and especially in the brest of an English Man and a Protestant those hot Statutes made only as I may say a hizzing like a little fire thrown into Water and as to their Execution went out presently Nor have I ever heard of any one that apostatiz'd from the Church of England to that of Rome who was as those Statutes ordain punisht as a Traytor merely for so doing And indeed since no Stratagems are to be used twice and especially such as did not succeed once I am highly pleased that on the Discovery of the late detestable Plot there was so great a calmness in the minds so general a smoothness in the brows of the people such an universal Spirit of Patience forbearance and meekness every where visible in their Faces even greater then that which shone in the Minds and Faces of the Londoners when with composed looks they saw their City newly made ashes and had smelt the Incendiaries almost as soon as the Fire that none can imagine but who as eye witnesses observed And even on the fifth of November ensuing the Discovery of the Plot the two excellent Preachers desired to preach before the House of Lords and the House of Commons on that day when both an Old and a New Plot were staring the Nation in the Face happen'd to be with the Peaceable Genius of the Christian Religion and of the People in that Conjuncture inspired in the choice of that same part of Scripture that was their Text and contain'd the calm yet severe reproof given by the Founder of Christianity to some of his Disciples that would have been Commission'd to call for Fire from Heaven to consume the inhospitable Samaritans in one of which Sermons namely that of the Dean of Canterbury's 't is for the Honour of our Nation and Religion by him observed p. 31. of the Sermon that after the Treason of this day nay at this very time since the Discovery of so barbarous a design and the highest provocation in the World by the Treacherous murder of one of His Majesties Iustices of the Peace a very good man and a most excellent Magistrate who had been active in the Discovery of this Plot I say after all this and notwithstanding the continued and insupportable insolence of their carriage and behaviour even upon this occasion no violence nay not so much as any incivility that I have heard of has been offer'd to any of them Thus for the words of this good and learned man. He that loves not his Brother whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath not seen And the Religion that prompts them to destroy our bodies that they see makes them fearless in the damming of our Souls that they have not seen and even without giving us a minutes warning to make up our accounts with God and that too perhaps for extravagant lenity shew'd to some incorrigibles among them which was poor Godfreys case But the calm temper of the Protestants to them upon the Discovery of the Plot not breathing out any Cruelty or new Severity against their Bodies or Souls shall alwayes endear to me the Protestant Religion And though those two great Votes of the House of Commons may seem severe to the Papists yet are they warning pieces only if they please and not murdring ones and like the Arrows of Ionathan to warn David and not to hurt him And indeed only to warn them not to kill David and not to hurt themselves and in effect a reasonable request or petition of â—wo Parliaments to them only to make much of themselves and like the lenity that accompanied the Divine threatning of moriendo morieris restrain'd to their eating of one tree so that no Flaming Swords need fence up their way from the Tree of Life unless they please But though the Spirit of the people hath not on the occasion of the late Plot shew'd its angry resentments against the persons of the Papists by any outrage or rudeness and though our Parliaments have not on that occasion as those in the times of Queen Elizabeth and King Iames made the Anger of the Statute Book to swell with many Acts of Parliament against them they are not to infer that therefore
defensive arms to hurtful animals by whom they often Suffered and sometimes by their very Shepherds who in Sheering them would cut their Skins Apollo told them that no Beasts were so much the Favorites of him and of men as they for that whereas others with great anxiety were forced in the Night the time of rest and sleep to seek their Food that they could not do with safety in the day Men the Lords of the Earth bought at dear rates pasture grounds for Sheep and that tho men did make Nets feed Dogs and lay snares for hurtful Beasts they employed Shepherds and Dogs to guard Sheep and that no Shepherds could deal ill with their Flocks without being chiefly cruel to themselves and that therefore their security lay in not being able to fright their Shepherds Thus every one is naturally abhorr'd who attacks a Naked man and from such a one Lions themselves either through fear or generosity have made their Retreat The holy Writ affords us a memorable Instance of the Divine displeasure in the 38 th of Ezekiels Prophesie against Gog and Magog who are there branded as the Invaders of a defensless City 'T is there mention'd in v. 10 th and 11 th Thus saith the Lord God it shall also come to pass that at the same time shall things come into thy mind and thou shalt think an evil thought and v. 11 th And thou shalt say I will go up to the Land of unwalled Villages I will go to them that are at rest that dwell safely all of them dwelling without walls and having neither Bars nor Gates and in v. 12 th to take a spoil and to take a prey to turn thy hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited and upon the people that are gather'd out of the Nations which have gotten Cattel and goods that dwell in the MIDST or navel of the land But it then follows v. 14. Therefore Son of man Prophecy and say unto Gog Thus saith the Lord God in that day when my people of Israel dwells safely shalt thou not know it that is thou shalt know it to thy sorrow and by thy bitter experience of my wrath what it is to disturb my harmless and quiet people in the World. The Comparing of the following 16 th and 18 th v. shew this to be the meaning of v. 14 th And I believe if any of the people of Gog and Magog were allowed by the Law to live apart by themselves they might in any defenceless City be as secure from danger or fear of the Protestant Israel as they pleased It hath been well observed by a great Enquirer into humane Nature That a restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death is a general inclination of all mankind and the cause of this is not alwaies that a man hopes for a more intensive delight then he has already attained to or that he cannot be content with a moderate power but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he hath present without the acquisition of more And from hence it is that Kings whose power is greatest turn their endeavours to the Assuring it at home by Laws or abroad by Warrs But as much as it is the inclination of the unthinking or brutish part of Mankind that power should be like the Crocodile alwaies growing the soberer few do know that power will destroy it self if it shall be still ascending and hath not a Center wherein to rest and be quiet just as fire would perish in nature and destroy it self if there were not an Element allow'd it wherein to leave burning And that therefore Augustus wisely designed a Law de cohibendis imperii finibus And that the experience of Antient and Modern times hath taught the teachable part of mankind That great Empires have sunk under their weight and have lost the length of their power by the widening it and that Kings whose power is greatest as was said sometimes turn their endeavours to the Assureing it at home by Laws which by giving it some bound are like letters about the edges of our coyn Decus tutamen to it the which makes it so Sacred that 't would be both Treasonable and Ridiculous to clip it and that as the Bees by their King have given the world an instance in Nature of Kingly power so they have likewise another of Kings governing by the power of Laws 'T is a common observation That tho Bees are little angry fighting Creatures upon occasion and leave their stings in the wounds they make Rex tamen apum sine aculeo est the King of the Bees is without any sting and the curious work of the Hive goes on with a great deal of Geometry and idle Drones are thence as it were legally expel'd who would there invade property Nor need the King of the Bees say the Naturalists have a sting for the whole Hive defends and guards him as thinking that they are all to perish if their King be destroyed And this would be the case of the Papists if they would be content so to part with the sting of their Power that it could not hurt either King or Kingdom and might not come to lose it self by so doing they would have the Posse of every County to defend them they would have the Laws and the whole Hive of English men to guard them the very Anger of the Protestants would be a defensive Wall of Fire round about them 'T is true that wild Animals are by their constant fears of danger habituated to more cunning then Tame ones of the same species but all their little cunning renders them not so safe as the great wisdom protection of the Law doth the other and ranging and out-lying Deer thrive not so well as those that are in the Forrests And here it falls in my way to observe that the Kings cautioning by the Law of the Forrests that the Mastiffs shall have the Power took from them of hurting the Deer may well insinuate into us the reason and equity of all our Laws that hinder its being in the power of a man to be a Wolf to another and of the Power inherent by the Law of Nature in all Soveraign Princes to restrain any undue Power of Subjects from violating the Public peace As the Law of God and Nature command both Iustice and Mercy to be shewn to Beasts so doth the Law of England provide that any mans person and Estate should be seized into the Kings hands in case of some wild cruelty to his Beasts for he would appear in the eye of the Law an Idiot or a Lunatic that should put his Horses or Asses to the Sword. That which I mention'd of the Laws providing that the Mastiffs of any Inhabitants in Forrests shall not have Power to hurt the Deer is called by the Forrest Law Lawing of Mastiffs or the Expeditating them that is the three Claws of their Fore-foot to the Skin
are to be cut off and thus they are to be law'd every three years for the preserving the Kings Game and the peace of his wild Beasts The Regarders of the Forrest are to make a TRIENNIAL enquiry about it tunc fiat per visum testimonium legalium hominum non aliter that is not Arbitrarily there must be legal Judgment upon legal Testimony and no Dog law'd without Judicial proceeding This Forrest Law made in the time of our Popish Ancestors did suppose that the Kings Game could not be preserved nor the Peace of his Wild Beasts by the Dogs being then either exorcised or their lapping a little holy water or any expedient as I may say without expeditation which did ipso facto destroy their Power of destroying the Kings Game and the Peace of his wild Beasts and therefore that 's the only valuable Garranty we can have from those who without Law and against Law would hunt down the King himself and his Tame Subjects that the excrescence of their power should be hambled or expeditated but the modus of this I do again say ought by them to be tendered to the Consideration of his Majesty and the Triennial Regardors of the Kingdom I am sure 't is worthy the consideration of us English what the Learned Frenchman Monsieur Bodin tells us in his Book de Republica Lib. 5. Cap. 6. Vna est tenuium adversus potentiores securitatis ratio ut scilicet si nocere velint non possent cum nocendi voluntas ambitiosis hominibus imperandi cupidis nunquam sit defutura And now my Lord to give your Lordship a home Instance of Jealousie taking Fire in some meerly from the power of another to do them hurt I will instance in your self at this conjuncture of time The nature of Iealousie renders it to be a troublesom weed and yet such an one that growes in the Richest Soil of Love my meaning is that 't is a fear of Love not being mutual when one doth love intensely with desire of being so loved My Lord in the picture of your mind that I have already drawn in this Letter I have only done you a little right and not at all favour'd you and 't is but Justice to you to acknowledge that the Protestant part of your Country hath a singular love for you with a desire of being so loved by you and 't is in this Critical conjuncture of time that your power makes them fear the love not to be mutual Your Lordship knows that fear in people is an aversion with an opinion of hurt from any object and they soon hate those things or persons for which they have aversion and fear of hurt by power disposeth men naturally to anticipate and not to stay for the first blow or else to crave aid from Society and from others especially whose concern may be the same or greater then theirs and who are their representatives and to wish ill to those who make them sleep in armour or to stand in the posture of Gladiators with their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on another and to be still in procinctu and all those passions sprung from the Root of Jealousie as far as they exceed the bounds of reason are degrees of madness And tho mans life be a constant motion and for the most part in both a Rugged way and near Precipices yet during that madness men are still by their own Scorpions scourging it to make it move faster then the regular and intended pace of Nature and injuring themselves with their passions are content too to wound another through their own sides And thus my Lord give me leave to tell you That 't is a kind of a Complement from people to a great good man of whose power and of whom they are jealous when that it may be said of them that they are occasionally faln mad for love of him One part of your Power namely that wherein you are a Conduit-Pipe to convey the grants of Honour and profit from your Royal Master the Fountain of Honour 't is possible for you to quit and that with pleasure too that you may have time to quench your great thirst after knowledge in that great collection of waters into which so many Streams of learning have met from all ages and Nations I mean your vast and choice Library And I may well suppose that your Lordship hath now that sense of Greatness and of power by publick Employment that Cardinal Granvel expressed at his retirement from the same That a great Man is like a great River where many sorts of Creatures are still quenching their thirst but are likewise still muddying and troubling the Stream Your Lordship knows who said thâ—â— actio est conversatio cum stultis lectio cum sapientibus In the Scene of the busie World you are necessarily troubled with the affaires of men whose being born was unnecessary to the world and there you are usually put to play at hard games well with ill gamesters the jest that fortune playing in humane affâ—ires commonly puts on the wise to spoil their busie sport there you are sometimes deafen'd with Complaints of Mimick Apes and grave Asses of airy fools and formal fops one against another but in your noble Library you have the advantage of the still Musick of the Tomb you have the weight of many dead Authors making no noise you have Socinus and Calvin standing quietly by each other and some Authors content with the dust of your Library who thought one Christian world not enough to trouble 't is there you will avoid any trouble by Authors of gilded outsides intruding nor be molested as now by nonsense in fine clothes You cannot now quietly enquire after the fountain of Nile for the noise of its Cataracts nor appease your thirst after knowledge otherwise then tanquam canis ad Nilum for fear of the Crocodiles of the World devouring you nor have a view of the tree of knowledge without a Serpent of envy circled about it nor have time to look on the pieces painted for eternity nor to mind the Eclipses in the Heavens while you are preventing your own being eclipsed in the Earth But my Lord there is another kind of power inherent in you and that you cannot part with such a power as King Charles the first in his Eikon Basil. affixes to the Character of his favorite when he sayes he looked on the Earl of Strafford as a Gentleman whose great abilities might make a Prince rather afraid then ashamed to employ him in the greatest affaires of State. Your very Reputation for power is power for that engageth those to adhere to you who want protection Your Success in your past conduct of publick affaires is power for it makes men promise to themselves good fortune while they follow you Your eloquence that fastens mens ears to your lips is power Your great knowledge in the Law whereby you possess that Engine by which you can be
