not of their own free will return him all possible | satiate avarice and ambition seem pious and orthodoxal, thanks. Was moral virtue so lovely, and so alluring, by painting his lewd and deceitful principles with a and heathen men so enamoured of her, as to teach smooth and glossy varnish in a doctrinal way, to bring and study her with greatest neglect and contempt of about his wickedest purposes. Instead of the great worldly profit and advancement? And is Christian harm therefore that these men fear upon the dissolving piety so homely and so unpleasant, and Christian of prelates, what an ease and happiness will it be to men so cloyed with her, as that none will study and us, when tempting rewards are taken away, that the teach her, but for lucre and preferment? O stale- cunningest and most dangerous mercenaries will cease grown piety! O gospel rated as cheap as thy Master, of themselves to frequent the fold, whom otherwise at thirty pence, and not worth the study, unless thou scarce all the prayers of the faithful could have kept canst buy those that will sell thee! O race of Ca- back from devouring the flock! But a true pastor öf pernaïtans, senseless of divine doctrine, and capable Christ's sending hath this especial mark, that for greatonly of loaves and belly-cheer! But they will grant, est labours and greatest merits in the church, he reperhaps, piety may thrive, but learning will decay: I quires either nothing, if he could so subsist, or a very would fain ask these men at whose hands they seek common and reasonable supply of human necessaries: inferiour things, as wealth, honour, their dainty fare, we cannot therefore do better than to leave this care of their lofty houses? No doubt but they will soon an- ours to God, he can easily send labourers into his barswer, that all these things they seek at God's hands. vest, that shall not cry, Give, give, but be contented Do they think then that all these meaner and super- with a moderate and beseeming allowance; nor will fluous things come from God, and the divine gift of he suffer true learning to be wanting, where true grace learning from the den of Plutus, or the cave of Mam- and our obedience to him abounds: for if he give us mon? Certainly never any clear spirit nursed up from to know him aright, and to practise this our knowledge brighter influences, with a soul enlarged to the dimen- in right established discipline, how much more will he sions of spacious art and high knowledge, ever entered replenish us with all abilities in tongues and arts, that there but with scorn, and thought it ever foul disdain may conduce to his glory and our good! He can stir to make pelf or ambition the reward of his studies; it up rich fathers to bestow exquisite education upon their being the greatest honour, the greatest fruit and pro- children, and so dedicate them to the service of the ficiency of learned studies to despise these things. Not gospel; he can make the sons of nobles his ministers, liberal science, but illiberal must that needs be, that and princes to be his Nazarites; for certainly there is mounts in contemplation merely for money. And what no employment more honourable, more worthy to take would it avail us to have a hireling clergy, though up a great spirit, more requiring a generous and free never so learned? For such can have neither true wis- nurture, than to be the messenger and herald of headom nor grace; and then in vain do men trust in learn- venly truth from God to man, and, by the faithful work ing, where these be wanting. If in less noble and of holy doctrine, to procreate a number of faithful men, almost mechanic arts, according to the definitions of making a kind of creation like to God's, by infusing those authors, he is not esteemed to deserve the name his spirit and likeness into them, to their salvation, as of a complete architect, an excellent painter, or the God did into him; arising to what climate soever he like, that bears not a generous mind above the peasantly turn him, like that Sun of righteousness that sent him, regard of wages and hire; much more must we think with healing in his wings, and new light to break in him a most imperfect and incomplete divine, who is upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising so far from being a contemner of filthy lucre, that his out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant whole divinity is moulded and bred up in the beggarly spring of saving knowledge, and good works. Can a and brutish hopes of a fat prebendary, deanery, or man, thus employed, find himself discontented, or disbishopric; which poor and low-pitched desires, if they honoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical do but mix with those other heavenly intentions that voice at sessions and jail deliveries? Or because