of a fair estate, or the love to a fatter benefice, can buy in this niceness of yours, and persuade you to lose a button [sic,] you have no more 'conscience' in observing than you had obedience in taking the oath for if Authority be in the waning, and some popular Stars promise you 'liberty,' how soon do you break these cords asunder, and with a Jus jurandum illicitum solummodo stringit ad pœnitentium, start you aside like a deceitful bow? yea, think yourself obliged to redeem your slackened vigour by an after increase of heat and violence? Yet are you still the same man; love of gain prescribed your oath, and the same absolves you from it; which, doubtless, your honesty, by a mental reservation, did ever lay as a ground. Happy you! whose conscience' can mould and fashion itself to the impress of the times, and ebb and flow with the aspect of different occasions! Be ashamed, therefore,—' tremble' you cannot,-when you 'see what small account' most of you make of your solemn vows. God is not mocked; nor shall your brags of casting out devils of idolatry and superstition in his Name, save you in that day.

"Having thus skirmished, you advance with the main battle; subjoining that the 'ministers and people have taken the Protestation, and have solemnly vowed to maintain the doctrine of the Church, so far as it is opposite to Popery!' They have so, and so might they ever perform; but cannot one devil be cast out unless seven enter? Have they therefore vowed to erect Anabaptism? Is there no mid betwixt the extremes? no salvation! but either in the communion of the one, or conventicle of the other? Must either a shaveling or a scavenger, be the 'star' to point us out the way to Christ? Lend us some of your light, your tallow, to find out a consequence here, I pray. I must tell you, and,-ni frons periit,-you may blush at it! you have defiled your father's house [sic,] and laid us open to the oppro brious insolence of the common enemy who, eying us in-you-our dross, wantonly upbraid us to have rejected, under the name of superstition, all visibility of a church, and by the title of Purity to have brought in nothing else but profaneness and atheism."

"Your objections-though like Ixion's cloud, airy; and by your own fancy and supposition,-I pass them by as the only orthodox part in you; and shall strictly tie myself to your Answers, lest I seem rather to have sought a cause than found a party. In your first and second, you make your posture and take your aim; in the third, you let in the thrust against the Church of England, but with no less mistake nor better success than when Don Quixote-one who, for a head-piece, might have been Moderator to your Diet-justed against the windmill instead of the enchanted castle. At the first view, by the multiplying glass of your Purity, you can descry four of the Beast's heads, and inform us that the Liturgy, etc.' are Popish. Suppose now, it were so; is not your curse who discovereth your Mother's nakedness' double to his who did not cover his father's? But I have mistaken you; your anabaptization doth privilege you to be none of her sons... How shall they [the Romanists] triumph over us and our unnecessary debates,-they fight closely within doors, when we bawl in the streets,-telling us we cannot agree amongst ourselves until we return ad Petram unde excisi sumus! What you say in defence of this your general position, we shall see on each particular; only I cannot pass your imposition' of the Liturgy: hinc illæ lachrymæ. Anything that is by Order and Authority is burdensome! You idolize only the calves of your own making; that is, of your crazed imagination. But how shall this humour of yours suit with the unity of a church? Can many shreds of cloth make a garment; and do not you remember that Christ's coat was without a seam ?.. Your third ground is of the same bullion, and carrieth your image, that is, of Schism and Democracy: you have vowed against all Popery,' and 'finding the particulars' mentioned to be so, you will have no more communion with them.' What if you should find the Decalogue and the Lord's Prayer, as you have already, the Creed, -to be Popish, must not all the principles of our religion, for your pleasure, be drawn within the verge of a thundering abjuration? Nor is this fear in vain : your precisest Gospellers already deny the law, as only suitable to the climate of

"As it is noted by one of the Fathers, Christ's coat indeed had no seam, but the church's vesture was of divers colours; whereupon he saith, In veste varietas sit, scissura not sit: they be two things, Unity, and Uniformity." Essays, by Lord Bacon. "Of Unity of Relig."

the Jews; and some of your best Rabbies make it a case of 'conscience' not to say the Lord's Prayer, that magicum canticum, as they term it, Pontificorum !”a