heard your Lordship reproacht for having any interest contrary to that of your Country or indeed to the repose of Christendom And as in Nature we see all heavy bodies tend by their own Center to the Center of the Universe so have I still thought that your Lordship alwaies endeavoured by the pursuing your own good to pursue that of the Kingdom and that your endeavours of promoting the good of your own Country have tended to the good of the World And that in every Scheme of your Politicks whether Civil or Ecclesiastical pollicy you have took your Model from the Great Architect of Nature doing things fortiter and suaviter and with regard to his works of which 't is said in the 8 th of Wisdom Mightily and Sweetly doth she order all things And he that builds so is a Workman that need not be ashamed either of himself or of his work that is both strong and fair such a Councellor need not be aâ—hamed of his Councel 'T is one of the worst sort of Reproaches to which a Councellor at Law can be exposed to be called a crafty Counsel that is one who secretly gives advice for the perverting of Justice and the law and to do that vile thing is more odious in a Counsellor of State And of this subject when I formerly discoursed to your Lordship I remember you were pleased to say it of your self to me That you had a great aversion from giving whispering Councel to your Royal Master and that it hath been your humble motion to him to command his Councel to give him their advice in writing Your Lordship is by one particular accident a necessary subject for the Worlds compassion namely by your having out-lived most of the eye witnesses of the many memorable things you have done for the World. If the people of England your Contemporaries were six Millions at the time of your birth five of those Millions are now lodged in graves persons above the Age of Sixty making but a sixth part of Mankind I reading lately in Tully de Senectute was pleased with what he saith of old men both de facto de jure praising themselves he saith there videtisne ut apud Homerum saepissimè Nestor de virtutibns suis praedicet Tertiam enim jam aetatem hominum vixerat he had lived almost 300 years when he went with the other Grecians to the Trojan War and where he gave such weighty advice that Agamemnon said he should make quick work of the taking of Troy if he had ten such Councellors as Nestor was Quod si acciderit non dubitat quin brevi Troja sit peritura He never wish'd saith Tully to have ten Ajaxes It seems the General thought that an old Commander would be weighed down with a tenth part of an old wise Councellor But Nestor had bury'd all those thrice over who were born with him and he lived to see his Country-men doubled once and a half 200 years being the space judged for a Nations doubling and if he would have his Atchievments in his first Century Celebrated and witnessed he must be his own Herald and witness in his own cause I will not apply Nestors case to your Lordships as to your doing right to your self by praise for you have no more occasion to do that then Tully had who saith there Nihil necesse est mihi de meipso dicere quanquam est id quidem senile aetatique nostrae Conceditur But do think that any Protestant Prince who can say he hath ten such Councellors and resembling your Lordship in the experience of near fifty years spent in the affairs of State in critical times and with success and equal to you in all â—orts of Learning and in the knowledge of the Law and publick Records and in Eloquence and Courage as well as in the hatred of Popery he may add Quòd non dubitat quin brevi Roma sit peritura i. e. without such dilatory Troy Sieges as have been formerly laid to it He saith elsewhere Apex senectutis est autoritas Quanta fuit in L. Caecilio Metelio quanta in Attilio Calatino in quem illud elogium unicum Vno ore plurimae consentiunt Gentes populi primarium fuisse virum And this Authority or Reverence of old age is so weighty that it seems reasonable that in the criminating one that hath this badge of Nature there should be what Tully calls authoritas testimonii and any single witness had need to have an allowance se primarium fuisse virum that would convict such a man for diamonds are not to be cut but with the dust of diamonds 'T is not for nothing that the Scripture cautions the not receiving an accusation against an Elder but by two or three witnesses and I am told that the Canon-Law requires seventy two Witnesses to convict a Cardinal who is a Bishop accused of any crime but heresie and forty four in the conviction of a Cardinal Presbyter and twenty six to convict a Cardinal Deacon and seven to convict any Clerk. And therefore I think that it was a commendable tenderness and worthy of English Judges in a Trial at the Kings-Bench to acquaint the Jury that they are to weigh and consider the credibility of witnesses pardon'd for perjury and both the Judges of the Kings-Bench and Common-Pleas resolved it That the credit of such a person was left to the breast of a Jury The Bishop of Rome who claims that Monarchiall power which is potestas restituendi in integrum Sententiam passos quandoque absolvendi paenam non infamiam quandoque poenam infaniam abolendi and who as Aquinas saith 2. 2 ae q. 68. ar 4. potest infamiam Ecclesiasticam remittere yet allows the School-men to apply distinctions to that priviledge of his and to interpret it of infamia Iuris not Facti for labem illam quae turpi facto annexa est nemo delere potest as Soto concludes De Iustit Iure l. 5. q. 5. ar 4. No man who ever he be can wash out that stain of infamy which by Nature is inherent in a foul wicked Act because saith he ad praeteritum non est potentia when the infamy is inherent by the Nature of the fact and not positive by Law. But still our merciful Laws of England allow a person after a pardon for the infamy of perjury to be a witness reserving his credibility to the Jury and who may after the former crime obtain to be belived by them when they shall have found that he hath acquired an habit of virtue by the series of many actions in his following Life no man being supposed able in a desultory way to leap out of a rooted habit of Vice into an heroical habit of Vertue and so è contra for that nature doth not pass from one extreme to another but per medium 'T is true indeed in case of Treason where the life of both the King and Kingdom is struck at and
the English language that the Spaniards caus'd to be made by an English Iesuite call'd Parsons and 't was by the way of the low Country dispersed about England c. And further in the 7 th book p. 301. in the letter to Villeroy letter 133. what he saith of that book of Parsons may be thus made English and from that book of Father Parsons one might draw reasons in favour of his Majesty which would be more weighty then those he deduceth for the King of Spain and his Sister the said Father Parsons does contradict himself very often and very grosly as it happens to all persons in passion as able as they are who are not guided by truth and by reason but transported by Interest and by passion And in the last letter of the 8th book and to Villeroy from Rome the 30th of December 1602 he speaks of Father Parsons having made application to himself to desire that there might be a treaty prepared from Rome between the Pope the King of France and the King of Spain to agree among themselves of a Catholick that may Reign in England after the Queen be it the King of Scots if he will turn Catholick or be it some one else c. But there in p. 367 year 1603 letter 174. from Rome to Villeroy and on April 21st it appears that all the Machinations of the hot Iesuitical heads against King Iames his Succession were overturn'd by providence for he there saith that the Queen was no sooner dead then that the King of Scotland was in England peaceably received and the Controversie of King Iames his title evaporated and for the honour of our English understandings he there saith Les gens de cet Isle là ont bien Monstrè qu' ils scavoient faire leurs affaires entr ' eux tost seurement que ceux de dehors se sont fort mescontez en leurs desseins esperances i. e. the people of England have well shewn that they knew how to do their own business among themselves quickly and safely and that others abroad took very wrong Measures in their designs and hopes I have here said enough to entertain your Lordship with the View of their unreasonableness who would impose on us That Father Parsons wrote not that Impious and Treasonable Book and likewise with the more pleasant View of Gods Confuting it as I may say by the happy determination of his over-ruling Providence And Now because I would make it appear to your Lordship that I have not been unjustly severe to the Jesuitical Principles in rendring them such as are the sturdy extravagances of those offals of Mankind call'd Bullyes and Hectors I shall entertain you with one Instance of a Bravado of threatning from one English Iesuite to all Protestant Crown'd Heads a bravado that is like the High Water Mark to shew in words how high 't is possible for the foam of the raging Sea of Anger to reach and 't is in a Letter of Campian the Iesuite to Queen Elizabeths Privy Councellers printed afterwards at Triers 1583. as I find it Cited in that most learned Preface of my Lord Bishop of Lincoln's to the Book concerning the Gunpowder Treason in the Year 1679 and 't is thus in English viz. That all the Iesuits throughout the World have long since enter'd into a Covenant to kill heretical Kings any manner of way and as to our Society know That we Iesuites who are spread far and wide throughout the whole World have enter'd into an holy Covenant that we shall easily overcome all your machinations and that we shall never despair of it as long as any one of us remains in the World. Lo here a Drawcansir that will not only snub all Protestant Kings and take the bowles from their mouths and beat out their Brains with them himself but he saith there is a Society or Corporation of such brethren of the bladed Ecclesiastical who have enter'd into a Covenant or Association to murder all Protestant Kings and that every single Member of the Corporation should have that dead-doing talent of Valour that should awe and subjugate the Protestant World. And here then my Lord every Jesuite values himself on being a Mutius Scaevola and more than Three hundred of these new Romans or so many thousands of them I mean all of them according to Campian have Covenanted to destroy every Porsenna that lays siege to Rome but in that time of Queen Elizabeth there was an industrious Gentleman who fear'd not the terror of these Huffes but with his secrecy and silence did reduce these mad dogs into the Condition of neither barking nor biting in England I mean Sir Francis Walsingham of whom 't is said in Cotton's Posthuma That his bountifull hand made his intelligences so active that a Seminary could scarcely stir out of the Gates of Rome without his privity And no wonder then if Campian was soon brought to the end of a Traytor here in England by the Care of one of Queen Elizabeths Privy Councellers in the Year 1581. who did both defie and scorn that Rhodomantado address wherein the Iesuite did Goliah-like defie All Protestant Kings and their Armies and as if he would give their flesh to the Fowls of the ayr but the event shew'd his own flesh was so given as a Traytors to that use here in England It was a kind of a bravado in the great Archimedes to say Give me where to stand and I 'le shake the Earth He well knew no such place could be found The Iesuits it seems would have every one of their Order to be an Archimedes and able to shake the Earth as he pleas'd and the hypothesis of Popery they know offers them a place divided from the Civil and Imperial Government where to stand with their Engines namely the Ecclesiastical but things will not be ill administred and holy Church it self will sink into the Earth if its Foundation be not laid as God and Nature would have it and the Man who stands for the place to be an Archimedes and to Move the Earth will soon find his fate of being dissolv'd into his own little dust and that among the artificial lines he is making It seems that boasted association or Covenant of the Jesuites did help to occasion another among the Protestants in Queen Elizabeths time which was ratify'd by Act of Parliament in the 27 th of Eliz. which was about three years after the death of Campian who was Convicted of High Treason by vertue of the Statute made in the time of our Popish Ancestors namely in the 25 of Edward the Third and thereupon executed and yet by the Romish Church made a Martyr tho as I said convicted on that Statute But according to this thundring denuntiation of War against all heretical Kings by Campian as the Jesuites Herald and his boasting when he did put on his armour that every one of his Order should be like an Alexander an adequate match for at
fear of us and our obtaining power as are the States of the Vnited Provinces from those of our persuasion in Religion among them We are willing to let you see that the same Basis that shall be your security shall likewise be ours A great part of our number has we fear given too much cause of jealousie to the Kingdom of their affecting pre-eminence therein we are sorry for it and hope it will be so no more I say such Papists as these are the bruised reeds I would not trample on and would make no noise to interrupt their being heard to the effect above mention'd And since what has been done may be and Sir William Temple in his Impartial Observations on the Vnited Provinces of the Netherlands chap. 5. saith of the Roman Catholicks there that tho they are very numerous in the Country among the Pesants and considerable in the Cities yet they seem to be a sound piece of the State and fast jointed in with the rest and have neither given any disturbance to the Government Nor expres'd any inclinations to a Change or to any forreign power either upon the former Wars with Spain or the latter Invasions of the Bishop of Munster 't is I say possible therefore for them to become sound pieces of the state there And if the end of all their shamme Plots be what is usually that of Comedies and Romances plots a Marriage I mean their espousing the true Interest of the Kingdom I for my part shall never forbid the bannes of the Matrimony nor enter any Caveat against the license for it granted by lawful authority provided they give due security as in that case against such a precontract with Rome that may null their contract with us 'T is an old Common Observation That whelps without any care bestowed on them will see at the end of nine days tho born blind and that if they are much tamper'd with by art to be forced to see sooner they are blind for ever and therefore I hope that the forbearance of our Church in this latter Age to tamper with them by disputes or Catechising or Compelling them to be present at the publick worship will with the help of Time and Nature and their experience of their inability by all their shamme Plots to put out our Eyes conduce to the opening of theirs Alas what advantage is it by all their artifices that they can hope both to gain and keep here I mean for any considerable time A trick of art is like a Monster in Nature ill-lookt and short lifed and 't is obvious to every Eye that the higher Scale got up by accident is more ready to pop down again then it was before while it hung in its due poise And while they do by art and contrary to Nature in any Conjuncture hoist up their Interest high in the Air the artificial motion endures not there long to be gazed at and while it is there visible 't is beheld by thousands of vigilant Marksmen who know 't is easier to hit the mark shooting upward then downward We find 't is notorious out of the present Pope 's said Decree of the Second of March last That the Iesuits and other Casuists were Encouragers and Patrons of Calumny by those Principles of theirs he therein Condemns and namely That Probabile est non peccare mortaliter qui imponit falsum crimen alteri ut suam justitiam honorem defendat si hoc non sit probabile vix ulla erit opinio probabilis in Theologia i. e. It is probable that he doth not Sin Mortally who fastens a false Crime on another that he may defend his own Iustice and Honour and if this is not probable there is scarce any Opinion probable in Divinity The Iesuits have by this Opinion given us the alarm that they make Calumny not contrary to the Law of God but only beside it for that is the Popish account of a Venial Sin and moreover that it is a small and very pardonable Offence against God or our Neighbour and no more than an Idle word and that it Robs not the Soul of life and that it may be remitted without hearty Pennance and Contrition and only with the Sacraments Holy Water and the like these being the Popish Received Doctrines of the Nature of Venial Sin. And thus they may be false Imputations and Testimonies rob the Bodies of Protestants of life without bereaving their own Souls thereof and this is own'd by them as a first Rate probable Opinion in that Great Science call'd Divinity that Great first Rate of all Sciences as relating to the honour of God but most certainly we have very great Reason to pity the Persons of those who have such low and groveling and ridiculous Conceptions of the Supreme Being as to think to add any thing to the brightness of his Perfection by that Sacrifice with whose smoke they endeavour to blind the eyes of some of their Brethren while they are with its flames consuming the Bodies of others and to think to tickle him with the straw of Praise while they rob Men and that the using of Fraud can be worthy of God which is scorn'd not only by Gentlemen but even generous Beasts it being proper to Foxes and not to Lions to practise it and that tho the Dice of the Gods always fall luckily according to the old Adage that false ones are to be used for their Honour or that any one is to be a falsarius for the Glory of the true God and that since the Roman Heathens thought it Essential to the Justice of their Laws and the honour of Human Nature to term him a falsarius who but conceal'd Truth in the Case of Men it can be worthy of the Divine Nature to encourage false asseverations in Ordine ad Deum and that it can be any Honour to infinit Wisdom to out-wit silly Mortals or to infinit Goodness to set it self off by the putative or real faults of any one and that since as the Philosopher said long ago 't is the greatest Scandal to a Governor imaginable 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to lay snares for those that he Governs to think that the Great Governor of the World can have honour from the laying of Nets and Springes by Man Catchers In fine to think that after the Divine Compassion to Men had under the Mosaic Dispensation so long signaliz'd it self against Idolatry because 't was a Cheat and for that an Idol is nothing it can be consistent with the Divine goodness now under the Oeconomy of the Gospel of which the Restoring of Humane Nature was the Great intent to encourage inhumane Arts and Artifices to make it degenerate to the old Cheat of Idolatry again and which was the worst extremity of it the immolation of Men under the pretext of Religion a Cheat of Idolatry that the Blessed Iesus design'd by the offring of himself to exterminate out of the World as an unnecessary thing and