he draw a man to this study, it is justly expected that they may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise of lishould bring forth a baseborn issue of divinity, like that tigious courts to shrive the purses of unconfessing and of those imperfect and putrid creatures that receive a unmortified sinners, and not their souls, or be discrawling life from two most unlike procreants, the sun couraged though men call him not lord, whenas the and mud. And in matters of religion, there is not any due performance of his office would gain him, even from thing more intolerable than a learned fool, or a learned lords and princes, the voluntary title of father? Would hypocrite; the one is ever cooped up at his empty he tug for a barony to sit and vote in parliament, knowspeculations, a sot, an ideot for any use that mankind ing that no man can take from him the gift of wisdom can make of him, or else sowing the world with nice and sound doctrine, which leaves him free, though not and idle questions, and with much toil and difficulty to be a member, yet a teacher and persuader of the parwading to his auditors up to the eyebrows in deep shal-liament? And in all wise apprehensions the persuasive lows that wet not the instep: a plain unlearned man that lives well by that light which he has, is better and wiser, and edifies others more towards a godly and happy life than he. The other is still using his sophisticated arts, and bending all his studies how to make his in power in man to win others to goodness by instruction is greater, and more divine, than the compulsive power to restrain men from being evil by terrour of the law; and therefore Christ left Moses to be the lawgiver, but himself came down amongst us to be a teacher, with which office his heavenly wisdom was so well pleased, as that he was angry with those that would have put a piece of temporal judicature into his hands, disclaiming that he had any commission from above for such matters. Such a high calling therefore as this, sends not for those drossy spirits that need the lure and whistle of earthly preferment, like those animals that fetch and carry for a morsel; no. She can find such as therefore study her precepts, because she teaches to despise preferment, And let not those wretched fathers think they shall impoverish the church of willing and able supply, though they keep back their sordid sperm, begotten in the lustiness of their avarice, and turn them to their malting kilns; rather let them take heed what lessons they instil into that lump of flesh which they are the cause of; lest, thinking to offer him as a present to God, they dish him out for the devil. Let the novice learn first to renounce the world, and so give himself to God, and not therefore give himself to God, that he may close the better with the world, like that false shepherd Palinode in the eclogue of May, under whom the poet lively personates our prelates, whose whole life is a recantation of their pastoral vow, and whose profession to forsake the world, as they use the matter, bogs them deeper into the world. Those our admired Spenser inveighs against, not without some presage of these reforming times: The time was once and may again return, Ne of land nor fee in sufferance, And little them served for their maintenance : Tho gan shepherds swains to looke aloft, By all this we may conjecture, how little we need fear that the ungilding of our prelates will prove the woodening of our priests. In the mean while let no man carry in his head either such narrow or such evil yes, as not to look upon the churches of Belgia and Helvetia, and that envied city Geneva: where in the christian world doth learning more flourish than in these places? Not among your beloved Jesuits, nor their favourers, though you take all the prelates into the number, and instance in what kind of learning you please. And how in England all noble sciences attending upon the train of christian doctrine may flourish more than ever; and how the able professors of every art may with ample stipends be honestly provided; and finally, how there may be better care had that their hearers may benefit by them, and all this without the prelates; the courses are so many and so easy, that I shall pass them over. Remonst. It is God that makes the bishop, the king that gives the bishopric; what can you say to this? Answ. What you shall not long stay for: we say it is God that makes a bishop, and the devil that makes him take a prelatical bishopric; as for the king's gift, regal bounty may be excusable in giving, where the bishop's covetousness is damnable in taking. Remonst. Many eminent divines of the churches abroad have earnestly wished themselves in our condition. Answ. I cannot blame them, they were not only eminent but supereminent divines, and for