troop have been in such distaste with libels? Ask your Lysimachus Nicanor what defaming invectives have lately flown abroad against the subjects of Scotland, and our poor expulsed brethren of New England, the prelates rather applauding than shewing any dislike: and this hath been ever so, insomuch that Sir Francis Bacon in one of his discourses complains of the bishops' uneven hand over these pamphlets, confining those against bishops to darkness, but licensing those against puritans to be uttered openly, though with the greater mischief of leading into contempt the exercise of religion in the persons of sundry preachers, and disgracing the higher matter in the meaner person. Remonst. A point no less essential to that proposed remonstrance. Answ. We know where the shoe wrings you, you fret and are galled at the quick; and O what a death it is to the prelates to be thus unvisarded, thus uncased, to have the periwigs plucked off that cover your baldness, your inside nakedness thrown open to public view! The Romans had a time once every year, when their slaves might freely speak their minds; it were hard if the freeborn people of England, with whom the voice of truth for these many years, even against the proverb, hath not been heard but in corners, after all your monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes, your gags and snaffles, your proud Imprimaturs not to be obtained without the shallow surview, but not shallow band of some mercenary, narrow-souled, and illiterate chaplain; when liberty of speaking, than which nothing is more sweet to man, was girded and strait-laced almost to a broken-winded phthisic, if now at a good time, our time of parliament, the very jubilee and resurrection of the state, if now the concealed, the aggrieved, and long persecuted truth, could not be suffered to speak; and though she burst out with some efficacy of words, could not be excused after such an injurious strangle of silence, nor avoid the censure of libelling, it were hard, it were something pinching in a kingdom of free spirits. Some princes, and great statists, have thought it a prime piece of necessary policy, to thrust themselves under disguise into a popular throng, to stand the night long under eaves of houses, and low windows, that they might hear every where the utterances of private breasts, and amongst them find out the precious gem of truth, as amongst the numberless pebbles of the shore; whereby they might be the abler to discover, and avoid, that deceitful and close-couched evil of flattery that ever attends them, and misleads them, and might skilfully know how to apply the several redresses to each malady of state, without trusting the disloyal information of parasites and sycophants: whereas now this permission of free writing, were there no good else in it, yet at some times thus licensed, is such an unripping, such an anatomy of the shyest and tenderest particular truths, as makes not only the whole nation in many points the wiser, but also presents and carries home to princes, men most remote from vulgar concourse, such a full insight of every lurking evil, or restrained good among the commons, as that they shall not need hereafter, in old cloaks and false beards, to stand to the courtesy of a night-walking cudgeller for eaves-dropping, nor to accept quietly as a perfume, the overhead emptying of some salt lotion. Who could be angry, therefore, but those that are guilty, with these free-spoken and plain-hearted men, that are the eyes of their country, and the prospective-glasses of their prince? But these are the nettlers, these are the blabbing books that tell, though not half your fellows' feats. You love toothless satires; let me inform you, a toothless satire is as improper as a toothed sleek-stone, and as bullish. Remonst. I beseech you, brethren, spend your logic upon your own works. Answ. The peremptory analysis that you call it, I believe will be so hardy as once more to unpin your spruce fastidious oratory, to rumple her laces, her frizzles, and her bobbins, though she wince and fling never so peevishly. Remonst. Those verbal exceptions are but light froth, and will sink alone. Answ. O rare subtlety, beyond all that Cardan ever dreamed of! when, I beseech you, will light things sink? when will light froth sink alone? Here in your phrase, the same day that heavy plummets will swim alone. Trust this man, readers, if you please, whose divinity would reconcile England with Rome, and his philosophy make friends nature with the chaos, sine pondere habentia pondus. Remonst. That scum may be worth taking off which follows. Answ. Spare your ladle, sir, it will be as the bishop's foot in the broth; the scum will be found upon your Remonst. I had said that the civil polity, as in general notion, hath sometimes varied, and that the civil came from arbitrary imposers; these gracious