to write for the sport and exercise of wit, without condemning those that differ from them, a man might fetch many a pleasant vagary, if not an over subtle Cajetan (who so often feigneth notions and distinctions), yet in Scotus, Ockam, Ariminensis, with abundance of their disciples, and in Thomas and many of his learned followers. But their successors can hardly forbear hereticating one another. How many such a wound hath poor Durandus suffered! from many for his doctrine of Concourse; and by others for his pretty device to save the credit of our senses; (that there is still the matter of bread, but not the form, as being informed by the soul of Christ, as digested bread in us is turned to flesh ;) which, saith Bellarmine, is an heresy, but Durandus no heretic, because he was ready to be taught of the Church.

But no where do these stinging hornets so swarm as in the Councils and the Canon Law: so that saith the preface to the Reformation Legum Ecclesiast. Edward VI. (John Fox,) In quo ipso jure, neque ullum modum tenet illius impudentia, quin leges legibus; decreta decretis, ac iis insuper decretalia, aliis alia, atque item alia accumulet, nec ullam pene statuit cumulandi finem, donec tandem suis Clementinis, Sixtinis, Intra et Extravagantibus, Constitutionibus Provincialibus et Synodalibus, Paleis, Glossulis, Sententiis, Capitulis, Summariis, Rescriptis, Breviculis, Casibus longis et brevibus, ac infinitis Rhapsodiis adeo orbem confarcinavit, ut Atlas mons quo sustineri cœlum dicitur, huic si imponeretur oneri, vix ferendo sufficeret.' Which made these two kings, Henry VIII. and Edward VI. appoint that Compendium of Ecclesiastical Laws as their own. King Henry first abolishing the Pope's Laws (whatever some say to the contrary), his words being, Hujus Potestatem huic cum divino munere sublatam esse manifestum est, ut quid superesset, quo non plane fractam illius Vim esse constaret, Leges omnes decreta atque instituta, quæ ab authore Episcopo Romano profecta sunt Prorsus abroganda censuimus.'

Is it possible that all the clergy and nobles of the Roman kingdom can be so ignorant of their own and other men's ignorance, as to take all the decrees of the huge volumes of their Councils for certain truths? Either they were certain in their evidence of truth, before they decree them, or not: if they were so, 1. How came the debates in the Councils

about them to be so hard, and so many to be dissenters as in many of them there were. I know where Arians or other heretics make up much of the Council, it is no wonder; but are the certainties of faith so uncertain to Catholic bishops, that a great part of them know not certain truths, till the majority of votes have told them they are certain? Have the poor dissenting bishops in Council nothing of certainty on which their own and all the poor people's faith and salvation must depend, but only this, that they are over-voted? As if the dissenters in the Council of Trent should say, 'We thought beforehand the contrary had been true; but now the Italian bishops being so numerous as to over-vote us, we will lay our own and all men's salvation on it, that we were deceived, though we have no other reason to think so.' O noble faith and certainty! It is possible one or two or three poor silly prelates may turn the scales and make up a majority, though as learned men Jansenius, Cusanus or Gerson were on the other side. And if the Jansenists' Articles were condemned or Cusanus' antipapal doctrine, lib. de Concordia, or Gerson's for the Supremacy of Councils and de Auferibilitate Papæ, they must presently believe that they were certainly deceived.

But what is become then of the contrary evidence which appeared before to these dissenters? As suppose it were in the Council of Basil about the immaculate conception of Mary; or the question whether the authority of the Pope or Council be greatest, decided there, and at Constance, and whereof at Trent the emperor and the French were of one opinion, and the Pope of another: was it evidently true before, which is made false after by a majority of votes?

2. And if all these decreed things were evident truths before the said decrees, why have we not those antecedent evidences presented to us, to convince us?

3. But if they were not evident truths before, what made those prelates conclude them for truths? Did they know them to be such without evidence? This is grosser than a presumptuous man's believing that he shall be saved because he believeth it; or their doctrine that teach men to believe the thing is true (that Christ did for them,) that thereby they may make it true; as if the object must come after the act. For then these prelates do decree that to be true, which before was false (forex natura rei," one party had

evidence of its falsehood), that so they might make it true, by decreeing that it is so.

A man might lawfully have believed his own and other men's senses, that bread is bread, till the Council at Lateran sub Innoc. 3. decreed transubstantiation. And O what a change did that Council make! All Christ's miracles were not comparable to it, if its decrees be true. From that day to this, we must renounce sense, and yet believe; we must believe that by constant miracles all Christians' senses are deceived and so that this is the difference between Christians, infidels, and heathens, that our religion deceiveth all men's senses, (even heathens and all, if they see our Sacrament,) and their religion deceiveth no man's senses, saith the grave author of the History of the Trent Council, (Ed. Engl. p. 473,) a better mystery was never found, than to use religion to make men insensible.

