if before the law, or under the law, God by a special type in any king would foresignify the future kingdom of Christ, which is not yet visibly come; what was that to the law? The whole ceremonial law (and types can be in no law else) comprehends nothing but the propitiatory office of Christ's priesthood, which being in substance accomplished, both law and priesthood fades away of itself, and passes into air like a transitory vision, and the right of kings neither stands by any type nor falls. We acknow ledge that the civil magistrate wears an authority of God's giving, and ought to be obeyed as his vicegerent. But to make a king a type, we say is an abusive and unskilful speech, and of a moral solidity makes it seem a ceremonial shadow: therefore your typical chain of king and priest must unlink. But is not the type of priest taken away by Christ's coming? No, saith this famous protestant bishop of Winchester, it is not; and he that saith it is, is an anabaptist. What think ye, readers, do ye not understand him? What can be gathered hence, but that the prelate would still sacrifice? Conceive him, readers, he would missificate. Their altars, indeed, were in a fair forwardness; and by such arguments as these they were setting up the molten calf of their mass again, and of their great hierarch the pope. For if the type of priest be not taken away, then neither of the high priest, it were a strange beheading; and high priest more than one there cannot be, and that one can be no less than a pope. And this doubtless was the bent of his career, though never so covertly. Yea, but there was something else in the high priest, besides the figure as is plain by St. Paul's acknowledging him. It is true, that in the 17th of Deut., whence this authority arises to the priest in matters too hard for the secular judges, as must needs be many in the occasions of those times, involved with ceremonial niceties, no wonder though it be commanded to inquire at the mouth of the priests, who besides the magistrates their colleagues, had the oracle of urim to consult with. And whether the high priest Ananias had not encroached beyond the limits of his priestly authority, or whether he used it rightly, was no time then for St. Paul to contest about. But if this instance be able to assert any right of jurisdiction to the clergy, it must impart it in common to all ministers, since it were a great folly to seek for counsel in a hard intricate scruple from a dunce prelate, when there might be found a speedier solution from a grave and learned minister, whom God hath gifted with the judgment of urim, more amply ofttimes than all the prelates together; and now in the gospel hath granted the privilege of this oraculous ephod alike to all his ministers. The reason therefore of imparity in the priests, being now, as is aforesaid, really annulled both in their person and in their representative office, what right of jurisdiction soever can be from this place levitically bequeathed, must descend upon the ministers of the gospel equally, as it finds them in all other points equal. Well, then, he is finally content to let Aaron go; Eleazar will serve his turn, as being a superior of superiors, and yet no type of Christ in Aaron's lifetime. O thou that wouldest wind into any figment, or phantasm, to save thy mite! yet all this will not fadge, though it be cunningly interpolished by some second hand with crooks and emendations: hear then, the type of Christ in some one particular, as of entering yearly into the holy of holies, and such like, rested upon the high priest only as more immediately personating our Saviour: but to resemble his whole satisfactory office, all the lineage of Aaron was no more than sufficient. And all or any of the priests, considered separately without relation to the highest, are but as a lifeless trunk, and signify nothing. And this shows the excellence of Christ's sacrifice, who at once and in one person fulfilled that which many hundreds of priests many times repeating had

enough to foreshow. What other imparity there was among themselves, we may safely suppose it depended on the dignity of their birth and family, together with the circumstances of a carnal service, which might afford many priorities. And this I take to be the sum of what the bishop hath laid together to make plea for prelaty by imitation of the law: though indeed, if it may stand, it will infer popedom all as well. Many other courses he tries, enforcing himself with much ostentation of endless genealogies, as if he were the man that St. Paul forewarns us of in Timothy, but so unvigorously, that I do not fear his winning of many to his cause, but such as doting upon great names are either over-weak, or over-sudden of faith. I shall not refuse, therefore, to learn so much prudence as I find in the Roman soldier that attended the cross, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath is quite out of the body, but pass to that which follows. The primate of Ar magh at the beginning of his tractate seeks to avail himself of that place in the sixty-sixth of Isaiah, "I will take of them for priests and Levites, saith the Lord," to uphold hereby such a form of superiority among the ministers of the gospel, succeeding those in the law, as the Lord's-day did the sab bath. But certain if this method may be admitted of interpreting those prophetical passages concerning Christian times and a punctual correspondence, it may with equal probability be urged upon us, that we are bound to observe some monthly solemnity answerable to the new moons, as well as the Lord's-day which we keep in lieu of the sabbath: for in the 23d verse the prophet joins them in the same manner together, as before he did the priests and Levites, thus: "And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord." Undoubtedly, with as good consequence may it be alleged from hence, that we are to solemnize some religious monthly meeting different from the sabbath, as from the other any distinct formality of ecclesiastical orders may be inferred. This rather will appear to be the lawful and unconstrained sense of the text, that God, in taking of them for priests and Levites, will not esteem them unworthy, though Gentiles, to undergo any function in the church, but will make of them a full and perfect ministry, as was that of the priests and Levites in their kind. And bishop Andrews himself, to end the controversy, sends us a candid exposition of this quoted verse from the 24th page of his said book, plainly deciding that God, by those legal names there of priests and Levites, means our presbyters and deacons; for which either ingenuous confession, or slip of his pen, we give him thanks, and withal to him that brought these treatises into one volume, who, setting the contradictions of two learned men so near together, did not foresee. What other deducements or analogies are cited out of St. Paul, to prove a likeness between the ministers of the Old and New Testament, having tried their sinews, I judge they may pass without harm-doing to our cause. We may remember, then, that prelaty neither hath nor can have foundation in the law, nor yet in the gospel; which assertion, as being for the plainness thereof a matter of eyesight rather than of disquisition, I voluntarily omit; not forgetting to specify this note again, that the earnest desire which the prelates have to build their hierarchy upon the sandy bottom of the law, gives us to see abundantly the little assurance, which they find to rear up their high roofs by the authority of the gospel, repulsed as it were from the writings of the apostles, and driven to take sanctuary among the Jews. Hence that open confession of the primate before mentioned: "Episcopacy is fetched partly from the pattern of the Old Testament, and partly from the New as an imitation of the Old;" though nothing can be more rotten in divinity thar such