stomach much like to Pompey the Great, that could endure no equal. Remonst. The Babylonian note sounds well in your ears," Down with it, down with it, even to the ground." Answ. You mistake the matter, it was the Edomitish note; but change it, and if you be an angel, cry with the angel," It is fallen, it is fallen." Remonst. But the God of heaven will, we hope, vindicate his own ordinance so long perpetuated to his church. Answ. Go rather to your god of this world, and see if he can vindicate your lordships, your temporal and spiritual tyrannies, and all your pelf; for the God of heaven is already come down to vindicate his ordinance from your so long perpetuated usurpation. Remonst. If yet you can blush. Answ. This is a more Edomitish conceit than the former, and must be silenced with a counter quip of the same country. So often and so unsavourily has it been repeated, that the reader may well cry, Down with it, down with it, for shame. A man would think you had eaten over-liberally of Esau's red porridge, and from thence dream continually of blushing; or perhaps, to heighten your fancy in writing, are wont to sit in your doctor's scarlet, which through your eyes infecting your pregnant imaginative with a red suffusion, begets a continual thought of blushing; that you tbus persecute ingenuous men over all your book, with this one overtired rubrical conceit still of blushing: but if you have no mercy upon them, yet spare yourself, lest you bejade the good galloway, your own opiniatre wit, and make the very couceit itself blush with spurgalling. Remonst. The scandals of our inferiour ministers I desired to have had less public. Answ. And what your superiour archbishop or bishops! O forbid to have it told in Gath! say you. O dauber! and therefore remove not impieties from Israel. Constantine might have done more justly to have pu nished those clergical faults which he could not conceal, | and believe, the catholic reformed church; and if any than to leave them unpunished, that they might remain man be disposed to use a trope or figure, as St. Paul concealed: better had it been for him, that the heathen did in calling her the common mother of us all, let him had heard the fame of his justice, than of his wilful do as his own rhetoric shall persuade him. If therefore connivance and partiality; and so the name of God we must needs have a mother, and if the catholic church and his truth had been less blasphemed among his only be, and must be she, let all genealogy tell us, if it enemies, and the clergy amended, which daily, by this can, what we must call the church of England, unless impunity, grew worse and worse. But, O to publish we shall make every English protestant a kind of in the streets of Ascalon! sure some colony of puritans poetical Bacchus, to have two mothers: but mark, have taken Ascalon from the Turk lately, that the Re-readers, the crafty scope of these prelates; they enmonstrant is so afraid of Ascalon. The papists we know condole you, and neither Constantinople nor your neighbours of Morocco trouble you. What other Ascalon can you allude to? Remonst. What a death it is to think of the sport and advantage these watchful enemies, these opposite spectators, will be sure to make of our sin and shame! Answ. This is but to fling and struggle under the inevitable net of God, that now begins to environ you round. Remonst. No one clergy in the whole christian world yields so many eminent scholars, learned preachers, grave, holy, and accomplished divines, as this church of England doth at this day. Answ. Ha, ha, ha! Remonst. And long, and ever may it thus flourish. Answ. O pestilent imprecation! flourish as it does at this day in the prelates? Remonst. But O forbid to have it told in Gath! deavour to impress deeply into weak and superstitions Remonst. Take heed of the ravens of the valley. Christians. Remonst. Sit you merry, brethren. Answ. So we shall when the furies of prelatical consciences will not give them leave to do so. Queries. Whether they would not jeopard their ears rather, &c. Answ. A punishment that awaits the merits of your bold accomplices, for the lopping and stigmatizing of so many freeborn Christians. Answ. Forbid him rather, sacred parliament, to vio-selves, that would peck out the eyes of all knowing late the sense of Scripture, and turn that which is spoken of the afflictions of the church under her pagan enemies, to a pargetted concealment of those prelatical crying sins: for from these is prophaneness gone forth into all the land; they have hid their eyes from the sabbaths of the Lord; they have fed themselves, and not their flocks; with force and cruelty have they ruled over God's people: they have fed his sheep (contrary to that which St. Peter writes) not of a ready mind, but for filthy lucre; not as examples