interpreters would needs draw my words to the present and particular government of our monarchy. Answ. And deservedly have they done so; take up your logic else and see: civil polity, say you, hath sometimes varied, and came from arbitrary imposers; what proposition is this? Bishop Downam in his dialectics will tell you it is a general axiom, though the universal particle be not expressed, and you yourself in your defence so explain in these words as in general notion. Hence is justly inferred, he that says civil polity is arbitrary, says that the civil polity of England is arbitrary. The inference is undeniable, a thesi ad hypothesin, or from the general to the particular, an evincing argument in logic. Remonst. Brethren, whiles ye desire to seem godly, learn to be less malicious. Answ. Remonstrant, till you have better learnt your principles of logic, take not upon you to be a doctor to others. Remonst. God bless all good men from such charity. Answ. I never found that logical maxims were un charitable before; yet should a jury of logicians pass upon you, you would never be saved by the book. Remonst. And our sacred monarchy from such friends. Answ. Add, as the prelates. Remonst. If episcopacy have yoked monarchy, it is the insolence of the persons, not the fault of the calling. Answ. It was the fault of the persons, and of no calling: we do not count prelaty a calling. Remonst. The testimony of a pope (whom these men honour highly). Answ. That slanderous insertion was doubtless a pang of your incredible charity, the want whereof you lay so often to their charge; a kind token of your favour lapped up in a parenthesis, a piece of the clergy benevolence laid by to maintain the episcopal broil, whether the 1000 horse or no, time will discover: for certainly had those cavaliers come on to play their parts, such a ticket as this of highly honouring the pope, | from the hand of a prelate, might have been of special use and safety to them that had cared for such a ransom. Remonst. And what says Antichrist? Answ. Ask your brethren the prelates, that hold intelligence with him, ask not us. But is the pope Antichrist now? Good news! take heed you be not shent for this; for it is verily thought, that had this bill been put in against him in your last convocation, he would have been cleared by most voices. Remonst. Any thing serves against episcopacy. Answ. See the frowardness of this man, he would persuade us, that the succession and divine right of bishopdom hath been unquestionable through all ages; yet when they bring against him kings, they were irreligious; popes, they are antichrist. By what era of computation, through what fairy land, would the man deduce this perpetual beadroll of uncontradicted episcopacy? The pope may as well boast his ungainsaid authority to them that will believe, that all his contradicters were either irreligious or heretical. Remonst. If the bishops, saith the pope, be declared to be of divine right, they would be exempted from regal power; and if there might be this danger in those kingdoms, why is this enviously upbraided to those of ours? who do gladly profess, &c. Remonst. Had you spoken such a word in the time of holy Cyprian, what had become of you? Answ. They had neither been haled into your Ge henna at Lambeth, nor strapadoed with an oath ex officio by your bowmen of the arches: and as for Cyprian's time the cause was far unlike, he indeed succeeded into an episcopacy that began then to prelatize; but his personal excellence like an antidote overcame the malignity of that breeding corruption, which was then a disease that lay hid for a while under shew of a full and healthy constitution, as those hydropic humours not discernible at first from a fair and juicy fleshiness of body, or that unwonted ruddy colour, which seems graceful to a cheek otherwise pale; and yet arises from evil causes, either of some inward obstruction or inflammation, and might deceive the first physicians till they had learned the sequel, which Cyprian's days did not bring forth; and the prelatism of episcopacy, which began then to burgeon and spread, had as yet, especially in famous men, a fair, though a false imitation of flourishing. Remonst. Neither is the wrong less to make application of that which was most justly charged upon the practices and combinations of libelling separatists, whom I deservedly censured, &c. Answ. To conclude this section, our Remonstrant we see is resolved to make good that which was formerly said of his book, that it was neither humble nor a remonstrance, and this his defence is of the same complexion. When he is constrained to mention the notorious violence of his clergy attempted on the church of Scotland, he slightly terms it a fact imputed to some few; but when he speaks of that which the parliament vouchsafes to name the city petition, "which I," saith he, (as