fate of those grand Impostors too be after their detection to march out of the Church and that without the Parade perhaps of noise of Trumpet or beat of Drum. There needs no battering Ram against Fraud but Detection And these Arbiters of Calumny that like the Month of March came into the World as a Lion may perhaps go out of it like a Lamb and their Morallity naturally come into the number of Pancirols Res deperditae and as not worthy of any Humane care to conserve after it has with so much violence been labouring in vain to destroy that old great invention of God the Law of Nature Let any great East or West-India Company in the World but once as a Public Society renounce the observation of Faith or Patronize Cheating and no other Company need envy their growth or Continuance or pick holes in their Charters and retain the loudness of Lawyers to dissolve them And such is the fate like to be of any Religionary Society None need ask where are the Fighters or where are the Disputers of this World to confound an order whose Casuists make Lying lawful and yet make it lawful to kill one that gives the Lye. And the truth is it is already through the Providence Divine and likewise the Providence and Circumspection of Men so effected That these lewd Moralists that call themselves the Fellows of the Holy Iesus these crafty Companions are so detected in the Church not only as Cheats but as having the Plague that they are avoided by many of the Orders that own the Pope as their Chief who will neither admit them to Prattique nor Quarrentine and they are in a manner reduced to the state of those Princes who force a Trade at home and only drive one with their own Plantations abroad They are already come to the state of Bessus his Collegues in the Comedy a sort of military pretenders who after their Buffetings and Spurnâ—ings they had took from so many did support their Credit only by this Combined Determination namely that they were valiant among themselves and this is the present state of these expos'd Casuists of the Church Militant that have been so long imposing on the World by force and fraud 't is agreed on by them that they are Iust among themselves With the help of all that Nature and Art can do they can never recover the wounds that have been given them by the publication of the Les Provinciales or the Mystery of Iesuitism discovered in Certain Letters written on occasion of the differences at Sorbonne between the Jansenists and the Molinists with additionals and were Printed in the English Tongue in the Year 1658. And that Great Court of Conscience that is a Court alwayes open and where the Judges are too many to be all brib'd or aw'd however some may sleep which I may call Conscientia humani generis having arraign'd and condemn'd their Casuistical Tenets as infamous they are after an Impeachment and Sentence in that Court to expect no pardon the World will never forgive nor forget their making Calumny a Venial Sin nor their particular bringing into the Field for the service of the art of strongly calumniating Battalions of Fathers Schoolmen Divines of other Orders by Guimenius who in that Book of his before mentioned brings in a multitude of great names of those great ranks not only to Justify but even to Sanctify the Crimes charged on them in those Letters and as 't was said of old Citius efficies Crimen honestum quam turpen Catonem so in Guimenius we do not see any rascall Deer who were Justly markt or wounded thrown out of the herd of the Jesuits but we see Men who were besmear'd with their own filth and the Dirt the World threw on them out-braving the light and to cleanse themselves from imputed guilt running into the Crouds of Casuists of their own and other Orders as likewise among the Fathers Divines and Schoolmen and so Magnanimously Impious was he as to make Acts of Cheating and Calumny to be patroniz'd by holy Church and openly to excuse the putting Gods Mark on the Devils Merchandize and to stamp in effect a legitimacy on them with an effrontery only to be parallel'd with that which Tully tells us concerning Antony the Oratour who being to defend a Person accus'd of Sedition boldly went to prove that Sedition was no Crime but a very Commendable thing But after all their long Casuistical weighing of the Dirt of Vice in Aurificis staterà or rather in Essay-Masters Scales which turn with the 300 th part of a grain and as some contriv'd by an honourable Person of the Royal Society will turn with the thousandth part of one it Can never be forgot that they tell us this Dirt is Gold. Nor can or will the bold Artifices of the Jesuits before mentioned in eluding the Popes Decree of the 2 d. of March 1679. against their unmoral Divinity and of which Declaration the Cloud contains Thunderbolts of Excommunication against their Tenet of lawful Lying and Perjury and Equivocating and of Dissembling in the administration of the Sacraments be ever forgot even by many thinking Papists or indeed the thinking part of Mankind And Protestants may well ask all Papists that Call those damn'd Tenets of the Jesuits by the Name of Religion Where was your Religion before the birth of Luther for Luther was born above half a hundred years before the birth of the Society of the Jesuits Nay since that Religion has been damn'd by that Decree of the Popes we may ask them Where is your Religion now where is the Popes Infallibility so much avow'd and Idolised by the Iesuites heretofore What is not the Pope infallible in his Chair in the Inquisition was his Chair in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican and attended there by the most Eminent and most Reverend Lords the Cardinals of the holy Roman Church being specially deputed by the holy Apostolic See to be the General Inquisitors for the whole Christian Common-wealth against all heretical pravity I say was that Chair the Chair of Pestilence Are not you as Heretics self-Condemn'd in having procur'd your infallible Popes Condemning Decree to be suppressed in France as coming from the Pope in the Court of Inquisition Alas do not we know that 't is all one as to the value of the Coin Let the Prince's Mint be kept in this place or the other and that 't is the Sanction of the Pope either in the Consistory or in the Inquisition at Rome that gives the standard of weight and fineness to any Doctrinal Propositions and that makes them current Do we not know it out of the History of the Councel of Trent that the Pope told the Cardinals in Consistory that they had only Consultive Voices to put things to his consideration and that the Decisive Voice belong'd only to him Do we not know out of that History Book 7th that Laymez the General of the Iesuites spoke with
Humane Nature and all the Jesuit's Skill in Divinity will never be able to render them otherwise to the World. I must seriously profess that one saying of the Great Cicero in that little Book viz Ea deliberanda omnino non sunt in quibus est turpis ipsa deliberatio i. e. Those things are not at all to be deliberated wherein the Deliberation it self is filthly has in it I think more frank generous Morality included and that which is more worthy of the ancient Roman and Primitive Christian simplicity then what all the Libraries stuff'd with Bauny Escobar Layman Le Moine Navarrus Azorius Molina Tanuerus Lessuis Emanuel Sa Henriquez and other Numerous Casuistical Jesuits have furnished the world with wherein they do so nicely and infinitely divide the body of Sin in semper divisibilia and indeed make it an infinite Nothing But the world I think will not long deliberate what to do with this Casuistical Divinity of which no truer Description can be given then that 't is a Deliberation of Sin. I do not know any that would eate or drink with another that he thought did deliberate to Poison him Dum deliberant saith Tacitus desciverunt i. e. While they do deliberate whether they should revolt they have revolted their very deliberation and consulting was ipso facto a Revolt I doubt not but many Pious Christians of the Roman Catholic Communion have Complain'd of the effect of their subtle and innumerable distinctions destroying Christianity in that style of the Woman in the Gospel They have taken away My Lord and I know not where they have Layd him and that Considering those Casuists had so far sear'd their Consciences and brazen'd their Foreheads as in the Patronizing of Calumny and other Impieties to defy not only Christs Gospel but the Pope's own Canon Law many Papists importun'd the Pope with their Zeal sutable to that of the Psalmist's to give that decree saying It is time for thee to work for they have made void thy Law. 'T is notorious that the Canon Law as bad as it is is very severe against Calumny and Calumniators and especially against Clergy-men that are such and pronounceth a Clergy-man infamous who is convicted of defaming another and 't was very well worthy the Vigilance of the Pope not to let the Jesuits steal away his Canon Law from him But this must needs be very diverting to this inquiring Age to see Protestants as well as Papists accounting the Popes reducing some immorallities to the Test of his own Canon Law a piece of Reformation and the Pope struggling to effect it and hindred by the Jesuits therein According to the former expression it is time for the Pope to work and to Null that Order that thus nulls his aforesaid Decree in the sight of an awaken'd World and is else likely to Null his Church the Patience of Mankind being the less able longer to bear the weight of Jesuitical Calumnies by its having endured them so long The truth is the Great and Original Cause of the founding of that Order being to cut Heretics Throats for at this plain rate we must speak and call a Spade a Spade when they are digging our Graves with it it was necessary for them to use the art of blackening of Heretics by Calumnies as the Prologue to that Tragedy the which would cause the Heretics to fall unpity'd and 't was necessary to make that black art as lawful as they Could that so they might have their quietus from the World for the arrear of their pass'd frauds and not fear accounting for future ones But as these men will not recede from their Art so neither will Nature recede from it self and our Critical English World now having occasion to pass Judgment of their Calumnies is naturally enforced to Conâ—ider their former Shammes in States and Kingdomes to aggravate their present ones as Judges still in the Case of Malefactors are obliged to take notice of their having been formerly branded for the same Crimes The execrable Shamme made against the Admiral and others as conspiring to kill the King of France and giving provocation to the Parisian Massacre will never be forgot nor the Shamme that was provided to have charged the Puritans with the Gun-Powder Treason nor that of the Irish Rebels who were so outragiously impudent as to pretend the Commission of our Royal Martyr for their Butcheries Nor yet that of the Jesuites having effected heretofore in Bohemia and lately in Hungary that Counterfeit and forged Letters should be found in the Custody of the Protestants to charge them with Crimes against Caesar. The Memorial of the Sufferings of the Protestant Ministers in Hungary at the Instigation of the Popish Clergy there printed for William Nott in the Pallmall 1676. shews it at Large where 't is said They did not against the Ministers insist much on the Particulars that relate to Religion but great endeavours were used to prove them Complices of the Rebellion the which their Advocates and Councel did manifestly disprove and the Resident of the States of the Vnited Provinces at Vienna did afterward in a Memorial to the Emperour fully and solidly refute Tho the Ministers were indicted in form of Law for having assisted the Rebels by their Councel and supply'd them with Provisions and for having Made way for the Turks to Come in and wast that Kingdome yet none of them as that Discourse sets forth was convicted thereof nor one clear Testimony brought to prove that any one was a Complice of that Rebellion That discourse shews that the Advocatus Fisci did exhibit everal Letters to prove all the Ministers Complices of that Rebellion but that many and great presumptions evinced that these Letters were never produced tho it was frequently demanded by the Ministers and their Advocates that they might be and that yet they could never obtain any thing but a printed Copy of them and thô the Advocates for the Ministers did often press the Fiscal to declare when where or how he came by these Letters yet that was never done That Author having p. 10. mentioned the vile art of Calumny That the Jesuits try'd to exterminate the Protestants out of Hungary by speaks in p. 11 th of the effects of their endeavours saying that upon a Iust account it can be made appear that at several times before and after the Citation against the Protestants meaning the Citation to that vile Process there were above 1200 Chruches of them suppressed It must needs then appear very Ridiculous to the World that when there is not a third part of Hungary that old Bulwark of Christendom against the Turks remaining in the Emperor's hands for so Dr. Brown in his late Travels there Computes it that these Nominal fellows of Christ by nominal crimes charged on real Christians should endanger the exterminating of Christianity out of the European World and the making the Emperor not long so much as a Nominal King in Germany it self
Resort as I call'd it of their use and application of their erroneous or rather diabolical doctrine of Calumny must certainly be fatal to them according to that Proverb in the Gospel about the last error erit novissinus error pejor priore The High Priests and Pharisees came to Pilate saying Sir we remember that that deceiver said while he was yet alive After three dayes I will rise again Command therefore that the Sepulchre be made sure till the third day lest his Disciples come by Night and steal him away and say to the people he is risen from the dead So the Last error shall be worse than the first and they Judged right enough of the Last error Confounding more than the First as it is the force of the Last motion from a Precipice that breaks a man in pieces and this effect of the last error was presently exemplify'd in themselves for they having caus'd the holy Sepulchre to be very strongly guarded and the Door of it to be barricado'd with a very great Stone and that Stone to be seal'd and the Lord of Glory after all this over-powring the Grave and Guards they had a Consult and gave the Guards Money to spread that Shamme in the World that his Disciples did steal him away while the Guards slept and saith St. Mathew this is reported among the Iews to this day And lo as Christ did rise for our Iustification so did this Subornation used by those Impostors justify the truth of his Resurrection which else could not so well have confronted the Worlds incredulity for if after his Resurrection his Disciples believed not Mary Magdalen Ioanna and the Mother of Iames who told them that he had appear'd to them and if the two Disciples that told the Rest that he had appear'd to them going to Emmaus were not believ'd by them and if when he appear'd in the midst of Ten of them at once and shew'd them his hands and his side they believ'd not for joy and if when he appear'd to the Women and bade them tell the Disciples and St. Peter that according to his Promise they should see him in Galilee and if the Eleven Disciples went into Galilee to a Mountain which he had appointed them and yet when they saw him there they worship'd but some doubted and if Christ almost in his Last words upbraided them with their unbelief because they believ'd not them who had seen him after he was risen the Pagan and Iewish World would not have been brought to easily as they were to the belief of his Resurrection the great hinge on which the Christian Religion turns and without which the Preaching of the Cross would not so much have seem'd foolishness as been madness Thus did that last Jewish error prove most fatal to Judaisme and as Heaven was extracted by the Divine Power out of the Hellish act of Murdring the holy Iesus so was the propagation of the truth of his Resurrection out of the Calumny Subornation and Bribery used to suppress it those artifices being so odious in the eye of the Law of all Nations that they make any that uses them to gain infamy and loose his Cause and to make sure of the hatred ofone very Considerable Enemy namely Mankind and justly for against that great Body is every one that professeth Calumny an aggressor and has proclaim'd War. And Granting that Nature is Constant to it self and that conslusions of the working of the Passions in humane Nature in future times may be made from the pass'd Our Quintadecimani thô their Order seems in many political Principles to be close compacted like the scales of Leviathan by the publishing of the Tenets before mentioned and constant practice of them have brought themselves into the shallows and they are like Whales on ground gazed on by the Critical World and there labouring under the fatality of their own weight It has been observed by that deep Enquirer into Nature Monsieur Descartes that Le bon sens est chose du monde mieux partagè c. Nothing is more equally distributed by Nature among Meu than Vnderstanding and Reason for every Man thinks he has enough and of this opinion was Mr. Hobbes in that Chapter in his Leviathan of the Natural condition of Mankind Where he saith That as to the Faculties of the Mind there is a greater equality among men then that of strength for prudence saith he is but experience which equal time bestowes on all men in those things they equally apply themselves to That which perhaps makes such equality incredible is but a vain conceit of ones own wisdom which all mortal men think they have in a greater degree than the Vulgar that is then all men but themselves and a few others whom by fame or for Concurring with themselves they approve for such is the Nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledg many others to be more Witty or more Eloquent or more Learned yet they will hardly believe many so wise as themselves for they see their own witt at hand and other mens at distance But this proves rather that men are in that Point equal than unequal For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing then that every man is Content with his share Admitting this great observation of those two great Masters of Witt and Philosophy to be true One would suppose that Nature did not in vain implant in men such a general notion of their equality in Wisdome nor without an intent of promoting the good of humane Society thereby The God of Nature hath not only not given us any members of our bodies but not the very hair of our eye-browes nor even the hairs of our eye-lids in vain for our eye-lids are fortify'd with those little stiff bristles as with palisado's against the assaults of Flyes and such like bold animalcula and I may say that that general Notion doth defend the Eyes of mens Minds from being too easily imposed on by particular Notions and Shammes occurring to us from any And as to that notion so universally planted in mens Souls by Nature one may well imagine that what a Gardiner plants in every bed of his Garden is no weed and perhaps one great End of Nature in the general implantation of this principle in men may be The shewing them the folly and danger of their attempts who think to engross that great Staple Commodity of the intellectual World call'd Wisdome and to force others to buy that Commodity of which they think they have enough of their own by them and especially when they see that others would force a trade on them by counterfeit Wares and have been already branded for so doing The truth is every man's life who pretends to a greater share of Wisdome than his Neighbour is in the better state of security by this Notion before-mentioned for if a man thought others by their Wisdom could render his ineffectual for