to the flock, but as being lords over God's heritage: and yet this dauber would daub still with his untempered mortar. But hearken what God says by the prophet Ezekiel, "Say unto them that daub this wall with untempered mortar, that it shall fall; there shall be an overflowing shower, and ye, O great hailstones, shall fall, and a stormy wind shall rend it, and I will say unto you, the wall is no more, neither they that daubed it." Remonst. Whether of us shall give a better account of our charity to the God of peace, I appeal. Answ. Your charity is much to your fellow-offenders, but nothing to the numberless souls that have been lost by their false feeding: use not therefore so sillily the name of charity, as most commonly you do, and the peaceful attribute of God to a preposterous end. Remonst. In the next section, like illbred sons, you spit in the face of your mother the church of England. Answ. What should we do or say to this Remonstrant, that by his idle and shallow reasonings, seems to have been conversant in no divinity, but that which is colourable to uphold bishoprics? we acknowledge, Remonst. Whether the professed slovenliness in God's service, &c. Answ. We have heard of Aaron and his linen amice, but those days are past; and for your priest under the gospel, that thinks himself the purer or the cleanlier in his office for his new-washed surplice, we esteem him for sanctity little better than Apollonius Thyaneus in his white frock, or the priest of Isis in his lawn sleeves and they may all for holiness lie together in the suds. Remonst. Whether it were not most lawful and just to punish your presumption and disobedience. Answ. The punishing of that which you call our presumption and disobedience, lies not now within the execution of your fangs; the merciful God above, and our just parliament, will deliver us from your Ephesian beasts, your cruel Nimrods, with whom we shall be ever fearless to encounter. Remonst. God give you wisdom to see the truth, and grace to follow it. Answ. I wish the like to all those that resist not the Holy Ghost; for of such God commands Jeremiah saying, "Pray not thou for them, neither lift up cry o TO THE POSTSCRIPT. REMONST. A goodly pasquin borrowed for a great part out of Sion's plea, or the breviate consisting of a rhapsody of histories. Answ. How wittily you tell us what your wonted course is upon the like occasion: the collection was taken, be it known to you, from as authentic authors in this kind, as any in a bishop's library; and the collector of it says moreover, that if the like occasion come again, he shall less need the help of breviates, or historical rhapsodies, than your reverence to eke out your sermonings shall need repair to postils or polian theas. Remonst. They were bishops, you say; true, but they were popish bishops. Answ. Since you would bind us to your jurisdiction by their canon law, since you would enforce upon us the old riffraff of Sarum, and other monastical reliques; since you live upon their unjust purchases, allege their authorities, boast of their succession, walk in their steps, their pride, their titles, their covetousness, their persecuting of God's people; since you disclaim their actions, and build their sepulchres, it is most just that all their faults should be imputed to you, and their iniquities visited upon you. Remonst. Could you see no colleges, no hospitals pope Answ. At that primero of piety, the bearen before you. Remonst. No hospitality kept? Answ. Bacchanalias good store in every bishop's family, and good gleeking. Remonst. No great offenders punished? Answ. The trophies of your high commission are renowned. Remonst. No good offices done for the public? Answ. Yes, the good office of reducing monarchy to tyranny, of breaking pacifications, and calumniating the people to the king. Remonst. No care of the peace of the church? Answ. No, nor of the land; witness the two armies in the North, that now lie plundered and overrun by a liturgy. Remonst. No diligence in preaching? Remonst. Truly, brethren, I can say no more, but that the fault is in your eyes. Answ. If you can say no more than this, you were a proper Remonstrant to stand up for the whole tribe! Remonst. Wipe them and look better. Answ. Wipe your fat corpulencies out of our light. Remonst. Yea, I beseech God to open them rather that they may see good. Answ. If you mean good prelates, let be your prayer. Ask not impossibilities. Remonst. As for that proverb, 'the bishop's foot hath been in it,' it were more fit for a Scurra in Trivio, or some ribald upon an alebench. Answ. The fitter for them then of whom it was meant. Remonst. I doubt not but they will say, the bishop's foot hath been in your book, for I am sure it is quite spoiled by this just confutation; for your proverb, Sapit