a position as this, and is all one as to say, episcopacy is partly of divine institution, and partly of man's own carving. For who gave the authority to fetch more from the pattern of the law, than what the apostles had already fetched, if they fetched any thing at all, as hath been proved they did not? So was Jeroboam's episcopacy partly from the pattern of the law, and partly from the pattern of his own carnality; a party-coloured and a party-membered episcopacy: and what can this be else than a monstrous? Others therefore among the prelates, perhaps not so well able to brook, or rather to justify, this foul relapsing to the old law, have condescended at last to a plain confessing, that both the names and offices of bishops and presbyters at first were the same, and in the Scriptures nowhere distinguished. This grants the remonstrant in the fifth section of his defence, and in the preface to his last short answer. But what need respect be had, whether he grant or grant it not, when as through all antiquity, and even in the loftiest times of prelaty, we find it granted? Jerome, the learnedest of the fathers, hides not his opinion, that custom only, which the proverb calls a tyrant, was the maker of prelaty; before his audacious workmanship the churches were ruled in common by the presbyters: and such a certain truth this was esteemed, that it became a decree among the papal canons compiled by Gratian. Anselm also of Canterbury, who, to uphold the points of his prelatism, made himself a traitor to his country, yet, commenting the epistles to Titus and the Philippians, acknowledges, from the clearness of the text, what Jerome and the church rubric hath before acknowledged. He little dreamed then, that the weeding-hook of reformation would after two ages pluck up his glorious poppy from insulting over the good corn. Though since some of our British prelates, seeing themselves pressed to produce Scripture, try all their cunning, if the New Testament will not help them, to frame of their own heads, as it were with wax, a kind of mimic bishop limned out to the life of a dead priesthood: or else they would strain us out a certain figurative prelate, by wringing the collective allegory of those seven angels into seven single rochets. Howsoever, since it thus appears that custom was the creator of prelaty, being less ancient than the government of presbyters, it is an extreme folly to give them the hearing that tell us of bishops through so many ages: and if against their tedious muster of citations, sees, and successions, it be replied that wagers and church-antiquities, such as are repugnant to the plain dictate of Scripture, are both alike the arguments of fools, they have their answer. We rather are to cite all those ages to an arraignment before the word of God, wherefore, and what pretending, how presuming they durst alter that divine institution of presbyters, which the apostles, who were no various and inconstant men, surely had set up in the churches; and why they choose to live by custom and catalogue, or, as St. Paul saith, by sight and visibility, rather than by faith? But, first, I con clude, from their own mouths, that God's command in Scripture, which doubtless ought to be the first and greatest reason of church-government, is wanting to prelaty. And certainly we have plenteous warrant in the doctrine of Christ, to determine that the want of this reason is of itself sufficient to confute all other pretences, that may be brought in favour of it. VOL. I.

8

CHAPTER VI.

That prelaty was not set up for prevention of schism, as is pretended; or if it were, that it performs not what it was first set up for, but quite the contrary.

