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OF REFORMATION IN ENGLAND,

AND THE

CAUSES THAT HITHERTO HAVE HINDERED IT. IN TWO BOOKS.

WRITTEN TO A FRIEND.

EDITOR'S PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

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On this treatise the reader will find several observations in my "Preliminary Discourse." I shall therefore add no remarks of my own here, but introduce the excellent outline which Toland has given of the work says, "He first of all, therefore, in the year 1641, published two books of Reformation, dedicated to a friend. In the first of these he shows, by orderly steps from Henry the Eighth's reign, what were all along the real impediments in this kingdom to a perfect reformation, which in general he reduces to two heads, that is, our retaining of ceremonies, and confiding the power of ordination to diocesan bishops exclusively of the people. Our ceremonies,' he says, are senseless in themselves, and serve for nothing but either to facilitate our return to popery; or to hide the defects of better knowledge, and to set off the pomp of prelacy.' As for the bishops, many whom he denies not to have been good men, though not infallible nor above all human frailties, he affirms, that at the beginning, though they had renounced the pope, they hugged the popedom, and shared the authority among themselves." In king Edward the Sixth's time, he affirms, they were, with their prostitute gravities, the common stales to countenance every politic fetch that was then on foot. If a toleration for mass were to be begged of the king for his sister Mary, lest Charles the Fifth should be angry, who but the grave prelates, Cranmer and Ridley should be sent to extort it from the young king? When the lord Sudley, admiral of England, and the Protector's brother, was wrongfully to lose his life, no man could be found fitter than Latimer to divulge in his sermon the forged accusations laid to his charge, thereby to defame him with the people. Cranmer, one of the king's executors, and the other bishops did, to gratify the ambition of a traitor, consent to exclude from the succession, not only Mary the papist, but also Elizabeth the protestant, though before declared by themselves the lawful issue of their late master.' In queen Elizabeth's reign, he imputes the obstructions of a further reformation still to the bishops, and then proceeds from antiquity to prove that all ecclesiastical elections belonged to the people; but that if those ages had favoured episcopacy, we should not be much concerned, since the best times were spreadingly infected, the best men of those times foully tainted, and the best writings of those men dangerously adulterated; which propositions he labours to prove at large. In the second book he continues his discourses of prelatical episcopacy, displays the politics of the same; which, according to him are always opposite to liberty; he deduces the history of it down from its remotest original, and shows, that in England particularly it is so far from being, as they commonly allege, the only form of church discipline agreeable to monarchy, that the mortallest diseases and convul

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sions of the government did ever proceed from the craft of the prelates, or was occasioned by their pride. Then he encourages the English and Scots to pursue their begun contest for liberty by this exhortation, Go on both, hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited! Be the praise and the heroic songs of all posterity: merit this; but seek only virtue, not to extend your limits, (for what needs to win a fading triumphant laurel out of the tears of wretched men ?) but to settle the pure worship of God in his church, and justice in the state. Then shall the hardest difficulties smooth out themselves before ye; envy shall sink to hell, craft and malice be confounded, whether it be homebred mischief, or outlandish cunning; yea, other nations will then covet to serve ye; for lordship and victory are but the pages of justice and virtue. Commit securely to true wisdom the vanquishing and uncasing of craft and subtlety, which are but her two runagates. Join your invincible might to do worthy and godlike deeds; and then he that seeks to break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance to all generations!""

OF REFORMATION IN ENGLAND.

THE FIRST BOOK.

SIR,-Amidst those deep and retired thoughts, which, with every man Christianly instructed, ought to be most frequent of God, and of his miraculous ways and works amongst men, and of our religion and works, to be performed to him; after the story of our Saviour Christ, suffering to the lowest bent of weakness in the flesh, and presently triumphing to the highest pitch of glory in the spirit, which drew up his body also; till we in both be united to him in the revelation of his kingdom, I do not know of anything more worthy to take up the whole passion of pity on the one side, and joy on the other, than to consider first the foul and sudden corruption, and then, after many a tedious age, the long deferred, but much more wonderful and happy reformation of the church in these latter days. Sad it is to think how that doctrine of the gospel, planted by teachers divinely inspired, and by them winnowed and sifted from the chaff of overdated ceremonies, and refined to such a spiritual height and temper of purity, and knowledge of the Creator, that the body, with all the circumstances of time and place, were purified by the affections of the regenerate soul, and nothing left impure but sin; faith needing not the weak and fallible office of the senses, to be either the ushers or interpreters of heavenly mysteries, save where our Lord himself in his sacraments ordained; that such a doctrine should, through the grossness and blindness