ollam. Answ. Spoiled, quoth ye? Indeed it is so spoiled, as a good song is spoiled by a lewd singer; or as the saying is, “God sends meat, but the cooks work their wills:" in that sense we grant your bishop's foot may have spoiled it, and made it "Sapere ollam," if not "Sapere aulam ;" which is the same in old Latin, and perhaps in plain English. For certain your confutation hath achieved nothing against it, and left nothing it but a foul taste of your skillet foot, and a more perfect and distinguishable odour of your socks, than of your nightcap. And how the bishop should confute a book with his foot, unless his brains were dropped into his great toe, I cannot meet with any man that can resolve me; only they tell me that certainly such a confutation must needs be gouty. So much for the bishop's foot. upon Answ. So did the miscreant bishop of Spalato write learned volumes against the pope, and run to Rome when he had done ye write them in your closets, and write them in your courts; hot volumists and cold lesbops; a swashbuckler against the pope, and a doragainst the devil, while the whole diocese be wn with tares, and none to resist the enemy, but such as let him in at the postern; a rare superintendent at Rome, and a cipher at home. Hypocrites! the gospel faithfully preached to the poor, the desolate parishes visited and duly fed, loiterers thrown out, wolves driven from the fold, had been a better confutatre of the pope and mass, than whole hecatontomes of controversies; and all this careering with spear in Smectymnuans. st, and thundering upon the steel cap of Baronius or E-llarmine. Remonst. You tell us of Bonner's broth; it is the fashion in some countries to send in their keal in the last service, and this it seems is the manner among our Answ. Your latter service at the high altar you mean: but soft, sir, the feast was but begun, the broth was your own, you have been inviting the land to it this fourscore years; and so long we have been your slaves to serve it up for you, much against our wills: we know you have the beef to it, ready in your kitchens, we are sure it was almost sod before this parliament begun; what direction you have given since to your cooks, to set it by in the pantry till some fitter time, we know not, and therefore your dear jest is lost; this broth was but your first service: Alas, sir, why do you delude your guests? Why do not those goodly flanks and briskets march up in your stately chargers? Doubtless if need be, the pope that owes you for mollifying the matter so well with him, and making him a true church, will furnish you with all the fat oxen of Italy. it but this, bishops were left remaining because they were reformers of the church, by as good a consequence therefore they are now to be removed, because they have been the most certain deformers and ruiners of the church. Thus you see how little it avails you to take sanctuary among those churches which in the general scope of your actions formerly you have disregarded and despised; however, your fair words would now smooth it over otherwise. Remonst. Our bishops, some whereof being crowned with martyrdom, subscribed the gospel with their blood. Answ. You boast much of martyrs to uphold your Remonst. Learned and worthy Doctor Moulin shall episcopacy; but if you would call to mind what Eusetell them. Answ. Moulin says in his book of the calling of pastors, that because bishops were the reformers of the English church, therefore they were left remaining: this argument is but of small force to keep you in your cathedrals. For first it may be denied that bishops were our first reformers, for Wickliff was before them, and his egregious labours are not to be neglected: besides, our bishops were in this work but the disciples of priests, and began the reformation before they were bishops. But what though Luther and other monks were the reformers of other places? Does it follow therefore that monks ought to continue? No, though Luther had taught so. And lastly, Moulin's argument directly makes against you; for if there be nothing in bius in his fifth book recites from Apollinarius of Hierapolis, you should then hear it esteemed no other than an old heretical argument, to prove a position true, because some that held it were martyrs; this was that which gave boldness to the Marcionists and Cataphryges to avouch their impious heresies for pious doctrine, because they could reckon many martyrs of their sect; and when they were confuted in other points, this was ever their last and stoutest plea. Remonst. In the mean time I beseech the God of heaven to humble you. Answ. We shall beseech the same God to give you a more profitable and pertinent humiliation than yet you know, and a less mistaken charitableness, with that peace which you have hitherto so perversely misaffected. |