itself, and passes into air like a transitory vision, and the right of kings neither stands by any type nor falls. We acknowledge 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 Deuteronomy, 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 so 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 shews 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 foreshew. 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 Armagh, 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 sabbath. But certain if this method may be admitted of

interpreting those prophetical passages concerning Christian times and 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 23rd 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 than 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 anything 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 less than a monstrous? Öthers 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 it or grant it not, whenas 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 conclude, 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.

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