giving decent burial to any of their undecent Plotts and for the exasperating any Protestants by despising them and endeavouring to impose on their Understandings as some did on a raw young Country Gentleman whom one day treating at a Puppet-shew they persuaded that the Puppets were living Creatures and after he had found out his gross ridiculous misconceit therein they on the following day attending him to the Theatre engaged him to believe that the Actors were Puppets I mean their endeavoring to make us believe that Sham-Plots were real ones and that a real one was Shamme I shall never wonder at the encrease of the passion of anger incident to humane Nature even in great and generous Souls on the occasion of gross Calumnies invented against them about a matter of weight when I consider the Example of the Great Royal Prophet a Person of a great Understanding and of so great Courage that he was not afraid of Ten thousands of men who set themselves against him round about and tho an Host should encamp ogainst him his heart would not fear and a Man that had in his Nature and temper the Gentleness of a Lamb mixt with the stoutness of a Lyon and one to whom the Divine Promise had ensured a Kingdom and yet was he by the Sycophancies and little Shammes rais'd against him by Saul's great Courtiers wrought to so high a pitch of anger that he did with exquisite forms of imprecation and such as perhaps are not to be found in any other Story frequently devote those Calumniators to the most dire Miseries his fancy could lead him to express But the Cause of his being so highly provoked by those that would turn his glory into shame and did seek after leasing and whose deceitful tongues used all-devouring words as he saith to Doeg the Edomite in one of his Psalms and whose tongue he there sayes did devise mischiefs like a sharp razor working deceitfully may be ascribed to the Shammes of his Enemies wounding him in the most sensible Part namely the Reputation of his Loyalty to his Prince whose Life he spared when 't was in his power to destroy him and who was so far from the use of Shammes against him that he doom'd the Amalekite to dy that shamm'd himself the author of Saul's death And therefore No marvel if the Calumnies of Jesuited Papists attaquing Protestants in that Case too of their Fidelity to their King render the passion of anger in them against those Shams so intense and vehement And tho the English Courage or a very little Philosophy would help them to bestow only a generous neglect on other Calumnies they can never forget those that strike at the heart of their allegiance and consequently of their Religion that so strictly enjoyns it Nor if according to the Example of that great man after Gods heart who said Away from me all ye that work vanity and who would have No lyer tarry in his sight is it to be admired if every true English Protestant shall say too odi Ecclesiam malignantium and shall feclude all dictators of Calumny from his company and banish them home to their own And tho the abuse of Excommunication by the Papal Church and Presbyterian hath been so horrid that the primitive use of it is in a manner lost and grown obsolete yet will that which includes somewhat of the Nature of it be still kept alive in the World by private persons who practice the Christian Religion they profess and to whom tho the Precepts of the New Testament have not given that hateful thing to humane Nature in charge namely to be Informers or Promoters or judicial accusers of any of Mankind accordingly as under the Mosaic oeconomy 't was said Tu non eris criminator yet have they obliged them to withdraw themselves from men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth and not to eat with any one who is call'd a Brother and is a railer and to turn away from men that are truce-breakers and to mark those who cause divisions and to avoid them and to reject a Heretic who is subverted and self-condemned and by men of Cultivated educations and tempers who value themselves on the Company they keep and on it are valued by the World and will therefore abandon or excommunicate from their Conversation such Monsters of men who have renounced the obligations of humane society and who are guilty of Notorious Contumacy in matters that concern the very Salvation of Souls and the Safety of Kingdoms The being staked down therefore to a Narrower Tedder in Conversation or being Civilly Excommunicated from Protestants Company must by necessity of Nature in my opinion be the fate of our Jesuited make-bates and criminators of Protestants that have been so unweary'd in raising Jealousies between the King and his People and between Protestant and Protestant and all such that go to part whom God and Nature and Interest have joyn'd will probably come at last to be the derelicts of humane Society when they shall Come to be understood and especially when there shall be that good understanding between Protestants here of several persuasions that may be expected to arise from their having found out the authors of their divisions and seen how ridiculous Protestants have been in the view of the World while they have appear'd like the Cat to draw one another through the Pool and the Jesuits and their Pensioners stood behind undiscern'd and pull'd the Rope My Lord I know we may justly fear that Popery may during some turbid intervals gain ground in England and as the Renowned Historian of our Reformation hath in a public Sermon Judiciously observed that Sure none believed themselves when they say we are not in danger of Popery and none can think it but they who desire it But without presuming to make my self one of Heavens Privy Councellors and without pretending to a spirit of Prophecy I shall on the basis of the Course of Nature ground this affirmation That whatever alterations Time can Cause yet while the English Nation remains entire and defended from Forraign Conquest the Protestant Religion Can never be exterminated out of this Kingdom nor the public profession of it suffer any long interruption therein I will grant it possible that hereafter under a Prince of the Popish Religion Popery may like the vibration of a pendulum among Certain persons have the greater extent in the return of it as Becket's Image was by Gardiner set up in London 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with much pomp in Queen Mary's time after its being pull'd down in Harry the Eighth's and himself unsainted and some people may undertake devout Pilgrimages hereafter to some such Images and Reliques as my Lord Herbert saith were in Harry the Eighth's time exploded and we may again hear of our Lady's Girdle shewn in eleven several places and her Milk in eight the Bell of St. Guthlac and the Felt of St. Thomas of Lancaster both Remedies for
the head-ake the Pen-knife and Books of St. Thomas of Canterbury and a piece of his Shirt much reverenc'd by great belly'd women the coals that roasted St. Laurence two or three heads of St. Ursula Malchus his Ear and the paring of St. Edmund ' s Nails and likewise the trumperies of the Rood of Grace at Boxly in Kent and in Hales in Glocestershire things name◠as trumperies in p. 495 and 496 by Herbert in that History and as adjudged to be such by H. the 8 th And no doubt but the Number of such would be very great who having great Summs of Money given them would be content to offer small ones in Devotion to such Images and many Candidates for preferment among some that now look big for and among Dissenters that look big against the Church of England would produce Certificates of their Constant good affection and Zeal for the Roman Catholic Church and any Legate that came to reconcile us to the Church of Rome would be thought by many to have brought the Holy-Ghost in his Sumpters thô we know what the Inside of Campegius his was made of It is moreover possible that Protestant writers may come not to have that freedom of the Press that Popish now have and all the luxury and wantonness and humor of the Press in sending forth innumerable Pamphlets against Popery in this Conjuncture may perhaps prove but like the jollity of a Carnival to usher in a long melancholly Lent. I will grant that 't is possible the Writ de haeretico Comburendo being now Abolished that destroyed so many Protestants by retail certain bloody men may find some Invention to destroy them by wholesale and to something of that nature Bishop Vshers Prophecy referred of the Raging Persecution of Protestants yet to come and not lasting and when their enemies will ipsam saevitiam fatigare and in the violence of such predicted cruelty not being long lasting that great Prelate erred not from the Nature of things more then he did when he Prophecy'd of an Irish Rebellion Forty years before it hapned for that usually happens once in so many years through the force and numbers of the Irish within that time outgrowing the English and their allowing themselves the repossession of their Estates by that time as a Iubile I will further grant that the discipline of our Church of which I think the Constitution is the best that the world can shew may be Crusht as I said before and our Dissenters then in vain wish that they had the tolerabiles ineptiae as your Lordship knows who imperiously call'd them in the Room of the intollerable abominations of the Mass and 't is possible that divine Iustice and Power may permit the doctrine as well as discipline of our Church to be supprest totally and finally in this Realm and that the prediction of that Great Man of God whô since his death has been as generally styl'd the Iudicious as Lewis the Iust was elsewhere so vogued I mean Mr. Hooker may impress a deep horror and a too late repentance on us who in his 5th Book of Ecclesiastical Polity in the end of the 79th Paragraph p. 432. of the old Edition speaking of the ill affected to our Church saith By these or the like suggestions receiv'd with all Ioy and with all sedulity practiced in Certain parts of the Christian World they have brought to pass that as David doth say of Man so it is in hazard to be verify'd concerning the whole Religion and Service of God the time thereof peradventure may fall out to be Threescore and Ten years or if strength do serve unto Fourscore what follows is likely to be small joy to them whatsoever they shall be that behold it Mr. Hooker did first print his 5th Book in the year 1597. the first four of his Polity being before printed in the year 1594 and so the period of Fourscore Years in his prediction was in the Year 1677. Thô that good man pretended not to be a Prophet yet according to the old saying 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 i. e. he is the best Prophet who can guess well both our Church of England and the Dissenters and Papists too have found that Mr. Hookers prudence had so much divination and his divination so much prudence that the small joy with which they have beheld the external face of Religion here since 1677. hath shew'd us that he guess'd shrewdly I have only affirm'd that humanly speaking and according to the common course of nature Popery cannot be the overgrown National Religion of England but am not ignorant that the sacred Code hath given us instances of Omnipotent power punishing even Heavens peculiar people by the Course of Political and Ecclesiastical Power running out of the common Channel of the Nature of things and particularly by a succession of Ten evil Kings one after another For thô humane Nature is so inconstant and men generally so apt to reel from one extream to another that the World growes as weary of the prevalence of Vice as of Virtue and after a long age of Dissoluteness and Luxury a Contrary humour reigns as long in the World again a humour that then excludes all Voluptuaries from Public Trusts for an Age together and a humour of which I think we now see the Tide Coming in and thus ordinarily scarce any Kingdom hath more than two or three good or bad Princes successively for any considerable space of time Yet after the Ten Tribes had made their defection from the Line of the House of David they were punish't by a Succession of Ten Kings and not one good one in the whole number thô some of them were less ill than others so that no Marvel if the weight of the impiety of so many successive ill Princes sunk them into the power of the Assyrians and to this their doom that passage in the Prophecy of Hosea refers which the vulgus of the Scriblers against Monarchy so Miserably detort and wracke as I may say to their own destruction namely I gave thee a King in mine anger and took him away in my wrath for the Prophet there had not his Eye on Saul or on a particular Person but on the whole succession of Kings after their Rent from Iuda from Ieroboam to the Last under whom the Catastrophe of their Captivity was Such Kings were given them by Heaven as were proper Instruments of Divine wrath and when they were took away from the Stage 't was that other worse might enter and make their Condition more Tragical But secret things belonging to God I pry not into the Book of Fate but Confine my sentiments alone to the Book of Nature In an Excellent Sermon of the Dean of St. Pauls 't is with great Piety and Prudence said We have liv'd in an Age that has beheld strange Revolutions astonishing Iudgments and wonderful Deliverances What all the Fermentations that are still among us may end in God alone knowes I
by some accidents be made to cast Anchor or they may be sunk but they cannot be forced to go back When a man hath long been compell'd to creep with Chains on him through a toilsome dark Labyrinth and having extricated himself out of it and being come to enjoy his liberty in the light of the Sun the persuasion of words cannot make him go back again My Lord I lately mentioned the Motto of the Royal Society of England of which your Lordship is a Member and I look on the very constitution of that Society to be an inexpugnable Bulwark against Popery In which Society many of our choice English Witts have shew'd as much subtilty and curiosity in the Architecture of Real Science and such as tends to the edification of the world as any of our Countrey men heretofore did in those curious but useless Cobwebs of holy Church call'd School Divinity And the constitution of that Society hath not only been useful in encreasing the Trade of Knowledge among its members by a joyned stock but moreover hath tended to the raising in the Kingdom a general inclination to pursue Real science and to contemn all science falsly so call'd and the Raising of this inclination I will call a Spirit that can never be Conjur'd down nor can the knowledge that depends on number weight and local Motion be ever exterminated by Sophisms or Canting or terms of Art Nor will they who have from this Society learned to weigh Ayre give up their Souls to any Religion that is all Ayre without weighing it or notwithstanding any hard name that may come to be in vogue ever forget that bread is bread His Majesty by the founding of this great Conservatory of knowledge presently after his Restoration wherein his great Minister then the Earl of Clarendon was an honourable Member did convey real knowledge and a demonstration of his being an Abhorrer of Arbitrary Power to all that can understand Reason and affect not the ridiculous Treasonableness of Bradshaw's Court to say that they will not hear reason for had he like the Eastern King 's affected Arbitrary Power he would have used their artifice of endeavouring to cast mists before the understanding faculties of his Subjects and to detain them from knowledge by admiration and to deprive them of sight like horses that are still to drudge in the Mill of Government by blind obedience But to shew that he abhorr'd both such obedience and implicit Faith and that he intended to establish his Throne as well in the heads as in the hearts of his Subjects he presently setled this Great Store-house of Knowledge that shew'd it was his desire and ambition by the general Communication of Knowledge in his Dominions to Command Subjects whose heads were with the Rays of Science crown'd within And therefore I think His Majesties Munificence to the Royal Society in giving them Chelsey-Colledge at their first institution was very Consistent with the Primary Intention of the erecting that Colledge which was to be a Magazine for Polemical-Divinity wherewith to attaque the Writers for Popery for the very planting of a general disposition to believe nothing contrary to Reason is the cutting of the graâ—s under Poperies feet and His Majesty providing for the growth of reason did apparently check the growth of Popery as well as of Arbitrary Power without the prop of which Popery can never run up to any height more then the Sun-flower without a supporter and the setling in men an humour of Inquisition into the truth and nature of things is as I partly said before an everlasting barricade against the Popes darling Court of the Inquisition That great and noble notion of the Circulation of the blood took its first rise from the hints of a common persons enquiring what became of all the blood that issâ—â—d out of the heart seeing that the heart beats above Three Thousand times an hour thô but one drop should be pump'd out at every stroke and if any one shall tell me that he believes that Popery with its retinue of implicit faith and ignorance can over-run us I will ask him what will then become of all that knowledge the vital blood of the Soul that hath issued from the heads of inquisitive Protestants and been Circulating in the World for above a Hundred and Fifty years and I doubt not but it will be in mens Souls as long as blood shall have its Circular Course in their bodies and maugre all the Calumnies cast on the Divines of the Church of England for being fautors of Popery I shall expect that our learned Colledge of Physicians will as soon be brought to disbelieve the Circulation of the blood of our Royal Society to take down the Kings Standard that they have set up against implicit faith as our learned Convocation the learnedest that ever England had be brought to believe the principles of Popery I know My Lord ' tâ—s obvious against this my hypothesis of the unpracticableness of Popery being here the State-Religion to say that in little more then Twenty years time Four great changes in Religion happen'd in England and that the generality of the people then like dead Fishes went with the stream of the Times but I ask if the generality of the people had been throughly enlighten'd in the rationality of the Protestant Principles Twenty years together would they have return'd to the belief of the Popish Will they now do it after the establishment of a Rational Religion for above a Hundred years together Can Popery now find the way into most Mens brains here presently after the whole Nation almost were Preachers and when all our great and little unruly disagreeing Sects yet agreed in this as a fundamental that the Bishop of Rome is the Antichrist If Printing had been free in Turky for a Hundred years and a libera Philosophia and Theologia had been there in fashion for a Hundred years and every man had been allow'd his Judgment of discretion so long about the sense of the Alchoran or of the holy Scripture and of all Books of Religion could ignorance even there come into play again or if the Turkes had drank Wine for a Hundred years together could any one Conjure the glasses out of their hands by telling them there was a Devil in every grape If that Law in Muscovy that makes it death for any Subject to travel out of that Kingdom without the Emperors Licence lest his Subjects having seen the freedome of other Countreys should never again return to the Arbitrary Power in their own again I say if that Law had been repeal'd for a Hundred years and multitudes of oppress'd mankind had thence found the way to breath in the ayre of Liberty like men could they be persuaded to return to the Yokes of Beasts again When a floating Island has been a Hundred years fixt to the Continent can any teach it to swim again Consulitur de Religione is likely to be the eternal