of her professors, and the fraud of deceivable traditions, arag so downwards, as to backslide one way into the Jewish beggary of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry, attributing purity or impurity to things indifferent, that they might bring the inward acts of the spirit to the outward and customary eyeservice of the body, as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly and spiritual; they began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed; they hallowed it, they fumed up, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold, and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe, or the flamins vestry: then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downward: and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken, and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on in the old road, and drudging trade of outward conformity. And here out of question from her perverse conceiting of God and holy things, she had fallen to believe no God at all, had not custom and the worm of conscience nipped her incredulity: hence to all the duties of evangelical grace, instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness which our new alliance with God requires, came servile and thrallike fear for in very deed, the superstitious man by his good will is an atheist; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear; which fear of his, as also is his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship, issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a

crust of formality. Hence men came to scan the scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant of our redemption, magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit; and yet, looking on them through their own guiltiness with a servile fear, and finding as little comfort, or rather terror from them again, they knew not how to hide their slavish approach to God's behests, by them not understood, nor worthily received, but by cloaking their servile crouching to all religious presentments, sometimes lawful, sometimes idolatrous, under the name of humility, and terming the piebald frippery and ostentation of ceremonies, decency.

Then was baptism changedint o a kind of exorcism, and water, sanctified by Christ's institute, thought little enough to wash off the original spot, without the scratch or cross impression of a priest's forefinger: and that feast of free grace and adoption to which Christ invited his disciples to sit as brethren, and coheirs of the happy covenant, which at that table was to be sealed to them, even that feast of love and heavenly-admitted fellowship, the seal of filial grace, became the subject of horror, and glouting adoration, pageanted about like a dreadful idol; which sometimes deceives well-meaning men, and beguiles them of their reward, by their voluntary humility; which indeed is fleshly pride, preferring a foolish sacrifice, and the rudiments of the world, as St. Paul to the Colossians explaineth, before a savoury obedience to Christ's example. Such was Peter's unseasonable humility, as then his knowledge was small, when Christ came to wash his feet; who at an impertinent time would needs strain courtesy with his master, and falling troublesomely upon the lowly, all-wise, and unexaminable intention of Christ, in what he went with resolution to do, so provoked by his interruption the meek Lord, that he threatened to exclude him from his heavenly portion, unless he could be content to be less arrogant and stiffnecked in his humility.

But to dwell no longer in characterizing the depravities of the church, and how they sprung, and how they took increase; when I recall to mind at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge overshadowing train of error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the church; how the bright and blissful Reformation* (by divine power) struck through * We have now, after the revolution of two centuries, come no longer to

the black and settled night of ignorance and antichristian tyranny, methinks a sovereign and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears; and the sweet odour of the returning gospel im bathe his soul with the fragrancy of heaven. Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues, the princes and cities trooping apace to the new erected banner of salvation; regard the Reformation as bright and blissful. Indeed, numbers of pious and learned men among us have greatly distinguished themselves of late, by denying and declaiming against it. Helvetius, speaking of matters of taste, observes that, when we have grown familiar with the beautiful, we pass on by a sort of physical necessity, to the extravagant, it being one of the laws of our nature that we can never remain fixed in one point, but must always, like the sea, be in motion, ebbing or flowing. The same remark may be applied in affairs of higher import. Truth itself becomes stale by use, so that pleasant and novel errors are preferred before it. It ought not, however, to be forgotten, that many, nay, most of the improvements of modern society are, together with us, children of the Reformation, and that to it we owe the progress we have made in civil freedom, in philosophy, in literature, and in science. The plastic and mimetic arts are undoubtedly less indebted to it. One of the principles of catholicism is the picturesque, while the spirit of the Reformation leads to the cultivation of a stern simplicity, which easily degenerates into baldness, and an insufferable monotony. Hence the cultivators of art are often led by their fancy back to their own religion, in the character of which they discover forms more congenial to their minds than those found within the circle of the Reformation. Milton, however, whether in prose or verse, whether in controversy or didactic writing, always displays an undoubting preference for the grandeur of Christian stoicism found in the puritanical or ultimate development of the Reformation. His capacious and energetic mind needed none of those helps to inspiration required by persons of less vigorous intellect. Familiar with all the forms of the imagination, he could, with the aid of the simplest faith, enforce vitality into them all, while spurning all the invention of man, and ranging the universe in the works, as it were, of its Almighty Creator. To him the Reformation itself was not sufficiently reform. He desired to abandon all rites and ceremonies, and to approach the Deity through forms of worship less complicated than those adopted by any existing church. His religion, in fact, was a philosophy impregnated with the spirit of the gospel, and comprehending all its truth, but completely independent of creeds and symbols. It was, in one word, Christianity pure and undefiled, because unalloyed by human teaching. To follow Milton's footsteps in this respect, it would be necessary to possess all the qualities of his mind, which, from that day to this, no man perhaps can be said to have done; consequently, there is little danger that his interpretation of the gospel should ever be generally adopted, or even spread sufficiently to form a sect.-ED.

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