if the state had made him public censor,)" deservedly censured." And how? As before for a tumultuary and underhand way of procured subscriptions, so now in his defence more bitterly, as the practices and combinations of libelling separatists, and the miszealous advocates thereof, justly to be branded for incendiaries. Whether this be for the honour of our chief city to be noted with such an infamy for a petition, which not without some of the magistrates, and great numbers of sober and considerable men, was orderly and meekly presented, although our great clerks think that these men, because they have a trade, (as Christ himself and Answ. Because your dissevered principles were but like the mangled pieces of a gashed serpent, that now begun to close, and grow together popish again. What-St. Paul had,) cannot therefore attain to some good soever you now gladly profess out of fear, we know what your drifts were when you thought yourselves secure. Remonst. It is a foul slander to charge the name of episcopacy with a faction, for the fact imputed to some few. Answ. The more foul your faction that hath brought a harmless name into obloquy, and the fact may justly be imputed to all of ye that ought to have withstood it, and did not. Remonst. Fie, brethren! are ye the presbyters of the church of England, and dare challenge episcopacy of faction? Answ. Yes, as oft as episcopacy dares be factious. measure of knowledge, and to a reason of their actions, as well as they that spend their youth in loitering, bezzling, and harlotting, their studies in unprofitable questions and barbarous sophistry, their middle age in ambition and idleness, their old age in avarice, dotage, and diseases. And whether this reflect not with a contumely upon the parliament itself, which thought this petition worthy, not only of receiving, but of voting to a commitment, after it had been advocated, and moved for by some honourable and learned gentleman of the house, to be called a combination of libelling separatists, and the advocates thereof to be branded for incendiaries; whether this appeach not the judgment and approbation of the parliament I leave to equal arbiters. SECT. II. REMONST. After the overflowing of your gall, you descend to liturgy and episcopacy. Answ. The overflow being past, you cannot now in your own judgment impute any bitterness to their foling discourses. Answ. You are a merry man, sir, and dare say much. riots both in this and other places of your book? Nay, what if you still defend them as follows? Remonst. If a bishop have said that our liturgy hath been so wisely and charitably framed, as that the devotion of it yieldeth no cause of offence to a very pope's ear. Answ. O new and never heard of supererogative height of wisdom and charity in our liturgy! Is the Remonst. Dr. Hall, whom you name I dare say for wisdom of God or the charitable framing of God's honour's sake. word otherwise inoffensive to the pope's ear, than as he may turn it to the working of his mysterious iniquity? A little pulley would have stretched your wise and charitable frame it may be three inches further, that the devotion of it might have yielded no cause of offence to the very devil's ear, and that had been the same wisdom and charity surmounting to the highest degree. For Antichrist we know is but the devil's vicar, and therefore please him with your liturgy, and you please his master. Remonst. And why should not I speak of martyrs, as the authors and users of this holy liturgy? Answ. As the authors! the translators, you might perhaps have said: for Edward the sixth, as Hayward hath written in his story, will tell you upon the word of a king, that the order of the service, and the use thereof in the English tongue, is no other than the old service was, and the same words in English which were in Latin, except a few things omitted, so fond, that it had been a shame to have heard them in English; these are his words: whereby we are left uncertain who the author was, but certain that part of the work was esteemed so absurd by the translators thereof, as was to be ashamed of in English. O but the martyrs were the refiners of it, for that only is left you to say. Admit they were, they could not refine a scorpion into a fish, though they had drawn it, and rinced it with never so cleanly cookery, which made them fall at variance among themselves about the use either of it, or the ceremonies belonging to it. Remonst. Would you think it requisite, that we should chide and quarrel when we speak to the God of peace? Answ. Fie, no sir, but forecast our prayers so, that Satan and his instruments may take as little exception against them as may be, lest they should chide and quarrel with us. Remonst. It is no little advantage to our cause and piety, that our liturgy is taught to speak several languages for use and example. Answ. The language