"It is your next care to draw the Parliament to your party; but there is no com.nunication betwixt light and darkness. Nature hath taught all Entities to intend their own preservation; nor can that Honourable Court forget its being, and join with you... You take the supremacy upon you, and, with intolerable pride and foolishness, presume to give us the infallible sense and meaning of the Parliament. .. But let us examine your reasons. First; They intended' the Protestation ' against all Popery,' it is granted... But who gave you authority to cleanse the Temple, unless you maintain that all power is from the People; your hands: and, that you may stop the well-spring, the fountain, when the fit takes you. Secondly; You remember us, that the Honourable House of Commons will not have the Protestation extended to the maintenance of any Form of worship, etc. :' and therefore, they condemn them as Popish! What a wild consequence is this?.. That they did not, is clear.. first, from the main distance they put betwixt ‘Popery and popish Innovations,' and the 'Form of worship, discipline, etc., of the Church of England,' intersected by such a period as your ends shall never be able to draw together secondly, from their laudable and religious practice in being at all occasions present at the Service of the Church, wherein none but Familists,'-who do conform themselves to any public worship,—can imagine their integrity and nobleness; for all the world would prevaricate if they had but thought-much less declared the Liturgy, as you would have it, to be the Mass-book.' And for 'the government of the Church by archbishops and bishops,' this is the heel you would most willingly bruise, because it bruiseth your head! it is no less evident that the Protestation doth not condemn that: first, from their actual sitting in the House. Should these members integrate that body, if they were already adjudged as limbs of the Antichrist? This were a too heterogeneous fancy. Secondly, What needed the late dispute concerning the present Discipline, if the sentence had been already passed? Thirdly, Would so considerable men for honesty, wisdom, and power, of that number whose reasons militate for episcopacy, have stood up in defence of a main branch of popery, and not have been ashamed-if not punished-for publicly maintaining the Antichrist and contradicting their late vow and order? These reasons,-nill you, will you,—do convince you that it was 'not' the intention of the Parliament, as you, to arm them against ecclesiastical persons and orders in every corner of the kingdom, would bear the people in hand, to protest against,though it seemed not fitting to protest for-the present discipline, government, and ceremonies of the Church. If you had a forehead you would be ashamed of this boldness, but your obduration hath no more sense

"Quam si dura silex, aut stet Marpesia cautes.

"These great patrons of Church and State shall, no doubt, punish this malapert sauciness of yours; for their love to peace and truth cannot permit such a firebrand to belie their intention, and abuse the credulous simplicity of the multitude. I am confident this reply of mine shall first visit you in the Gate-house. Did you, I beseech you, ever think it possible that the roarings and outcries of such braying schismatics as yourself could have induced the Honourable Court of Parliament to change upon a sudden, the whole face of the Church as that of a scene, upon the daring and misgrounded information of your ignorant and malicious libels. The dross, the off-scourings of the multitude are yours; these, and these only, you are able to induce by promises, or deceive by pretences. Tell them as you do, that they are the people of God,' set apart for the great work! and shall not this ambition blow up the unconstant vulgar? Show them they may change their fortunes, and [at] last share in the public government, you may draw them along with you to the slaughter, though there you leave them with your grandfather Muncer's benediction, Si quidem populus vult decipi, decipiatur... Your parity brings along with it an anarchy; and that, all imaginable ruin and confusion. I'll tell you in your ear, you had better

a P. 7-10.

"Who, raising a sedition of boors in Germany was defeated, taken and beheaded, about the year of our Lord God, 1525. He preached that all goods must be common, and all men free, and of equal dignity: that God had commanded him to destroy all the ungodly, and to repurge the church." Pagit, Heres, p. 35: Quoting Sleidan's Commentaries, lib. v.