and dangers 'T is true some few others have written something Mr. Baxter and Mr. Pool have laboured worthily Dr. Owen hath said somewhat to Fiat lux and there are some Sermons of the Presbyterians extant Morning Lectures against Popery these are the most and the chief of their performances I ever heard of The Conjuncture of the few and evil days of Popery would occasion another good effect a thing that is always to be wished but considering the general present ferment in Mens minds and pass'd mutual exasperations never else to be hoped for and that is this the common Calamity would cause such an Union between Protestants of several perswasions in Religion as would put a Period to that dreadful state of dissension among them which has so much horrour in it that all those subtle miscreants who have been able to cause it here and make so many of them almost ready with the ferity of the canes sepulchrales to devour one another can never in words express Nor can my imagination paint out to me any thing of the kind like it in the past course of time without my recollecting the description of the fears of the Doctor of the Gentiles given by himself concerning the State of the Church of Corinth to which he applies the words of debates envyings wraths strifes backbitings whisperings swellings tumults and without my considering the fermentation in the City of Ierusalem when near its fatal destruction But there will be a finalis concordia among the now implacable Protestants if ever Popery should set up to be the State-Religion And then any one who will give advice to a Painter to draw The present state of the Protestant Church of England may make a good Copy from the great Original of that Prophesie in Scripture The Wolf and the Lamb shall feed together c. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy Mountain c. And perhaps without going so far for a Mountain that may represent to ones fancy that State of English Protestants he may find one in England to do the work one that several of our Historians speak of telling us that in the Year 1607 When by the Irruption of the Severn Sea the Country in Somerset shire was overflown almost Twenty Miles in length and Four Miles in breadth it was then observ'd that Creatures of contrary natures as Dogs and Hares Foxes and Conies yea Cats and Mice getting up to the tops of some Hills dispensed at that time with their antipathies remaining peaceably together without sign of fear and without any violence used toward one another Nor do Men in great Towns supposed qualified only as the Children of light but as the Children of this World and as wise in their Generations and as projecting their own wealth and the encreasing of their Trade and of the value of their Rents by eminent Oblations provide for such Divines planting there and 't is obvious to every thinking Man that the erecting of Free-Schools and encouraging excellent Divines to live in any particular Town turns sufficiently to Mens account in this World as to the ends aforesaid by attracting inhabitants For it will be natural to Christians there when they do not barely hear of a Christ Transubstantiated into a dull Wafer but see one as I may say Transfigured and shining as the Sun in the Preaching of the Gospel to say Lord it is good for us to be here and for them there to make Tabernacles and provide Oblations not for dead but living Saints and as a living Dog is more valuable then a dead Lyon so I beâ—lieve that in any times of Popery here that can come any one Corporation and a holy learned Divine of the Church of England will get more by one another then all Towns where Shrines and Images of dead Saints shall be set up will mutually gain thereby Then will the Clergy and People being benefactors to each other be naturally ready to pray for each other and the former being believed from their hearts to say O Lord save thy people will find both an Oral and Cordial Response from the latter And bless thy Clergy But while I am thus accompanied by the Guide of Natural reason travelling in the Region of future time the time that only is the object of humane sollicitude and from which anxious minds are too apt to fear that every days birth may be a Monster I have by considering the former Revenue accruing to the Church by Oblations took occasion to Corroborate my great affirmation of it s not being naturally possible for Popery to exterminate the Protestant Religion in England a Religion that Popery can never take by assault or making of its professors Martyrs nor yet by Siege in starving its Pastors 'T is true that such a great impost as Popery may occasion to Protestants by Oblations may in one sense seem to have the nature of a punishment namely because 't will not be a burden to which all Subjects or indeed all Protestants will be equally liable and it will chiefly light on the devouter sort of Protestants And in like manner it may be said that the gain that arose from Oblations in the times of Popery to the Parish Priests of great Towns was in effect an unequal impost on the Popish Laity as being a Tax only on the more Ignorant and Superstitious of them But any one who has in the least considered matters of State cannot but know that any great inequality of Taxes that lights on the Subject as a mischief doth prove to the Prince an inconvenience to whom the Subjects pressure makes him unable to afford that Subsidium he otherwise could and perhaps would cheerfully for the Publick safety Thus may the great supposed charge to be incumbent on the more devout Protestants by Oblations probably tempt them to use all the means the Law will permit to render the Government of a Popish Prince uneasie to him and certainly disable them from paying in that proportion toward the public Levys upon emergent occasions they else might do It may therefore here be affirm'd that the gain of Popes arising from Indulgences which was so vast that Popes would boast That they could never want 〈◊〉 while they could command Pen and Ink and which Klockius in his Book de Contributionibus observes did yield the Pope in Common Years a hundred Tuns of Gold i. e. a Million of pounds Sterling and which being an unequal Tax on Papists and not pressing the debauchees of that Religion but only falling heavy on the more Pious and devout sort made them the less able to supply the holy See with mony on extraordinary occasions or to pay their Taxes due to the Popish Princes they lived under and particularly those due to the Pope as a Temporal Prince has since in a manner dyed a natural death the light of Learning having no sooner come into the World then that poor Hermit Fryer Martin Luther scourged the Popes Buyers and Sellers
of Cattle by pasture hindred that encrease of Men that the advancement of Tillage would have produced and the furnishing the Crown with more Subsidy Men and Soldiers But this supineness of our Kings was not only caused by Superstition and a vitiated fancy in Religion an Idol to which Philip the Second sacrificed his Son and therefore might be well supposed prevalent with others to wish the generation of their Children or Subjects restrained but our Kings were not then stimulated by necessity to promote the populousness of their Realm for that their riches and strength depending on comparison the same Religious Orders did by Celibate and Depopulation equally obstruct the Wealth and Power of the neighbouring Kingdoms as well as this and by that means they were not our over-match But the course of encreasing Generations having operated so far as to awaken the World and Men for not having so much Elbow-room as they had jostling one another by the violence of War the politics of Statutes against Depopulation were forced and reinforced on this Realm And like as Men so too will such Statutes beget one another as I may say to the end of the Chapter Nor is the power of the Kingdom ever likely again to be really emasculated by such as pretended To make themselves Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake and honoured not the Founder of Christianity of whom since he for the good of Mankind made his first Disciples fishers of Men it may seem unworthy that he should intend the hurt of States and Kingdoms by making the following Doctors of his Church Pastors of Sheep Sir Thomas Moor in the first Book of his Vtopia doth with a sharpness worthy his excellent wit tell us That certain Abbots holy Men God wot not profiting but much damnifying the Common Wealth leave no ground for Tillage they enclose all in pastures they throw down Houses they pull down Towns and leave nothing standing but only the Church to make of it a Sheep-house And afterward saith That one Shepherd is enough to eat up that ground with Cattle to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite And he in that Book calls the Fryers errones maximos and desires they might be treated like Vagabonds and sturdy Beggars And in the Second Book contrives a Model of the Priesthood so as not to make it such a Nusance to the Civil Government as the Papal one was accordingly as has been before discoursed For one of his fundamentals there is That the Priests should be very few and that they should be chosen by the people like other Magistrates and with secret voices and enjoyns to his Priests marriage and makes them to be promoted to no power but only to honour Sir Thomas More it seems was far then from Writing at the Pope's Feet the Character that was afterward given to Bellarmine's style and there was as little occasion for a peace-maker's interposal between him and Fish as is between two wrangling Lawyers at a Bar. But the matter is well mended with our English World since the time of the Supplication of Beggars as appears by the multitudes of the healthy and robust Plebs of our Nation that Till the Earth and Plough the Sea and who by the proportion of the Mony Current coming to their hands having fortify'd their Vital Spirits with good diet there is finis litium and an end of such Lamentations as the beginning of that Supplication to the King in part before referred mentions viz. Most lamentably complaineth of their woful misery to your Highness your poor daily Beads-men the wretched hideous Monsters on whom scarcely for horrour any eye dare look the foul unhappy sort of Lepers and other sore people needy impotent blind lame and sick c. How that their Number is daily so sore encreased that all the Alms of all the well disposed people of this your Realm is not half enough to sustain them There is no doubt but their indigence was extream when they were to glean not only after the Reaping of the Monks but after the Ecclesiastick Beggars the Fratres Mendicantes or as they were then called Manducantes had been satiated in diebus illis and when Holy Church almost engrossed not only the wealth but the begging in the Kingdom And he who now looks on our English infantry when they turn their Plough-shares into Swords will see nothing of the horrour of starvelings in their faces and the Writ de leproso amovendo is in effect obsolete in nature as that too de haeretico comburendo is abrogated And within the Term of about twenty years that the Observator of the Bills of Mortality refers his Calculations to he mentions but six of 229150 dying of the Leprosie What the Bills of Mortality in France may contain about deaths by the Leprosie happening there in late years I know not but do suppose that the general Scurâ—e appearing in the skins of the Pesantry there condemned to Sell their Birth-right of nature for no Pottage and to eat little of the Corn they Sow and to drink as little of the Vines they Plant and to taste little of Flesh save what they have in Alms from the Baskets of the Abbies and who are Dieted only for Vassalage may be an indication of the Leprosie having still its former effects among them But our English Husband-men are both better fed and taught and the poorest people here have so much of brown Bread and the Gospel that by the Calculations on our Bills of Mortality it appears that for so many years past but One of Four Thousand is starved 'T is therefore I think by instinct of Nature That our Yeomanry in the Country though not addicted to mind niceness of Controversie in Religion nor to be dealers in the Protestant Faith by Retaile are great Whole-sale Traders in it and will as soon suffer their Ploughs to be took out of their Hands as their Bibles from under their Arms And they have been generally observed since the Plot and some years before to manifest in common discourse their robust abhorrences of Popery as supposing that under that Religion they could neither save their Souls nor their Bacon Doleman alias Parsons in the Second part of his Book of the Succession speaking of the Numbers of the Papists here makes it very considerable In that the most part of the Country people that live out of Cities and great Towns in which the greatest part of the English forces are wont to consist are much affected ordinarily to their Religion meaning the Popish Religion by reason the Preachers of the contrary Religion are not so frequent with them as in Towns c. But were he now alive he would find the Scene of things changed in our Country Churches since Queen Elizabeth's time in whose Reign a Book was printed Anno 1585 called A lamentable complaint of the Commonalty by way of Supplication to the High Court of Parliament for a learned Ministry He would find
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
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
when by the ill Poets of the Play they shall be well paid to line the Pit Boxes and Galleries to cry it up and thus the Wit and Philosophy of a great Lady have been Celebrated in the Vniversities by Heads of Colledges and lodged there in Libraries on the expectance of her being a Benefactress And if any Tecelius would come not as a sturdy Pardon-Pedlar as before to require Mony the which thing then proved so destructive to Popery but to distribute it there would be enow to receive it and among the Indigents for a while according to the Stylus curiae Romanae in Mr. Colemans Letter of March the 12 th 74 to the Internuntio a little Mony I say a very little will do But Conclamatum est as to the state of Religion it self as well as of the Power of any Prince when men come to be bought by him either into Religion or Loyalty The profusion of Money in the way of Legacies by any one is a sign of his being near his end and Tacitus therefore saith it not improperly of Otho Pecunias distribuit parce nec tanquam periturus And thus is any Princes Power and likewise Religion near expiring when once he comes to buy of Hydras heads as Mr. Hobbs's expression is in his History of the Civil Wars I know that it hath been the common practice of Kings to buy of Demagogues and some of their Ministers have perhaps been apt to think that those who formerly were by their Artifices able to make the Disease of Sedition in the minds of the people had likewise the greatest skill to cure it in like manner as any Doctor of Phsick who could make a Quartan Ague or any other Disease would be held in the greatest repute for ability to cure it it being perhaps more easie to make a Disease then to cure it as composition is more easie then Analysis and Multiplication then Division but the too dear bought experience of Princes hath seal'd the Probatum est in this case of all popular Wizards losing their power of charming when they have been Captivated with Royal gifts Witches according to the vulgar received opinion being unable to hurt when they are in Jayles There is another Notion I dâ—scanted largely on before and that overstocks the Market of expectants to be bought off Namely that all men naturally think themselves equally wise and therefore as any Ship that sails faster then another is in the Sea-phrase said to wrong it so are men apt to think themselves wrongd by those who with Gales of Court preferment get beyond them Moreover tho the power of Gold be still what it always was namely the most ductile thing in nature next to degenerate Man made ductile by it yet will any Prince be impoverish'd who buys Gold or Men of golden Abilities and great Parts too dear by Preferments and Donatives for such Donees will be Continuando-beggers and everlasting expectants of further Gifts and their conversion either to a Princes Interest of State or Religion must be still nourished by the same thing it was made of and therefore it was worthy the wisdom of Solomon to observe That he that oppresseth the Poor and giveth Gifts to the Rich shall surely come to want And most certainly here as in France the Play of a Prince who shall use that Game to win Souls will not be worth the sorry Candle of Conversion he shall light up and the Conversion of Sharpers will be of such who will soon run away with the stake of their Souls they have laid down The Fisherman of Rome St. Peter's pretended Successor can neither in France nor here with a drag-net of Conversion catch thousands of Souls at a draught as St. Peter elsewhere did but must Angle for every Convert and that with a golden Hook of which the value is more considerable to be lost then is that of the Fish to be taken and from which Hook too it can invisibly get off at pleasure A Prince of that Religion will have more occasion for the multiplying Miracle of the Loaves then that of Transubstantiation and the Multitude that follow his Converters for the former Miracle will be apt as soon to leave him as they did our Saviour who followed him on that account The Observator on the Bills of Mortality shews us that in December 1672. The Protestants in Paris were but as one to 65 and 't is confessedly true on all hands that the great Scene of the late French Conversions lies in Paris and even there the present Ecclesiastical Policy is to Attaque tâ—e Fleet of the Hereticks rather by Merchant-men then by Fire ships I have never heard of any Bishops Survey of the persuasions there relating to Religion but in the Index of Mersennus his Comment on the first 6 Chapters of Genesis I find it said Atheorum numerus Luteciae p. 671. and Athei in Gallâ—â Germaniâ Scotiâ Poloniâ p. 673. I could find neither of those places in the body of the Book but observe that in the Learned Fryars Dedicatory Epistle to De Gondy the Archbishop of Paris he says Quibus addo te hujus urbis orbis Parisiensis ut vigilantissimum Praelatum sapientissimè constitutum esse in quâ sicut eximiam plurimorum virtutem atque pietatem admiramur à multorum etiam infesto immani scelere longissimè abhorremus ad cujus fastigium non video quid adjungi possit cum numen omne pernegent ex eorum mente quibuscum familiariter degunt sensum Divinitatis consensum pro viribus evellunt Quamobrem impii suorum numerum in hac Parisiorum luce ingentem esse aiunt atque gloriantur But I have heard some more conversant in that Book then I have been relate how that great Master of Numbers doth make the Atheists in Paris to be 20,000 and it being justly to be supposed that those 20000 Miscreants being wretchedly poor for that as Aristotle has long since well observ'd rich men are naturally 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or lovers of God who hath provided so well for them they would presently seem Protestants to qualifie them for turning Papists and receiving their Conversion Money and would say as of old accipe pecuniam dimitte asinum and instantly swell up the number of Converts in Paris But Popery gains nothing in reality by those fugitive Converts for the Fool that saith in his heart there is no God will be easily brought to say in his Soul there is no Soul and therefore say I caveat emptor to Messieurs the French Converters the volatile Converts for a good quantity of solid Gold sell them but a little Quicksilver or rather Smoak and I think they may as well employ their Money in converting the Poysoners There is another thing that makes it very impolitick thus to throw away good Money on bad Converts and that is what hath been observed to be the effect of this expenceful project in France namely that it