of Ashdod is one of them, and that makes so many Englishmen have such a smattering of their Philistian mother. And indeed our liturgy Remonst. Slight you them as you please, we bless hath run up and down the world like an English galGod for such patrons of our good cause. loping nun proffering herself, but we hear of none yet that bids money for her. Answ. O Benedicite! Qui color ater erat, nunc est contrarius atro. Are not these they which one of your bishops in print scornfully terms the Foxian confessors? Are not these they whose acts and monuments are not only so contemptible, but so hateful to the prelates, that their story was almost come to be a prohibited book, which for these two or three editions hath crept into the world by stealth, and at times of advantage, not without the open regret and vexation of the bishops, as many honest men that had to do in setting forth the book will justify? And now at a dead lift for your liturgies you bless God for them: out upon such hypocrisy ! Remonst. As if we were bound to make good every word that falls from the mouth of every bishop. Answ. Your faction then belike is a subtile Janus, and hath two faces: your bolder face to set forward any innovations or scandals in the church, your cautions and wary face to disavow them if they succeed not, that so the fault may not light upon the function, lest it should spoil the whole plot by giving it an irrecoverable wound. Wherefore else did you not long ago, as a good bishop should have done, disclaim and protest against them? Wherefore have you sat still, and complied and hood-winked, till the general complaints of the land have squeezed you to a wretched, cold, and hollow-hearted confession of some prelatical Remonst. As for that sharp censure of learned Mr. Calvin, it might well have been forborn by him in aliena republica. Answ. Thus this untheological remonstrant would divide the individual catholic church into several republics: know, therefore, that every worthy pastor of the church of Christ hath universal right to admonish over all the world within the church; nor can that care be aliened from him by any distance or distinction of nation, so long as in Christ all nations and languages are as one household. Remonst. Neither would you think it could become any of our greatest divines, to meddle with his charge. Answ. It hath ill become them indeed to meddle so maliciously, as many of them have done, though that patient and christian city hath borne hitherto all their profane scoffs with silence. Remonst. Our liturgy passed the judgment of no less reverend heads than his own. Answ. It bribed their judgments with worldly engagements, and so passed it. Remonst. As for that unparalleled discourse concerning the antiquity of liturgies, I cannot help your wonder, but shall justify mine own assertion. Answ. Your justification is but a miserable shifting off those testimonies of the ancientest fathers alleged against you, and the authority of some synodal canons, which are now arrant to us. We profess to decide our controversies only by the Scriptures; but yet to repress your vain-glory, there will be voluntarily bestowed upon you a sufficient conviction of your novelties out of succeeding antiquity. Remonst. I cannot see how you will avoid your own contradiction, for I demand, is this order of praying and administration set or no? If it be not set, how is it an order? And if it be a set order both for matter and form Answ. Remove that form, lest you tumble over it, while you make such haste to clap a contradiction upon others. Remonst. If the forms were merely arbitrary, to what use was the prescription of an order? durst for that old pharasaical fear that still dogs them, the fear of the people; though you will say you are none of those, still you would seem not to have joined with the worst, and yet keep aloof off from that which is best. I would you would either mingle, or part : most true it is what Savanarola complains, that while he endeavoured to reform the church, his greatest enemies were still these lukewarm ones. Remonst. And if the Lord's prayer be an ordinary and stinted form, why not others? Answ. Because there be no other Lords, that can stint with like authority. Remonst. If Justin Martyr said, that the instructor of the people prayed (as they falsely term it) “according to his ability." Answ. "Οση δύναμις αυτῷ will be so rendered to the world's end by those that are not to learn Greek of the Remonstrant, and so Langus renders it to his face, if he could see; and this ancient father mentions no antiphonies or responsories of the people here, but the only plain acclamation of Amen. Remonst. The instructor of the people prayed according to his ability, it is true, so do ours: and yet we have a liturgy, and so had they. Answ. Nothing will cure this man's understanding but some familiar and kitchen