And what is the Omnipotent power that doth this? Such a Convention as that of Trent, while with our Worcester Pate, and Olaus Magnus, they made up a great while two-and-forty things called Bishops; and after such a pack of beardless boys, and ignorant fellows, created by, and enslaved to the Pope, as Dudithius Quinqueccles. one of the Council describeth to the emperor; and which Bishop Jewel, in his letter to Sign. Scipio, saith, he took for no Council, called by no just authority, &c., where were neither the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, or Antioch, nor Abassines, nor Græcians, Armenians, Persians, Egyptians, Moors, Syrians, Indians, nor Muscovites, nor Protestants, pp. 143, 144. For, saith he after, p. 489, 'Nowa-days (merciful God!) the intent or scope of Councils is not to discover truth, or to confute falsehood: for these latter ages, this hath been the only endeavour of the Popes, to establish the Roman Tyranny; to set wars on foot, to set Christian princes together by the ears, to raise money—, to be cast into some few bellies for gluttony and lust: and this hath been the only cause or course of Councils for some ages last past.' So here.

And can the vote of a few such fellows oblige all the world to renounce all their senses, who were never obliged to it before?

And all this consisteth in PRETENDED FAITH and KNOWLEDGE, when men must take on them to know what

they do not know, and make decrees and canons, and doctrines suited to their conjectures, or rather to their carnal interests, and then most injuriously father them on God, on Christ and the Apostles.

m

II. And as the number of forgeries and inventions detecteth this public plague, so doth the number of persons that are guilty of it. How many such superfluities the Abassines (in their oft baptizings, and other trifles) and the Armenians, Syrians, Georgians, Jacobites, Maronites, the Russians, &c. are guilty of, the describers of their rights and religion tell us. Some would have the state of the Church in Gregory Ist's. days to be the model of our Reformation: (that Pope whom authors usually call the last of the good ones, and the first of the bad ones :) But is there either necessity or certainty in all the superfluities which the Churches then had, and which that great prelate's writings themselves contain? Or were there not abundance of such things then used as indifferent (of which see Socrates and Sozomen in the chapters of Easter,) and must all their indifferents be now made necessary to the Church's concord and communion? and all their uncertainties become certainties to us? Some will have the present Greek Church to be the standard; but alas, poor men, how many of these uncertainties, crudities and superfluities are cherished among them by the unavoidable ignorance which is caused by their oppressions? To say no more of Rome, O that the Reformed Churches themselves had been more innocent. But how few of them unite on the terms of simple Christianity and certainties? Had not Luther after all his zeal for Reformation, retained some of this leaven, he could better have endured the dissent of Zuinglius, Carolostadius and Oecolampadius about the Sacrament. And if his followers had not

m And yet saith Zaga-Zabo in Damnian a Goes, p. 226. Nec Patriarcha nec Episcopi nostri, per se, nec in Conciliis putant aut opinantur ullas leges se condere posse, quibus ad mortale peccatum obligari quis posset. And p. 231. Indignum est peregrinos Christianos tam acriter et hostiliter reprehendi ut ego de hac re (de delectu ciborum) et de aliis, quæ minimè ad fidem veram spectabant reprehensus fui; sed multo consultius, fuerit, hujusmodi Christianos homines sive Græcos, sive Armenos sive Æthiopes; sive ex quavis Septem Christianarum Ecclesiarum in charitate et Christi amplexibus sustinere, et eos sine contumeliis permittere, inter alios fratres Christianos vivere ac versari; quoniam omnes filii baptismi sumus, et de vera fide unanimiter sentimus. Nec est eausa cur tam acriter de ceremoniis disceptetur nisi ut unusquisque suas observet, sine odio et infectatione aliorum, nec commerciis Ecclesiæ ob id excludendus, est, &c. Learn of a ceremonious Abassine.

kept up the same superfluities, they had never so torn the Churches by their animosities, nor resisted and wearied peaceable Melanchthon, nor frustrated so many Conventions and Treatises for Concord, as they have done. Bucer had not been so censured; agreement had not been made so impossible: all Dury's travels had not been made so ineffectual. Schlusselbergius had not found so many heresies to fill up his catalogue with; nor Calovius so much matter for his virulent pen; nor so many equalled Calvinism with Turcism: nor had Calixtus had such scornful satires written against him; nor the great peace-makers, Lud. Crocius, Bergii, Martinius, Camero, Amyraldus, Testardus, Capellus, Placæus Davenant, Ward, Hall, and now Le Blanc, had so little acceptance and success. Had it not been for this spreading plague, (the over-valuing of our own understandings, and the accounting our crude conceits for certainties) all these Church wars had been prevented or soon ended: all those excellent endeavours for peace had been more successful, and we had all been one.

Had it not been for this, neither Arminians nor antiArminians had ever so bitterly contended, nor so sharply censured one another, nor written so many confident condemning volumes against each other, which in wise men's eyes do more condemn the authors; and SELF-CONCEIT, OF PRETENDED KNOWLEDGE should have been the title of them all. How far I am able to prove that almost all their bitter and zealous contentions are about uncertainties, and words, the reader may perceive in my preface to the Grotian Religion, and if God will, I shall more fully manifest to the world". The synod of Dort had not had so great a work of it, nor the Breme and Britain Divines so difficult a task, to bring and hold them to that moderation of expressions which very laudably they have done: one of the noblest successful attempts for peace, though little noted, which these ages have made.

In a word, almost all the contentions of divines, the sects and factions, the unreconciled feuds, the differences in religion which have been the harvest of the devil and his emissaries in the world, have come from pretended knowledge and taking uncertainties for certain truths.

I will not meddle with the particular impositions of n Since done in "Catholic Theology."