Office and for my part I shall never give my voice for any ones serving in Parliament that will not be willing to move for the discharge of the Debt to the Clergy before mention'd as soon as the State of the Kingdom will bear it Sir Benjamin Rudyard in his aforesaid Speech p. 3. mentioning the danger we are in of being upbraided by the Papists for being willing to serve God with somewhat that would cost us nothing hath a saying that I have often heard Cited in discourse as anothers namely He that thinks to save any thing by Religion but his Soul will be a loser in the end And this Notion of his of not saving by Religion doth fortifie my affirmation of the publick inconvenience accruing by the getting by it as to which I have so opened the present State of the Clergies maintenance in England as to represent them rather losers then gainers When 't is considered how many there are in England of the Layety who gape for gain by Religion and are ready to devour one another for it as well as Religion by it I am sure none can with reason think the Quota of the Clergy's Maintenance should be such as in the time of the prosperity of the State to render them losers How scandalous and how ridiculous nay how ridiculous by Poverty it self many of our Lay-Popish and Protestant Religion-Traders have been I have already evinced and do suppose that nothing can blacken that Trade in the fancies of the People more then the discovery of the Traders who must needs appear more odious then they who are the Mercenary Brokers for the debasing of Humane Nature by Lust since the Hypocritical Religion-Traders do for Rewards prostitute the Honour of their Creator and as much as they can make the Divine Nature subservient to the diabolical Art of their Hypocrisy Before the late Market for Converts in France I have not heard or read of any Nation in the World wherein great Parcels of the Layety have gain'd Mony by Religion but only in England I believe that in Amsterdam whereas Des Cartes saith in one of his Epistles Nemo non mercaturam exercet there is not one Religion-Trader tho yet all Religions are there tolerated Nor yet is any Lay-man of that Trade in Paris who is of any other And in the Policy of the Turkish Empire 't is provided for as a Fundamental that nothing shall be there acquired by Religion insomuch that all that Emperor's Subjects as well as himself being by their Law enjoyn'd to be able to practice some Manual Trade when any are call'd out to discharge the Office of Priests or Celebraters of the Publick Religious Worship there such exact Care is taken that they shall get by the exercise of that Office just so much and no more as they did by their Manual Trade for which purpose an Excellent Person who was the King's Ambassador at Constantinople related to me That he complaining to the Visier of some injury done by a Turkish Priest to one of his Servants the Visier deprived him of that Holy Employment and that the Priest being afterward sent to Petition to be restored to his place he answered that he would not being as well content to work on in the Mechanick Trade to the exercise whereof he was returned since his said deprivation But this Trade and sort of Traders that hath so long pester'd our Kingdom is now about to expire and dye a natural death and which it could not before be brought to do by a violent And as the Trade of sturdy Beggars the which is as much a Trade and as much conducted by Laws among themselves as is any incorporate one that hath the stamp of the Great Seal could by no Legislation be extinguished but would soon be so by peoples voluntary forbearing to be their Contributers thus too will this sturdy Religion-Trade have its Period Our Fifth Monarchy-men who thought to inherit the earth without giving sixteen years Purchase for it and who pretended to follow the Lamb wheresoever he went but really out of dreams of a golden Fleece are by all exploded The condition of Britannia languens and that too very much occasion'd by the former insolence of the Papists being understood at Rome will make the old Gentleman there think 't is vain for him to hope to be possess'd of the Abby Lands without giving for them many Millions of Pounds Sterling and the Papists here will I believe so soon penetrate into the present State of our Poverty that they will find no way effectual for the delivering them from the vexatious Prosecutions of Protestant Informers but the Removal of that decay of Trade and general dearth of many that has necessitated so many to be Informers and who cause them to spend upon under Sheriffs more Money then they save by not being high Sheriffs and which decay of Trade hath sunk a 4th part of the value of their Lands and which can never be cured but by the dissolution of the Religionary one and finding the Credit of the Iesuites Society crack'd as I have before express'd will find that their Iourneymen Calumniators as Mr. Sergeant calls them in a Paper of his I have seen must necessarily break too and it being found that not only our Enthusiasts are forced by necessity of Nature to desist from expecting any gain by Religion but all Protestants whatsoever the Popish Traders therein will be the more content to give over one of their Trades and the fare of them will be like that of the Associated Jesuites to march out of their Spiritual Corporations insensibly like the captious Scribes and Pharises in the Gospel of whom 't is there said Being convicted in their own Consciences they went out one by one beginning at the eldest even to the last c. Tho as I said no man in Holland doth get or lose by Religion yet since the Reformation there was a Controvery of Religion I mean the Armiminiâ—n one which made an extraordinary fermentation in their State and which Controversy tho Knaves there frighted Fools with as if it were stirred by the Remonstrants with an intent to bring in Popery yet the knowing few easily understood that neither side of the Question could produce that effect and they likewise understood that the profession of the belief of the several opposite Points of that Controversie among the opposite Parties there serv'd only as Ribbands of several colours to distinguish Parties that are against each other in Arms. And yet that very great Controversie in Religion which divided Holland and distracted our Kingdom in the time of the Royal Martyr and the substance of which perplexed the Trihaeresia of the Iews the Saduces Essenes and Pharises and likewise three sorts of Christians the Pelogians Calvinists and Arminians and that of old divided the Sects of the Philosophers and hath many years raged among the Turks and likewise among the Iesuites and Dominicans after its having for so
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
man certainly apprehended no reason of an additional Commandment Thou shalt not fire thy Neighbours house and had he been convinced that the Pope in his decrepit Age had made a Commandment for the firing of it and whole Cities and had so pronounced è Cathedrâ would probably have imputed the lingua dolosa and the caâ—bones desolatorii to his Doctrine and the smoak from that fiery Doctrine would have had the effect of opening his Eyes But as for Mr. Cressy's Idea of the Massacring any Incendiaries tho they had been tooâ—â— in flagranti if he had staid in his old Church I mean that of England he would have found any such thing sufficiently stigmatised by its Doctrine which makes the King to bear the Sword and that not in vain and allows not the Rabble to be a Terror to Evil Doers nor Hell to break loose for the support of Heaven and which inculcates Obedience to the Law of the Land for Conscience sake and even that Law permits none to Assemble in Arms against a declared Enemy but by the Kings particular Commission and he must therefore go to China or to Rome that will have a Street or a Town or the Vniversitas or Community therein punish'd for the pretended or real faults of particular persons Moreover the English Genius hath not in Story that I know of been tainted with Infamy for penetrating any thing of that horrid Nature except in the old days of Popery in relation to the Iews and the Lay-Rabble was then put upon it by the Rabble of Fryars and Monks who owing Money to the Iews were that way willing to confute their Creditors And since the time that that Great and High Judg of Reason as well as Equity and to whom the Custody of the King's Conscience was Committed and who hath held the Scale of Equity with as steady an hand and tender heart and as discerning and watchful an Eye as any of his Predecessors did place the dreadful Guilt of the Firing of London where he did at the Condemnation of the Lord Stofford and probably had satisfied his Judgment for the doing of it by Observations or Examinations of Passages that occured elsewhere rather then at that Tryal for there the Evidence did not rise clear and high enough for the occasioning that part of his Sentence and since the time that the People of England by their Representatives threw the Guilt of that Fire on the Papists and the Magistrates of our Metropolis inscribed it on the Monument the populace have been as calm and temperate in their judging of it and as perfectly free from resentments of Revenge against all the Papists in general or any one Papist in particular as if none but that poor angry Antiquary Mr. Prynn had censured them for it and whose Thunder the World being so long used to did so much despise that his popularity could scarce have obtain'd an out-cry for the killing of a single Mad Dog. I must confess tho by the reiterated Confession and by the Execution of Hubert a Papist it appear'd that he did set Fire to the House in London from whence its rage began and tho his Confessing of Peidelow to be one of his Accomplices in the Fact exempts it from being doubted that Papists burn'd London and tho after I had heard of that judgment of the Lord Chancellor and of the House of Commons and of the Magistrates aforesaid and was shewn that Papal Tenet by your Lordship I doubted not of the Justice of attributing in my thâ—â—ghts one part of the Guilt of the Fire to some Jesuited Papists and that it might be said with the same propriety of Speech that London was Fired by the Papists as 't was by Sir Walter Raleigh that Harry the 4 th of France was kill'd by the Papists yet I never thought any considerable number of the Gentry among our Lay-Papists would have practised any thing of that kind tho the Pope himself should have Commanded it There was a Book containing Observations on our late Affairs of Church and State Printed in the Year 1680 called the Arts and Pernicious Designs of Rome wherein is shewed what are the Aims of the Iesuites and Fryars c. by a person of their own Communion who turn'd Romanist about thirty years since and throughout that Book as he in general fortifies my observation of a Protestant when turn'd Papist not being able to abandon all Candour his mind was first nourished in so he doth it particularly p. 25. where having in Proposition 4th spoke of the Mischiefs we havâ— received from some Popish Orders and particularly that of the Iesuites he saith as followeth in Proposition 41 viz. Amongst which the late sad disaster happening to the City of London not to mention divers others of like nature happening in divers other places since if it were a Practice of any Humane Contrivance and not a meer judgment of God from Heaven upon us cannot reasonably be thought to have been the Project or Practice of any other Men then these and to have come originally from Rome and the Consistory there who beside the bad Principles already mentioned which legitimate such doings at all times that they judge it convenient for their ends were without doubt willing to signalize that year 1666 with some remarkable mischief done to Protestants in check to the fancies of some in that Party who have had the confidence to affirm and as it were to predict that in this year Rome and their pretended Antichrist the Pope should be utterly destroyed That it appear'd a Practice of Humane Contrivance by the very Confession of the Incendiary is plain and that it was by the People in the City then suspected so I have said but so far were our plain English natures from charging it on any Lay English Papist that Mr. Marvel in his Growth of Popery Printed Anno 1677 having said That we may reckon the Reigns of our late English Princes by a Succession of the Popish Treasons against them adds And if under his Majesty we have yet seen no more visible effects of the same Spirit then the Firing of London acted by Hubert hired by Peidelow two French Men which remains a Controversie it is not to be attributed to the good Nature or better Principles of that Sect but to the wisdom of his Holyness who observes that we are not of late so dangerous Protestants as to deserve any special Mark of his Indignation I presume not to charge or discharge any sort of men about this Fact further then the Law hath done whether Papists or Priests or Fifth Monarchy-men for of a Conspiracy to Fire the City on the day it was fired on several of that latter Sect had been before Convicted and deservedly Executed for it as we must either Grant or Arraign the Justice of the Nation and therefore Mr. Cressy had reason to blame Mr. Prynn in some measure for concluding that the Papists were the only Incendiaries of the City
when Mr. Prynn could not have forgot what had happen'd to those Conspirators and that the very Principles of many of that wild Sect are for the legitimating the most desperate Out-rages and Rebellions imaginable but out of Justice to Humane Nature will never render any man ill upon ill Proofs and such as are contrary to the Nature of things as for example one Argument which is so prevalent with many for their concluding that London was designedly burnt by many Popish Persons namely because it was apparently true and not denyable that the Flames did break out in several places of the City at the tops of several houses which were at a considerable distance from the Fire doth not in the least move me so to conclude for 't is obvious in Nature that as the heat of an ordinary Fire will put combustible light matter that is at a small distance from it into a flame a heat proportionably greater must do the same thing at a greater distance and this appear'd in Fact conspicuous to Thousands while the Fire then broke out from the Timber-work in the Tower of the Old Exchange when the great Conflagration was a quarter of a Mile distant from it Nor yet would I venture in discourse with any Papist about the aforesaid Tenet to call it either Tenet or Principle chargeable on the Church of Rome as approved by it if it were only deducible in the way of Inferences from other Tenets as for example If one should say the Papists hold that 't is lawful to burn the persons of Hereticks and much more therefore to burn their Houses and to burn the Nest as well as to kill the Bird and that the Goods of Hereticks are ipso iure confiscate and therefore their Houses and accordingly I told my Roman-Catholick friend that I would never raise this Principle of Fire against his Church by Collision of Arguments but by the help of your Lordships Quotations referring to the Canon Law as well as Canonists shew him the Pope claiming the Power in terminis terminantibus to fire whole Cities as aforesaid and that long before his Power received so much accession of Territory as I may call it of Prerogative by those great Students of Crown-Divinity and Assertors of his Fifth Monarchy the Jesuites I do intend to entertain only this my particular friend at this Season with the Passages I shall receive from you concerning this Tenet because 't is in me an habitual temper not salem nitro superaddere or to afflict any afflicted Lay-Papists who may retain some unsound Notions of Religion and yet be sound Members of the State and I shall not desire either by words or writing to imitate the ungenerous Practice of the Sons of Iacob toward the Sichemites in attacking them when they were sore And moreover reason is thrown away on men in Passion and during the Paroxysme of Passion in either any Papists or Dissenters there is no frighting them from an absurdity by Arguments for there can be nothing more absurd then their very Passion and while that lasts they are as insensible of the wounds that are made in their Principles by objections as some in a Battel are of wounds they receive there But I am not without hopes of a more pacific Conjuncture that may come wherein our Vn-Iesuited Lay-Papists may discriminate their Principles and Notions from the troublesome ones of others of them that vex the knowing part of Mankind with their Implicit Faith like Flies blind in one Season of the year getting into Mens Eyes and when all empty Religion-Traders will no more like the Merchants of Tyre pass for Princes of the Earth after they had with a bulk of words so long enslaved the World and its Princes and themselves too and made Religion but the word as I may say to discriminate Parties in War and to know who and who are of a side and that by the Mutual Consent of reasonable men of all Parties the word Religion will not be put on what is really Irreligion and that a handful of men will think it in vain to strive to keep up the acception or signification of any word or words when the currency of the age and that justly too hath damned the former sense thereof and that all men must speak in the Sense of the Rational Age or not speak intelligibly and as he who seems to be Religious and bridles not his tongue his Religion is vain it will be in vain too for him to think to have ought call'd Religion against the sense of the World and as the Licence was vain and ridiculous granted to a Book of Physick wherein the Licencer said Nihil reperio in hoc libello fidei Catholicae contrarium quo minus typis mandetur so likewise will the Vogue of granting any Liberty to any thing of Catholick Faith that has Treason and Sedition in it be as worthy of Laughter and then will the Publishing of this Tenet be prevalent probably with Papists and prove like a word in season and tend to the abolishing the abuse of the word Religion when they shall be argued with in the cool of the day as our first Parents where after the fall and their Fiery Principles be then exposed and then may each of them whose Religion so call'd excited their angry Prophets to desire the destruction of Heretical Cities as the Choler of Ionah at last animated him tho not to destroy yet to wish the Destruction of Niniveh be as he was seasonably expostulated with dost thou well to be angry and dost thou well to be angry with others who will not call thy firing their houses Religion when thou seest the World begin to laugh at the impertinence of the calling it so The Author I cited before of the great Question to be considered begins his discourse with a Patriotly kind of Sagacity thus viz. That this Nation and the Nation of Scotland and Ireland concerned with it are at present in such a posture and under such Circumstances as give just reason both of fear and care more then ordinary both to Rulers and People is so without doubt that it needs no Proof and that we are in a dangerous Feaver in regard both to our Civil and Religious Interest all in their wits must know which Disease albeit it be now in the opinion of most come to a Crisis yet few can determine whether it will end in a natural cool or prove a distemper yet more dangerous and deadly But when I consider the great number of those in the Kingdom who are at their ease therein either by substantial Fortunes or Professions or Trades and who would account it both trouble and shame to get by Religion as an adventitious Trade as much as a great first-rate Practitioner in Law who had a Receit for the Curing the Tooth-Ach or Gout would to get Fees thereby and to have a Mingle of Clients and Patients together and which sort of Mankind that by