physic, which, with pardon, must for plainness sake be administered to him. Call hither your cook. The order of breakfast, dinner, and supper, answer me, is it set or no? Set. Is a man therefore bound in the morning to poached eggs and vinegar, or at noon to brawn or beef, or at night to fresh salmon, and French kickshose? May he not make his meals in order, though he be not bound to this or that viand? Doubtless the neat-fingered artist will answer yes, and help us out of this great controversy without more trouble. Can we not under- Remonst. Neither is this liberty of pouring out ourstand an order in church-assemblies of praying, read-selves in our prayers ever the more impeached by a ing, expounding, and administering, unless our prayers be still the same crambe of words? Answ. A quick come-off. The ancients used pikes and targets, and therefore guns and great ordnance, because we use both. public form. Answ. Yes, the time is taken up with a tedious numRemonst. What a poor exception is this, that litur- ber of liturgical tautologies, and impertinencies. gies were composed by some particular men? Remonst. The words of the council are full and affirmative. Answ. Set the grave councils up upon their shelves again, and string them hard, lest their various and jangling opinions put their leaves into a flutter. I shall not intend this hot season to bid you the base through the wide and dusty champaign of the councils, but shall take counsel of that which counselled them, reason and although I know there is an obsolete reprehension now at your tongue's end, yet I shall be bold to say, that reason is the gift of God in one man as well as in a thousand: by that which we have tasted already of their cisterns, we may find that reason was the only thing, and not any divine command that moved them to enjoin set forms of liturgy. First, lest any thing in general might be missaid in their public prayers through ignorance, or want of care, contrary to the faith: and next, lest the Arians, and Pelagians in particular, should infect the people by their hymns, and forms of prayer. By the leave of these ancient fathers, this was no solid prevention of spreading heresy, to debar the ministers of God the use of their noblest talent, prayer in the congregation; unless they had forbid the use of sermons, and lectures too, but such as were ready made to their hands, as our homilies: or else he that was heretically disposed, bad as fair an Answ. It is a greater presumption in any particular men, to arrogate to themselves, that which God universally gives to all his ministers. A minister that cannot be trusted to pray in his own words without being chewed to, and fescued to a formal injunction of his rote lesson, should as little be trusted to preach, besides the vain babble of praying over the same things immediately again; for there is a large difference in the repetition of some pathetical ejaculation raised out of the sudden earnestness and vigour of the inflamed soul, (such as was that of Christ in the garden,) from the continual rehearsal of our daily orisons; which if a man shall kneel down in a morning, and say over, and presently in another part of the room kneel down again, and in other words ask but still for the same things as it were out of one inventory, I cannot see how he will escape that heathenish battology of multiplying words, which Christ himself, that has the putting up of our prayers, told us would not be acceptable in heaven. Well may men of eminent gifts set forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose them on ministers lawfully called, and sufficiently tried, as all ought to be ere they be admitted, is a supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves. Remonst. Do we abridge this liberty by ordaining a opportunity of infecting in his discourse as in his prayer public form. or hymn. As insufficiently, and to say truth, as imAnsw. Your bishops have set as fair to do it as they prudently, did they provide by their contrived liturgies, lest any thing should be erroneously prayed through ignorance, or want of care in the ministers. For if they were careless and ignorant in their prayers, certainly they would be more careless in their preaching, and yet more careless in watching over their flock; and what prescription could reach to bound them both in these? What if reason, now illustrated by the word of God, shall be able to produce a better prevention than these councils have left us against heresy, ignorance, or want of care in the ministry, that such wisdom and diligence be used in the education of those that would be ministers, and such strict and serious examination to be undergone, ere their admission, as St. Paul to Timothy sets down at large, and then they need not carry such an unworthy suspicion over the preachers of God's word, as to tutor their unsoundness