6

keep your pamphlets at home; and have restrained the late jealous stirs at Southwark, and St. Margaret's, if you would not have had your passions detected. These staring looks of yours so soon after the change, do foretell what madness you may come to at the height of the moon; and will, no doubt, persuade that supreme judicatory either to draw blood of you in time, or to provide manacles for binding up your furious attempts, lest you tear out your own bowels. Your third reason, leans to a thought a supposition,—and is a strain of your old lunacy, That the Honourable House of Commons did' intend to exclude whatsoever should be found to be a branch of Popery: but who should find it so, themselves, or you?.. Rather think that the Protestation hath an edge to cut out your tongue, than to cut off what your unsettled imagination, after a Friday's supper from the back of an oyster-board, shall, Dictator-like, happen to belch up. You tell us, in the fourth place, that you are all in an erected hope of a Reformation' from 'this most noble Parliament;' and so are we too: yea, no less confident than yourselves that all Popish trash shall be made packing;' but may it please you to go along with that baggage, and attend the safe transportation of these fopperies, we shall be rid of two great evils! At your return from Rome, you may take your rest by the way with your brethren at Amsterdam. No peace for Israel how long the Jebusites are thorns in our sides: and if the Papists and you-I cannot tell how to name you, unless it be Legions, you are so many-the foxes, the boutefeux, joined by the tails, were once removed, we should have good hopes no more to see our cornfields on fire. The Reformation you expect, is a deformation; your active zeal extends to the purifying of churches, yea of churchyards, as lately one of your society was buried in the fields, lest his sanctified body might be polluted by consecrated, that is superstitious, ground. A strange 'separation' that holds even amongst the dead! But when you have banished from us all that can speak us Christians what shall be the event? The sad ruins of a torn Church and State, yea of religion itself, is at the stake; for the more weak and conscientious people, who expect salvation in come church, will rather join with Rome than have no church at all; like the fish, changing the hot water for the hotter fire others, who have made religion their handmaid, shall be bold to laugh at piety, and think it nothing but an invention of policy to bridle the humours of the less daring, and to encompass the designs of the more active wits: so the fruits of your Reformation shall be like those of Gomorrah, pleasing to the sight, but, in effect, either apostacy or atheism. In your fifth ground, I acknowledge your perfect idiom, the complete language of Amsterdam. There you tell me that 'suppose the House of Commons' had not intended the removal of these things but the protection, rather, of the same; yet private Christians' must put to their hands and reform themselves,' and live no longer schoolboys and punies under the ferula of that Discipline.' Now you speak to the point, and have but dallied hitherto. Bishops, I see, and Parliaments, are in the same respect to you if once they cross your humour: if this be not a trumpet of sedition, there is nothing so. Go on, and give not over till the Commonwealth be fitted to your Church, as one of yours said, 'the hangings to the room;'-let us have that prodigious monster your Parity, in both, without so much as distinction of head and feet, and then you may reform when and what, and how you please! Can there be the least thought of loyalty and subjection beneath this, when such an 'O Yes,' is made for every man to take up arms and to reform what comes first unto his hand? Nor is it a wonder to hear this from you: ere all be done you will speak with a higher tone, even, That the property of all goods is your own for it is your doctrine, That we have fallen from all dominion and right to the creature, by the mortal sin of Adam. This, say you, was restored by Christ, who reserved the dominion to Himself—there, your love to magistracy!-but gave the right to his children, the sons of the church; these, whom the Conventicle hath assured that they are marked with the 'white stone.'b You may therefore, possidere terram; and who, besides you, do so, are but usurpers! Yet give me leave to wonder if, in a settled Church and State, some care be not taken to suppress this madness whereby every man is invited to a freedom and liberty of doing what his humour suggesteth; as if this Diana' of yours inspired nothing else but frenzy and rebellion. You will, by this your exorbitancy, make the Bishops' enemies long after them, and, while they are going out at doors, pull them back by the gowns. In the time of

Qy.? Westminster; not that "stir" formerly in Southwark.

their power which of you durst vent such dangerous whimsies? Now you teach us that, by one blow, we cannot lop off the inconveniency of Bishops and the inconveniency of no Bishops; and that the greatest danger in a mutation is that all dangers cannot be foreseen... The Honourable House of Commons.. will provide for that fire, that gangrene, of yours, which hath already inflamed the bed-straw, and seized almost upon the very heart of the kingdom."