Harry the 8ths time so it may perhaps as justly be said that they are in debt to the Crown for the safety of the Protestant Religion since Queen Elizabeth's who as I have been informed from some well Vers'd in our Exchequer Records alienated more of the Patrimony of the Crown then any English Prince ever did and that in order to her raising those great Sums before mentioned which were necessary for the securing the Protestant Religion and rivetting it in fast to our Laws and Government and I am the more apt to credit such my Information because I see not by what other way she could raise those vast Sums but by such alienation of the Crown Lands her ordinary expences probably coming near such her receits which one may partly guess by what Sir Robert Cotton in his abstract of the Records of the Tower touching the Kings Revenue affirms Ex Computo Dom. Burleigh The saurar that Anno 12 her Revenue besides the Wards and Dutchy of Lancaster was 188197 l. 4 s. and the Payments and Assignmets were 110612 l. 13 s. of which the Houshold was 30000 l. Privy Purse 2000 l. Admiralty 30000 l. and Sir Robert Cotton in that Book mentions that she did pawn her Iewels in the Tower and often morgage her Land which no doubt she was constrained to do for the great end aforesaid her ordinary Revenue and extraordinary Supplies of Subsidies not being adequate to the great Sums that her Measures of State and Religion caus'd her to expend And to how low an Ebb the Crown Lands were fall'n in the late Kings time from what they were in the 12th year of her Reign and when they were perhaps about 200,000 l. per Annum appears in a Book of Mr. Christopher Verion an Exchequer man dedicated to Sir Iohn Culpeper under Treasurer of his Majesties Exchequer where 't is said that the Revenues of the Kings Lands now in charge before his Majesties Auditors amounted in the whole to 100,000l per Annum and consisted then for the most part of Fee-Farms and certain Rents I have before mentioned that she laid the Foundation of the Protestant Religion being here semper eadem as in the Metropolis of Holland the Foundation of a House ordinarily costs as much as the superstructure thus expenceful to the Crown did the Foundation of Protestancy by her prove and she needed not the Precaution in these words of St. Luke For which of you intending to build a Tower sits not down first and counts the cost whether he hath sufficient to finish it lest happily after he hath laid the Foundation and is not able to finish it all that behold it begin to mock him saying This man began to build and was not able to finish She laid the Foundation of our English Gospel so deep in the Law of the Land that God be thanked the Romanists have not been able to mock it further then by calling it a Parliament-Religion and by my consent let them that way still mock on and I shall mock at them who think that any Religion but protestancy here will ever have a Parliamentary Sanction and if Popery had not been a Parliamentary Religion here in the Marian dayes her Reign had not as I may say been infamous by the occasion of any Noble Army of Martyrs nor the Eclipse of Justice and Mercy and the English good nature in her vile Quinquennium been made an Epoche of Horror in the English Story as great Eclipses of old in Chronology like notches in the Line of Time for Mens Memories to fasten on served as dates of Epoches to measure it by and setting aside some just ground of fear of Poperies being here permitted by Heaven to be an Epidemical opinion of Religion as a just Punishment of such defection from Morality I think the fear of the Kingdoms being Shipwrack't on it and sustaining thereby such persecution as was in Bohemia would be as much to be mocked as Shakespears Shipwrack in Bohemia and the fear of the Writ De haretico comburendo grillading any more Christians be as ridiculous as Lithgows mentioning in his Travels that in a hot Country he saw Geese roasted in and by the Sun. But My Lord raillery apart the Protestant Religion that before Queen Elizabeth's Reign was only like a Picture hanging on the Wall and easie to be removed without Fatal Prejudice to the Kingdom hath since been so incorporated into our Laws and the heart of our Politicks that like the old Fresco Painting appearing on Walls and there wrought deeply in it cannot be removed but with the Wall it self and whatever Popish Bishops or Iudges any Prince of that persuasion may possibly hereafter appoint they must till some of our Acts of Parliament can be Repeal'd which declare Popery to be against God's Law give Judgment that it is so accordingly as 't is rationally resolved in Vaughan's Reports in the Case of Thomas Hill vers Thomas Good where 't is occasionally said That if a Marriage be declared by Act of Parliament to be against God's Law we must admit it to be so for by a Law that is by an Act of Parliament it is so declared There is nothing I am more ashamed of in many Protestants who pass for first-rate ones and carry not only swoln Sails of Profession of it but Flaggs as Demagogues then to see them as I said value themselves on their excessive Fears of Papists and Popery I would wish that such intimidated Protestants if really they suffer that Passion and are afraid of the Fire of those Faggots that they are more distant in nature from then from the heat of Mount Aetna and talk after the Rate of the Martyr in his Letter to Cranmer that they must prepare to hold out to the Fire Inclusive would not by their pittiful ill boding fears stain the Noble Prophecies of some English Martyrs when the Fire was kindled about them at the Stake The Acts and Monuments will tell them how at the Martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer That when a Faggot was kindled with fire and laid down at Ridleys Feet Latimer spake to him in these words Be of good comfort Mr. Ridley and play the man We shall this day light such a Candle in England as I trust shall never be put out But what is somewhat more extraordinary and which I remember not to have heard any one observe out of the Acts and Monuments is in the Relation of the Tryal of Roger Holland a Merchant-Taylor of London how Bishop Bonner heard him say after the Sentence of Condemnation was read God hath heard the Prayer of his Servants which hath been powred forth with Tears for his afflicted Saints whom you daily persecute But this I dare be bold in God to speak which by his Spirit I am moved to say that God will shorten your hand of Cruelty c. For after this day in this place shall there not be any by you put to the Tryal of Fire and Faggot
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
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
the least if the Oath were to be interpreted otherwise than in the Imposers sense and under this Conclusion it may be properly added that where that sense is sufficiently manifest in the words it is exactly to be stood to as Sanderson hath well shewed in his second Lecture of the aforesaid Subject and where having shewed how we must take heed that we impose not on the Oath we have taken or any part thereof other sense than that which any other Pious and Prudent Man and who being unconcerned in the Business is of a freer Iudgment may easily gather out of the Words themselves he saith That we become without question guilty of the heinous Crime of Perjury if that milder interpretation which encouraged us unto the Oath chance to deceive us And in his 6th Lecture § 7. he saith As it is one kind of Perjury to strain the words during the Act of Swearing unto another Sense than that wherein they are understood by the Auditors so it is another kind of Perjury having sworn honestly not to proceed sincerely but to decline and elude the strength of the Oath tho the words be preserved with some new forged inventions variously turning and dressing the words to cloak the guilt of their Consciencâ—s as Tacitus saith of some and he concludes that Section by saying That where the words of an Oath are so clear in themselves that among honest men there can be no quâ—stion of their meaning the Party swearing is obliged in that sense which they apparently afford and may not either in swearing or when he hath sworn stretch those words upon the last of his Interest by any studied interpretations There appeared nothing more detestable to the Eye of the old Civil Law then fraud and trick and particularly the destroying the true Sense and meaning of a Law by a cavilling fraudulent interpretation that retains the words but confounds the ends for which the Law was made and accordingly 't is said in the Digests In fraudem legis facit qui salvis verbis legis sententiam ejus circumvenit But this in the Case of an Oath was more abominated and accordingly Cicero tells us that Fraus adstringit non dissolvit perjurium And if the Civil Law was afterward so provident for the honour of Humane Nature as to determine in the Case of an unask'd free gift that Cum in arbitrio cujuscunque sit hoc facere quod instituit oportet eum vel minime ad hoc prosilire vel cum venire ad hoc properaverit non quibusdam excogitatis artibus suum propositum defraudare tantamque indevotionem quibusdam quasi legitimis velamentis prolegere any one may judge how much it abhorred any thing of fraud in the evading of the payment of a due subjection to Sovereign Power acknowledged by what the thinking Heathens term'd Sacramentum as if the most eminent or only thing emphatically Sacred and religiously to be observed I should not since the Extermination of the Iesuites Doctrine of Equivocating have thought it worth while so much to dilate on this plain Conclusion before the publishing a Pamphlet in our Metropolis in the Year 1680 called An Account of the New Sheriffs holding their Office made publick upon reason of CONSCIENCE respecting themselves and others in regard to the Act for Corporations and in which ACT tho the Lawgivers meaning of the Oath thereby imposed is most apparently manifest out of the Words yet the Author of that Casuistical Pamphlet makes it lawful to take the Oath and subscribe the Declaration and not in the literal strict Construction but in an imaginary sense topp'd upon the Lawgivers and that nothing but a vitiated fancy or injudicious mind could imagine I was sorry to hear that that Pamphlet was writ by a Non-Conformist Divine and that in a Conjuncture when the Magistrates of that City were so hot against the name of Popery any men should be so zealous for the Thing called Iesuitism and that any men by attempting to rivet Equivocation into their Model of Protestancy should at once endeavour to rob us of the Energy of the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and of the Test it self and to make the sacredness of all Oaths whatsoever to evaporate Let any sober Person of the Dissenters Party but seriously read that Pamphlet so scandalous to Protestancy and it cannot but give him the Alarm of coming out from among them for that he must do that would come out even from the Iesuitick Equivocation If there were not a Church of England Protestancy in that Loyal City I may without unjust reflection say it that Magistrates who were Accessory to the erecting that Paper-Monument to Equivocation and to the trying to help it to a jus Divinum and to be a part of pure Religion and undefiled could bring little honour to our Metropolis by calling it a PROTESTANT CITY on its Monument of Stone As we find in the Book of Iudges that all that saw that inhumane Butchering and Quartering out into pieces of the Levites Wife by her own Husband cried out and said There was no such thing done or seen since the time that the Children of Israel came up out of the Land of Egypt until that day I believe it may be affirmed that never in any PROTESTANT City in the World since the time that it was free'd from the Egyptian Servitude of the Papal Impositions was any such barbarous butchering of the Obligation of an Oath by Equivocation in a printed Case sent about the Kingdom by the pretended Espousers of Protestancy ever done or seen And according to the saying that Nisi serpens serpentem comederit non fit draco it may be said that the most superlative and dreadful outraging of Oaths cannot be compassed but by the Consciences of pretended Protestants digesting the old Equivocation of the Iesuites When I consider this therefore that the false Protestant Discusser of that CASE of CONSCIENCE of the SHERIFFS doth determine that by taking up Arms against the King mentioned in the Oath is to be meant against HIS RIGHTFUL GOVERNMENT and that the Oath must be taken in the SENSE or MEANING of the Major part of both Houses that passed it and then makes their meaning so opposite to their words and do recollect what is so clearly laid down in my Lord Chancellor Hatton's Treatise concerning Statutes and the Expositions of Acts of Parliament viz. That the Assembly of Parliament being ended functi sunt officii and that as to all of the lower House who are by Election their Authority is returned to the Electors so clearly that if they were altogether assembled again for interpretation by a voluntary Meeting eorum non esset interpretari and that then the interpretation of the Statutes falls into the hands of the Sages of the Law and when I consider that great Caution of Sanderson in his said Book that where we depart from the words of an Oath to the intent it must be well proved that
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
Acquaintance as to judge them free from any Complication of the belief and practice of any irreligious Principles with the Principles of their Religion and particularly from the owning any Principle of Disloyalty or the Iesuites Doctrine of Calumny or the Obligatoriness of the Lateran Council will not rashly pronounce any other particular Papist guilty of the belief or practice of such Principles Nor is it any great honour that I have done to any men of extraordinary Vertue in thus judging that they cannot believe or practise such Principles for that it being true in the Course of Nature what Machiavel said that next to the being perfectly good 't is the most difficult thing to be perfectly bad the World hath had thereby some Garranty against the belief and practice of such Principles and by necessity of Nature must still have But since Mankind in general may expect to find in our esteem the benefit of the presumption of Law viz. That every man is presumed to be good and that the high Births and Educations of Princes and the great Examples of their Magnanimous Ancestors may well pass as strong presumptions of Nature against their doing any low ungenerous Acts of Cruelty and since in Gods great Ordinance of Magistracy an especial Divine presence may by Virtue of Holy Writ be presumed to accompany the very Magistrates appointed by Sovereign Prinâ—es according to that in 2 Chron. 19. 6. where after it was said to the Judges Take heed what you do for yee judge not for man but for the Lord the following words are Who is with you in the Iudgment and that therefore as Christ is said to be present with those Officers he appointed in the Church because there is a special Virtue and Efficacy of Christ manifest in their Ministry there may likewise be expected a special presence Divine in the Administration of Magistracy from the like manifestation of God in his Wisdom Power Goodness c. for the Well-fare of Societies as Mr. Ny observes and since Kings and Princes are an Oâ—dinance of God or Medium by which in a more special and peculiar way he communicates his Goodness to Christians according to the Style of the 13th of the Romans the great Sedes materâ—ae of Loyalty for he is the Minister of God to THEE for good it may well be thought profaneness and Sacrilege for men to bode and presume ill of the future Acting of any Heirs to Crowns and particularly as to their believing or practising any thing pernicious to their Realms What Roman Catholick Prince doth not deride Innocent the 3d under whom the Lateran Council was held for telling it in the Canon Law that the Papal Power is as much greater than the Imperial as the Sun is greater than the Moon and at the Marginal Note there for saying That the Papal Power exceeds the Imperial no less than 7744 There is a Prince whose Emblem is the Suâ— and whose Power exceeds the Papal in every ones account to more than that Proportion And is it not therefore but according to reason and common sense that we should believe that of all men in any Realm the Prince will be the latest brought to the belief of that Papal Power so categorically asserted by that Council That Kings may be Excommunicated by their own Bishops for not obeying the Pope and their Subjects in such Case be absolved from their Oaths of Allegiance Do not all the French Kings notwithstanding that Council claim the liberty of so much freedom from the Papal Power that Popes can neither directly nor indirectly command or ordain any thing concerning Temporal Matters within their Dominions and that neither the French King nor his Realm nor his Officers can be Excommunicated or interdicted by the Pope nor his Subjects absolved from their Oath of Allegiance As I have therefore in my Writing to a Noble Lord one of his Majesty's Ministers who was barbarously accused by one of the Plot-Witnesses for being a Papist and designing to advance the Papal Power said that I would be the last man in England who would believe he could be a Papist meaning it as impossible that he could believe or practise any irreligionary Tenet of Popery I will account it more impossible that any Roman Catholick Prince now living in the World should favour the Usurpation of the Papal Power however any of the Popish Clergy or Layety in his Realms might perhaps be addicted to favour the same That great Affair of the Munster Pâ—ace wherein so many great Roman Catholick Crown'd Heads agreeing perhaps in the Lateran Council being a General one did yet certainly agree together in the Year 1648 for Lutheran and Calvinistick Princes and States and their Subjects quietly possessing forever their Properties both in their Religions and Estates hath afforded the World an important Instance of Heavens so far influencing the understandings of those Crown'd Heads that they thought not themselves obliged to put the Decree of that Council in practice by exterminating Hereticks but to the contrary And because the Affair of that Peace and the great Pacta Conventa therein for the effect aforesaid have been scarce more taken Notice of here than the Transactions in China and that the notification of the same may advance the measures of our Duty by Internal Communion and help to un-blunder some of our Nominal Protestants in their fancying it so necessary for the quiet of Christendom that Christian Princes and their Subjects should agree in the belief of the Speculative points of Religion I intend to take an opportunity to publish some Account of the same I account my having thus largely dilated on the Moral Offices as aforesaid hath tended to corroborate this my 8th Conclusion I am here conversants in the great Court of Conscience the Court whose Seat is in the Practical and not Speculative intellect and the great things of which it holds Plea are as Sanderson tells us Actus morales particulares proprii and therefore particular urging of Records against which lies no averment is not more pertinent in Courts of Law than of Moral Offices in this And moreover I observing in this Conjuncture when many mens zeal hath been so hot against the Speculative points of Popery which disturb not Civil Society that yet they have believed the more pernicious Tenet of it and would have practised the same viz. The founding Dominion in Grace and that tho they have been altogether neglectâ—ul of their Actus morales particulares proprii they have both presumed to judge dishonourably and rashly of the Actings of others and to trouble the World not only with their Anxiety about the Acts of Kings and Princes but the Actus Dei and his illuminating Princes understandings with the Heavenly Mysteries I have thought this discoursing of our Moral Offices as aforesaid the more a Propos and seasonable as tending to fortify the rationality of this 8th Conclusion by exposing the absurdity of a respective or conditional Loyalty a