with the *Abcie of a liturgy, or to diet their ignorance, and want of care, with the limited draught of a matin, and evensong drench. All this may suffice after all their laboursome scrutiny of the councils. Remonst. Our Saviour was pleased to make use in the celebration of his last and heavenly banquet both of the fashions and words which were usual in the Jewish feasts. Answ. What he pleased to make use of, does not justify what you please to force. Remonst. The set forms of prayer at the Mincha. Answ. We will not buy your rabbinical fumes; we have one that calls us to buy of him pure gold tried in the fire. Remonst. In the Samaritan chronicle. Answ. As little do we esteem your Samaritan trumpery, of which people Christ himself testifies, Ye worship ye know not what. Remonst. They had their several songs. of the liturgy will be considered by wiser heads than your own. Answ. We doubt it not, because we know your head looks to be one. Remonst. Our liturgy symbolizeth not with popish mass, neither as mass nor as popish. Answ. A pretty slipskin conveyance to sift mass into no mass, and popish into not popish; yet saving this passing fine sophistical boulting hutch, so long as she symbolizes in form, and pranks herself in the weeds of popish mass, it may be justly feared she provokes the jealousy of God, no otherwise than a wife affecting whorish attire kindles a disturbance in the eye of her discerning husband. Remonst. If I find gold in the channel, shall I throw it away because it was ill laid? Answ. You have forgot that gold hath been anathematized for the idolatrous use; and to eat the good creatures of God once offered to idols, is in St. Paul's account to have fellowship with devils, and to partake of the devil's table. And thus you throttle yourself with your own similies. Remonst. If the devils confessed the Son of God, shall I disclaim that truth? Answ. You sifted not so clean before, but you shuffle as foully now; as if there were the like necessity of confessing Christ, and using the liturgy: we do not disclaim that truth, because we never believed it for their testimony; but we may well reject a liturgy which had no being that we can know of, but from the corruptest times: if therefore the devil should be given never so much to prayer, I should not therefore cease from that duty, because I learned it not from him; but if he would commend to me a new Pater-noster, though never so seemingly holy, he should excuse me the form Answ. And so have we our several psalms for several which was his; but the matter, which was none of his, occasions, without gramercy to your liturgy. Remonst. Those forms which we have under the names of Saint James, &c., though they have some insertions which are plainly spurious, yet the substance of them cannot be taxed for other than holy and ancient. Answ. Setting aside the odd coinage of your phrase, which no mint-master of language would allow for sterling, that a thing should be taxed for no other than holy and ancient, let it be supposed the substance of them may savour of something holy or ancient, this is but the matter; the form, and the end of the thing, may yet render it either superstitious, fruitless, or impious, and so worthy to be rejected. The garments of a strumpet are often the same, materially, that clothe a chaste matron, and yet ignominious for her to wear: the substance of the tempter's words to our Saviour were holy, but his drift nothing less. he could not give me, nor I be said to take it from him. It is not the goodness of matter therefore which is not, nor can be owed to the liturgy, that will bear it out, if the form, which is the essence of it, be fantastic and superstitious, the end sinister, and the imposition violent. Remonst. Had it been composed into this frame on purpose to bring papists to our churches. Answ. To bring them to our churches? alas, what was that? unless they had been first fitted by repentance, and right instruction. You will say, the word was there preached, which is the means of conversion; you should have given so much honour then to the word preached, as to have left it to God's working without the interloping of a liturgy baited for them to bite at. Remonst. The project had been charitable and gracious. Answ. It was pharisaical, and vain-glorious, a greedy desire to win proselytes by conforming to them unlawfully; like the desire of Tamar, who, to raise up seed to her husband, sate in the common road drest like a Remonst. In what sense we hold the Roman a true church, is so cleared that the iron is too hot for their fingers. Answ. Have a care it be not the iron to sear your courtezan, and he that came to her committed incest own conscience. with her. This was that which made the old Christians Remonst. You need not doubt but that the alteration paganize, while by their scandalous and base conform i. e. A, b, c. |