"In your sixth answer, you dealt your strokes about you. Your first blow is at the Liturgy. This you observe to be popish in two respects: First, in regard of the whole frame and matter of it, as being translated out of the Romish Latin Liturgy.' But is it not the Romish Liturgy' translated? that is, is there anything in the Mass-book which is not in the Book of Service? If your answer be negative, I leave you to be hissed at: but if affirmative, what advantage have you gotten by this envious calumny? Do you think we may not use what is in the Massbook consonant to Scripture and purest antiquity? To say otherwise, were to deny the Lord's Prayer and the Decalogue because they are there... And why may there not be some few pearls in that dunghill, the Mass-book? If these be culled out, and according to Scripture and the best pattern of ancient Liturgies,.. what can malice or ignorance say against it?.. All must be admitted from them, errors with truths; all rejected by you, truths with errors: they destroy the perfection of the Scripture, you the being of the Church: you no less enemies to the authority of this, than they to the belief of that. But let both of you roar like the lioness bereaved of her whelps, and mix heaven and earth together by your lowings, Naaman shall be the same man, to us, before and after his washing. We will, in despight of Papists, cleanse the leprosy; in spight of you, retain the substance. You mention the late 'Parallel.'.. He is an ungracious son of the Church who hath falsely invented these whoredoms; and they the unworthy offspring of such a mother, if they rest unrevenged! Meantime, what a death it is to think of the sport and advantage our watchful enemies will be sure to make of our self-confession, That we have the same public worship which, in them, we do condemn as heresy, as idolatry! What exprobrations, what triumph of theirs will hence ensue. How shall we argue against them, without bespattering our own faces, in time to come? All our help is that the treatise itself-the Parallel'—is so ridiculous a piece that it will be thought the dreams of a sleeping person... You tell us you omit to say,' what you cannot, you dare not say; all your frivolous exceptions are so fully answered by the learned Mason, judicious [R.] Hooker, and others, that it will be three ages yet ere you attain to so much judgment as to understand their discourses! . . If we [you] dare call the settled laws of Church and State in question, we shall, by the meanest of five thousand in England, stop your black and ignorant mouths... And you, Sir, who hath made all this din, how shall a man find you out, either to convert you or to be converted by you? Your name, it seems, was affrighted of the titlepage; but it may be you had none, and that this libel hath been penned by you in the interim betwixt your renunciation of that name you had from the Church of England and your anabaptization. You add, there are 'vitious' things-animus meminisse horret-that 'run through all the veins' of the Service-book. All the letters of the alphabet cannot furnish censures for this blasphemous Rabshakeh. God rebuke thee, Satan! Sufficiently discovered;' by whom? in whose age? Did your Separatists ever produce any thing upon this subject, but lazy, indigested fables, as far from learning as their authors from sense?.. Your second general respect is, The imposition' of the Liturgy ‘upon all men's consciences.' Let the matter be never so laudable, yet the manner—' the imposition,'—is a wile of the Antichrist. Here I entreat Geneva to answer you, whose Church hath an imposed, a set-form of Liturgy; and whose worthiest men, Calvin and Beza, do stoutly maintain the Church's power in prescribing ceremonies and orders for unity and peace' sake...d a P. 10-15. 2 Kings v. 14. d Calvin's comes under the distinction of "a species" of Liturgy, and is so called by the late Rev. John Scott, M A. Vicar of North Ferriby, &c., in his Continuation of the Milners' Hist, of the Church of Christ, 1831, 8vo. vol. iii. an. 1542, p. 372. It accords to the Presbyterian "Directory" of 1644, but not at all to the English "Common Prayer." It is headed in Latin, " Precum Ecclesiasticarum Formula;" and it has no responses to be made audibly. But the last paragraph in our account of Apollonius, Chap. LVI., will show the judgment of foreigners upon the Anglican "Forms prescribed."

b Say you so?