YET because it hath the outside of a specious reason, and specious things we know are aptest to work with human lightness and frailty, even against the solidest truth that sounds not plausibly, let us think it worth the examining for the love of infirmer Christians, of what importance this their second reason may be. Tradition they say hath taught them, that, for the prevention of growing schism, the bishop was heaved above the presbyter. And must tradition then ever thus to the world's end be the perpetual cankerworm to eat out God's commandments? Are his decrees so inconsiderate and so fickle, that when the statutes of Solon or Lycurgus shall prove durably good to many ages, his, in forty years, shall be found defective, ill-contrived, and for needful causes to be altered? Our Saviour and his apostles did not only foresee, but foretell and forewarn us to look for schism. Is it a thing to be imagined of God's wisdom, or at least of apostolic prudence, to set up such a government in the tenderness of the church. as should incline, or not be more able than any others to oppose itself to schism? It was well known what a bold lurker schism was, even in the household of Christ, between his own disciples and those of John the Baptist about fasting; and early in the Acts of the Apostles the noise of schism had almost drowned the proclaiming of the gospel; yet we read not in Scripture, that any thought was had of making prelates, no not in those places where dissension was most rife. If prelaty had been then esteemed a remedy against schism, where was it more needful than in that great variance among the Corinthians, which St. Paul so laboured to reconcile? and whose eye could have found the fittest remedy sooner than his? And what could have made the remedy more available, than to have used it speedily? And lastly, what could have been more necessary, than to have written it for our instruction? Yet we see he neither commended it to us, nor used it himself. For the same division remaining there, or else bursting forth again more than twenty years after St. Paul's death, we find in Clement's epistle, of venerable authority, written to the yet factious Corinthians, that they were still governed by presbyters. And the same of other churches out of Hermas, and divers other the scholars of the apostles, by the late industry of the learned Salmasius appears. Neither yet did this worthy Clement, St. Paul's disciple, though writing to them to lay aside schism, in the least word advise them to change the presbyterian government into prelaty. And therefore if God afterward gave or permitted this insurrection of episcopacy, it is to be feared he did it in his wrath, as he gave the Israelites a king. With so good a will doth he use to alter his own chosen government once established. For mark whether this rare device of man's brain, thus preferred before the ordinance of God, had better success than fleshly wisdom, not counselling with God, is wont to have. So far was it from removing schism, that if schism parted the congregations before, now it rent and mangled, now it raged. Heresy begat heresy with a certain monstrous haste of pregnancy in her birth, at once born and bringing forth. Contentions, before brotherly, were now hostile. Men went to choose their bishop as they went to a pitched field, and the day of his election was like the sacking of a city, sometimes

ended with the blood of thousands. Nor this among heretics only, but men of the same belief, yea, confessors; and that with such odious ambition, that Eusebius, in his eighth book, testifies he abhorred to write. And the reason is not obscure, for the poor dignity, or rather burden, of a parochial presbyter could not engage any great party, nor that to any deadly feud. but prelaty was a power of that extent and sway, that if her election were popular, it was seldom not the cause of some faction or broil in the church. But if her dignity came by favour of some prince, she was from that time ⚫ his creature, and obnoxious to comply with his ends in state, were they right or wrong. So that, instead of finding prelaty an impeacher of schism or faction, the more I search, the more I grow into all persuasion to think rather that faction and she, as with a spousal ring, are wedded together, never to be divorced. But here let every one behold the just and dreadful judgment of God meeting with the audacious pride of man, that durst offer to mend the ordinances of heaven. God, out of the strife of men, brought forth by his apostles to the church that beneficent and ever-distributing office of deacons, the stewards and ministers of holy alms: man, out of the pretended care of peace and unity, being caught in the snare of his impious boldness to correct the will of Christ, brought forth to himself upon the church that irreconcilable schism of perdition and apostasy, the Roman antichrist; for that the exaltation of the pope arose out of the reason of prelaty, it cannot be denied. And as I noted before, that the pattern of the high priest pleaded for in the gospel, (for take away the head priest, the rest are but a carcase,) sets up with better reason a pope than an archbishop; for if prelaty must still rise and rise till it come to a primate, why should it stay there? when as the catholic government is not to follow the division of kingdoms, the temple best representing the universal church, and the high priest the universal head: so I observe here, that if to quiet schism there must be one head of prelaty in a land, or monarchy, rising from a provincial to a national primacy, there may, upon better grounds of repressing schism, be set up one catholic head over the catholic church. For the peace and good of the church is not terminated in the schismless estate of one or two kingdoms, but should be provided for by the joint consultation of all reformed Christendom: that all controversy may end in the final pronounce or canon of one archprimate or protestant pope. Although by this means, for aught I see, all the diameters of schism may as well meet and be knit up in the centre of one grand falsehood. Now let all impartial men arbitrate what goodly inference these two main reasons of the prelates have, that by a natural league of consequence make more for the pope than for themselves; yea, to say more home, are the very womb for a new subantichrist to breed in, if it be not rather the old force and power of the same man of sin counterfeiting protestant. It was not the prevention of schism. but it was schism itself, and the hateful thirst of lording in the church, that first bestowed a being upon prelaty; this was the true cause, but the pretence is still the same. The prelates, as they would have it thought, are the only mauls of schism. Forsooth if they be put down, a deluge of innumerable sects will follow; we shall be all Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists. For the word Puritan seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore were counted such, are now Brownists. And thus do they raise an evil report upon the expected reforming grace that God hath bid us hope for; like those faithless spies, whose carcases shall perish in the wilderness of their own confused ignorance, and never taste the good of reformation. Do they keep away schism? If to bring a numb and chill stupidity of soul, an unactive blindness of mind, upon the people by their leaden doctrine, or no