Loyalty that any Christian who hath taken these Oaths shall think sufficient doth most certainly take the name of Loyalty and Protestancy and of Christianity and even of God in vain and as the Scripture implies that there is a Repentance to be repented of I shall say that such a mans Protestancy is to be protested against And when we consider that the Presbyterian Author of the EXERCITATION beforementioned hath in p. 41. with so much Loyalty and Reason told us in terms That Obedience is owing to Princes without condition of Religion or Iustice on their part performed and the Scripture is clear for an irrespective and in regard of the Rulers Demeanor absolute subjection Exod. 20. 12. 21. 25. Rom. 13. 1 2 c. Tit. 3. 1. 1 Pet. 2. 13. 1 Sam. 24. 6 7. 26. 9 10 11. Jer. 27. 12. 29. 7. Matth. 22. 21. and hath told us in p. 56. That our Oaths put no condition on the Prince but are all absolute and irrespective and run without ifs or ands in like manner as the Obligation of Subjects Allegiance to their Sovereign is irrespective according to Divine Institution methinks it should make any Son of the Church of England to start at the thought of his being out-done in Loyalty and sworn Allegiance by a Covenanting Presbyterian for such that Author was and at the thought of any ones having taken those Oaths relating to the King his Heirs and Successors and afterward interlining the interpretation of them with ifs and ands and at the thought of such an interlineation not appearing as ill in the Court of Conscience as any would do in a Court of Law. But the truth is the Church of England appearing in this late Religionary Fermentation to have so incorporated this Doctrine of absolute and irrespective Loyalty into its Constitution beyond any other Church in the World and likewise the Doctrine of Charity and Moderation toward all Christians whether Foreigners or Domesticks whether whole Churches or single Persons as Primate Bramhal's words are that the same doth now as I may say strike the Eyes of all indifferent men and enforce it self on the thoughts of any who do but for Curiosity walk about this Sion and go round about her and tell the Towers thereof I mean do consider its Prayers Homilies Articles Canons and Ecclesiastical Constitutions it hath hereby been necessarily made like the Eagle to renew its youth and to be invigorated as with a new Soul after its Enemies thought it dead or asleep and after Mr. Hooker's shrewd guessing that after the Year 1677. That what followed would be likely to be small joy to them who should behold it For the Doctrine of absolute and irrespective Loyalty being Essential to the Peace of Kingdoms and likely to be so more and more to the Worlds end and the Church of England appearing as by consent of Parties to be THE Church that overtowers all others in the Principles for THAT Sort of Loyalty as well as in the august Principles of Charity for all Christians according to the saying of Magnes amoris amor it must naturally attract the love of thoâ—e in other Churches and supposing that any Church or People love themselves and cannot be preserved but by Loyalty Nature will direct the World to a growing love for the Church of England and therefore I am no Visionaire in predicting from natural Causes That what shall follow to the Church of England will be great joy to those who shall behold it to the very end of time And nothing could possibly in my opinion have brought it to this firm State of its Glory but the disloyal Principles and Practices of some of its Competitors and particularly the just and dreadful apprehensions given to considerate men upon some Nominal Protestants and Nominal Property-men having founded Dominion in Grace and yet having reproached the Church of England and its Divines with Popery and invited the Protestant Mobile to make a Schism from it on such an account and printed many Seditious Pamphlets for the Establishing the IF or AND-Loyalty or indeed which is all one an absolute Disloyalty and in such a Conjuncture when it would have been not more pernicious to the particular Souls of the Disloyal than to the Body of the whole Nation and to the State of Christendom Thus through the Divine Omnipotence which can bring good out of evil hath our late Fermentation been made perfective to our Church as well as the Hereditary Monarchy and the Rule of God's governing the World by the Prayers of his Church and Lusts of his Enemies been here exemplified and as the Air that is the Steem of the dull Earth or the Textura halituum terrae as Gassendus calls it is made by nature to be the Vehicle of those Beams of the Sun that dazle our Eyes thus have the Fumes exhaled by such mens Lusts of Disloyalty and Malice that darken'd their own understandings and would have obscured the glory of the Church of England been made instrumental in dispersing its brightness through the World and even in the opening of the Eyes of many to behold it with amazement and that service hath been done our Church thereby which by all the Pens of its Iewel and Hooker and Sanderson could never be effected England that had so much the Carriage and the Trade of the World till the Munster Peace of 48 could bear the Civil War after 41 and breathe under it and flourish after it but as the State of the World abroad and at home now is and likely to be our ALL must depend upon the Principles and Practice of Loyalty and therefore this new Soul I spake of as now animating the Church of England must be immortal and it may well say to it self under any Prince that can come Soul take thy ease thou hast Loyalty and the Principles of it laid up for many years and England did not before 48 more excel other Realms in Trade than its Church doth now other Churches in absolute and irrespective Loyalty That great Iudge of Churches and their Principles Arch-Bishop Laud having in p. 36. of his famous Star-Chamber Speech remarked the dangerous Consequence of avowing That the Popish Religâ—ion is Rebellion saith That some Principles of theirs teach Rebellion is apparently true c. and I shall add that some Principles of our late Covenanting Dissenteâ—s have taught it is apparently true and for such of the latter who believed and practised these Principles to reproach any Papists with Disâ—oyalty is as apparently ridiculous as was Mr. Prynn's writing two Voluminous Tractates of The Disloyalty of Papists at the time when he was making so great a Figure in the late Rebellion But however suitably to the Moral Offices urged by Ames of not condemning whole Parties of men on the account of the guilt of some Persons I have under this Conclusion cited the loyal Principles of some Recusants of all sorts pertinent to my Scope and because the irrespective Loyalty
words in the Oaths altho it is a common sure Rule That Verba ubi sunt expressa voluntatis supervacanea est quaestio yet I shall ex superabundanti choose to corroborate such my Assertion by laying down this as my 9th and last Conclusion that it is manifest that it was the Law-givers intention to bind the Takers of these Oaths not only to bear true Faith and Allegiance to his Majesty but to his Heirs and Successors in the Due and Legal Course of Descent as I have before expressed It need not be much dilated on that Relations are Minimae entitatis but Maximae efficaciae and that Liberi sunt quasi partes appendices parentum not only Fictione Iuris but Naturâ â—ei veritate and that in the framing of the Oath of Allegiance and the designing the Obligations to arise thence the King had a necessary regard to natural affection and to the preservation of the Hereditary Monarchy in the Line of his Heirs and Successors and suitably to what is expressed in the Preamble of the Statute of 25 H. 8. c. 22. viz. That since it is the natural inclination of every man gladly and willingly to provide for the surety of both his Title and Succession altho it touch his only private Cause we therefore reckon our selves much more bound to beseech and instant your Highness to foresee and provide for the PRESENT surety of both you and of your most lawful Succession and Heirs Nor need it be much insisted on that 't is natural for every Government to defend and preserve it self and to this purpose the Author of the Exercitation cites Alsted a Lutheran Divine and likewise Grotius and Dudley Fenner for maintaining the lawfulness of what the old Athenian famous Oath enjoyned for the preservation of its Polity namely of any private Person killing any Usurper or one who without a lawful Title forcibly invaded the Government The Athenians had several Oaths of a high nature by the Religion of which they tyed themselves to defend their Government and one was the Iusjurandum epheborum which they took when 20 years old and which is set down in Petitus his Noble Commentary on the Athenian Laws and part of which as rendered by him into Latin is Patriam liberis non relinquam in deteriore sed potius in meliore statu Navigabo ad terram eamque colam quantulacunque illa sit quae habenda mihi tradetur Parebo legibus quae obtinent c. quod si quis leges abrogare velit populo non sciscente minime feram Vindicabo autem sive solus sive cum aliis omnibus Patria sacra colam c. ad mortem usque pro nutriciâ terrâ dimicabo But this Oath tho famous enough was not THE famous one I referred to but 't is the other of which the formula is set down in Petitus there p. 232 233. and which beginneth with Occidam meâ ipsius manu si possim eum qui everterit Rempublicam Atheniensium aut eâ— eversâ Magistratum gesserit in posterum c. That Oath of so high and strange a nature was made shortly after the driving out the thirty Tyrants and the Law made that Si quis Atheniensium Rempublicam evertat aut eâ eversê Magistratum gerat Atheniensium hostis esto impunèque occiditor c. To secure their Government forever from future Usurpation was the intent of that terrible Oath and to secure the Government of the Hereditary Monarchy here was the intent of our gentle ones and sufficiently favouring of the Mansuetudo Evangelii and which Oaths however binding the Loyal to defend the Government with their lives do yet strictly bind to the defence of the Rights and Privileges of the Crown one of which is both by the 13th of the Romans and the Lex terrae to be a terror to the Evil and to bear the Sword. But Sir E. Coke having told us in his Commentaries That the true Scope and design of our Statute Laws are oftentimes not to be understood without the knowledge of the Histâ—ry of the Age when the particular Statute was made I shall looking back on the Conjuncture when the Act for the Oath of Allegiance was made take notice that by many particular matters then obvious to all mens thoughts it appeared worthy of the wisdom of the Government then to provide for the security both of his Majesty and of the Succession Any who shall read D' Ossat's Letters will find the various deep designs there opened that related to several Foreign Princes and Potentates Jealousies of the Power that England would have in the balance of the World by the uniting of the strength of Scotland to it upon the rightful Succession of King Iames to the Monarchy and perhaps rather out of a design to amuse them than out of an humour to put by the thoughts of Mortality Queen Elizabeth did shew so much unwillingness sometimes to hear and speak of her Successor And during the constrained Altum silentium of the Succession then here a Book of the Succession was writ by Father Parsons and which made noise enough in the World as those Letters mention and by which Book the Author intended that our Hereditary Monarchy should be Thunder struck especially with the help of the Papal Breves that came here to obstruct the Succession King Iames at the end of his Premonition to all Christian Monarchs printing a Catalogue of the Lyes of Tortus i. e. Bellarmin with a brief Confutation of them refers to one Lye of Tortus p. 47 viz. In which words of the Breves of Clement the 8th not only King James of Scotland was not EXCLVDED but included rather and the Confutation is thus viz. If the Breves of Clement did not exclude me from the Kingdom but rather did include me why did Garnet burn them Why would he not reserve them that I might have seen them that so he might have obtained more favour at my hands for him and his Catholicks And that King in his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance p. 29. refers to the two Breves which Clemens Octavus sent to England immediately before Queen Elizabeth's Death debarring him from the Crown or any other that either would profess or any ways tolerate the Professors of his Religion contrary to the Pope's Manifold Vows and Protestations Simul eodem tempore and as it were delivered uno eodem spiritu to divers of his Majesty's Ministers abroad professing such kindness and shewing such forwardness to advance his Majesty to the English Crown Any one who reads in D' Ossat the inclination of that Pope to Principles and Practices of this kind will not wonder at his Majesty 's thus exposing his Vn-holyness and the nature of the Breves is sufficiently there explained and proved to be according to his Majesty's measures published of them That Great King was sufficiently acquainted with the Principles and Practices of the Papacy that had been so injurious to
him our Sovâ—reign Lord the King IS lawful and rightful King c. and so the word IS must necessarily hinder any Heirs or Successors forestalling the Market if they should presume before their time to come for our actual Allegiance however sworn to them to be paid in future time Our Law-Book of Oaths mentions a long Promissory Oath made voluntarily to Harry the 6th by 2 Arch-Bishops 16 Bishops 3 Dukes 5 Earls 2 Viscounts 14 Abbots 2 Priors and 7 Barons and but part of which I shall here set down viz. I A. B. knowledge you most High and Mighty and most Christian Prince King Henry 6. to be my most redoubted and rightwise by Succession born to Reign upon me and all your Liege People whereupon I voluntarily without Coercion promise and oblige me by the faith and truth that I owe to God and by the faith truth and ligeance that I owe to you my most redoubted Sovereign Lord that I shall be without any variance true faithful humble and obeysant Subject and Liege man to you my most redoubted Sovereign Lord c. and swear to endeavour to do all that may be to the weal and surety of your most Royal Person c. to the weal surety and preserving of the Person and benign Princess Margaret Queen my Sovereign Lady and of her High most Noble Estate She being your Wife and also the weal surety and honour of the Person of the right High and Mighty Prince Edward my right redoubted Lord the Prince your first begotten Son and of the Right High and Noble Estate and faithfully truly and obeysantly c. First my Allegiance to you my most redoubted Sovereign Lord during your life c. and if God of his infinite Power take you from this Transitory Life me bearing life in this World that I shall then take and accept my said redoubted Lord the Prince Edward your said first born Son for my Sovereign Lord and bear my true Faith and Ligeance to him as by nature born for my Sovereign Lord and after him to his Succession of his Body lawfully begotten c. and in default of his Succession c. unto any other Succession of your Body lawfully coming But the wisdom of any Nation making Laws and especially about Oaths as short as may be I account that those of Supremacy and Allegiance have much better that Multi-loquious one as I may call it provided for the security of our Allegiance to the King Regnant and afterward to his Heirs and Successors by plain and liquid words as far as Humane Prudence could provide for the same And because what is made by Humane Art is in danger of being by Humane Art eluded and for that we see that Nature it self hath been made a Term of Art a word that St. Paul thought plain enough when he said doth not Nature teach us that c. yet of which word a late Lawyer and Kinsman of the Great Grotius hath in his Book De Principiis juris Naturalis told us of seven significations and for that it is as easie for a captious versatil Wit to turn the word Heir or most words into as many or more the Oath of Allegiance was further with deep precaution made to exterminate all cavilling senses and calumnious interpretations and such as that of the haeres viventis by that Final Clause which Crowns that Oath and that which alone as I partly hinted before amounts to an Oath viz. And I do make this Recognition and Acknowledgment heartily willingly and truly upon THE TRVE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN and after which it follows So help me God. That the Faith of a Christian alone amounts to an Oath I shall cite the opinion of Tuldenus the Regius Professor of Law at Lovain when writing De interpretatione Iuramenti he saith Affirmatio perfidem tunc demum jusjurandum est cum additum fuit Christianam Alciat in l. 41. c. De transact I conclude therefore that what Christian soever hath taken this Oath hath by Virtue of the words of The faith of a Christian obliged himself thereby as much as if he had said That Great Privilege of Birth-right belonging to the King's Heirs a Privilege so great that the despising of it as in the Case of Esau is applied in Scripture to mens prophaneness in despising their Inheritance of Bliss by Christianity I do as sincerely promise to defend according to my Oath and without any Fraud or Mental Reservation or the least cavilling capricious or calumnious interpretation as I value the great Privilege that Christianity hath ennobled Humane Nature with in being Heirs of God and joynt Heirs with Christ as St. Pauls words are and of being Heirs according to the Promise and may all the Divine Promises be so Yea and Amen to me and interpreted with not only a plain but a full and fair interpretation and so likewise the very Oath of God mentioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews As I do plainly and fully and fairly and with the exuberant honesty and simplicity enjoyn'd by the Christian Religion and so much transcending the Bona fides of the Heathen Morality perform my Promissory Oath of Allegiance to the King and his Heirs and Successors I shall in the last place take notice of what I have not without horror observed namely that some disloyal Authors have presumed in Print to pretend the lawfulness of Exclusion of Heirs and Successors on the account of their Religion by colour of the punishment of Idolaters according to the Iudicial Law and as to which it will be sufficient here to say that that Law was given only to the Iewish Nation and that it did never bind any else or doth and that the Divine Law natural and positive bind us to the Observation of our Oaths and that Christianity doth not found Dominion in Grace and that the Patriarchs and Ioshua and the Princes of the People of Israel made Leagues with Idolaters and on both sides there was mutual Faith confirmed with solemn Oaths and that an Oath Promissory to pay Allegiance to the Heirs of the Crown at the time of its Descent is much more lawful And I might urge that the Iewish Kings tho often idolatrous yet as the Lord 's Annointed had De jure de facto Obedience payed them without respect to their Religion or Irreligion And by Virtue of the Moral Offices of honouring all men and of the Internal Communion due from all Christians to all Christians I shall without offending the Church I hold External Communion with venture to go as far in my Measures of Charity as some of its great Ornaments Dr. Hammond and Bishop Taylor and likewise Bishop Gunning have done in freeing many Roman Catholicks from the guilt of Formal Idolatry Innumerable Acts of Idolatry may be charged on many Persons of that Communion and particularly on all such as do worship the Cross or Saints and Angels Culâ—â— latriae and on such as in the Eucharist determine the