I am confident the Church and State of England are not so weary of themselves as to become slaves to your fancy; this, perhaps, may fit America, where there is no government at all, but how it may subsist with the being of a kingdom here, I understand it not... Speak out, dare you say it in open terms, though indeed you say as much, That the king and parliament, because of the Liturgy imposed, have denied Jesus to be Christ: Tyburn for you, if you do! You, indeed, seem rather stained with this blasphemy, who hath boldly and profanely averred, that bowing at that sacred Name is idolatry, and—as you jeer with the bad thief on the cross-' JesuWorship!' But let me, from your own principles, use one argument against you: Whosoever prescribeth to their people a set form of prayer, do lord it over the conscience and are the very Antichrist; but your extemporary prayers in public, are, to your people, a set form of prayer; you, therefore, are the Antichrist! The major is your own, the subsumption is proved by this inevitable dilemma, When you pray before your hearers, either it is as their mouth to God, or for yourselves only: if you say, the last; you contradict the action itself, your expressions, and the cause of your meeting; and, if the first, must not the people join with you in word, or at least in thought? And is not this, to be stinted and tied to a form' of prayer, how raw and senseless soever? By your 'sole Lawgiver,' you express your thoughts of Authority you can hear of no general commission, for ordering the House of God as place and time shall require; but pardon me to believe the Apostle' better than you, who hath not in vain appointed this qualification, 'Omnia fiant decenter et ordine.'. 'And for this cause the Pope,' say you, 'is proved to be the Antichrist,' in that he'sitteth in and [or, sic Burton] over the Temple of God;' that is, as you please to paraphrase it, the consciences of men:' it had been well you had spoken with application. You are the only man I know who must have all men's consciences squared by the supposition of your own. The 'will-worship' you name is, truly, that you practise; that is, an affected contradictorious way, in the service of God, to Scripture, to antiquity, to the Church you live in, to discretion, yea to Christianity itself...c

:

"Having choked, as you think, the Liturgy, with this ill-peec't [ill-piqued] discourse of yours concerning the Antichrist,' your second onset is upon the Ceremonies' of the Church... There is no greater error committed by you sectaries than that because the Church of Rome hath thrust upon us some unnecessary, many superstitious, ceremonies, you would have the Reformation to have none at all: not considering that ceremonies, as the hedge, do fence the substance of religion from the indignities that profaneness and irreligion sometimes put upon it... For you, you are so spiritual,-though some think you no less carnal than your neighbours, I am afraid your religion may evaporate in words, turn in the smoke of a thin airy profession, and as no substance of good works, so leave no visibility of worship behind it. Though now, while the heat of a party keeps in the fire, you seem to have some zeal in your breasts, if you were settled on your dregs, and, after this great motion, returned to your cold blood, it is very possible you shall have no religion at all!.. The matter imposed is left, in its own nature, indifferent still, though not so in the practice; and this very same restraint enlargeth their Christian liberty for otherwise, they would be in conscience obliged to abstain from everything that the nice and peevish humorist should conceive to be offensive; now, being tied by a law, they may use their freedom; yea, must prefer a necessary duty to an imaginary scandal. But.. you love that order, and not any besides it, that may be raked out of the ashes of monarchy; but your late injuries meeting with its discretion, will teach a necessity of foresight not to adventure huge bodies as you are, quia suo feruntur pondere, down steep hills, that is, to your own swinge.

d

"Your third endeavour is against the 'Discipline' of the Church in exercising the power of 'excommunication!' this you prove to be another' branch of Popery,' because it is from the Church of Rome... You do well to deny all 'censures'..lest you might happen to be punished for this contumacy...e

"The fourth plea is against the root of all bitterness; the very heart and lungs of the 'Antichrist: the government of Bishops!' Each casual mishap in them must

a Burton had just published, 1641, "Jesu-worship Confuted: Or, Certain Arguments against Bowing at the Name' Jesus.' With Objections to the Contrary fully Answered." 4to. pp. 6. "It is but pious idolatry, or idolatrous piety."-p. 5. b 1 Cor. xiv. 40. d P. 20-22.

P. 15-19.

e P. 22.