SECT. II. riots both in this and other places of your book? Nay, what if you still defend them as follows? Remonst. If a bishop have said that our liturgy REMONST. After the overflowing of your gall, you hath been so wisely and charitably framed, as that the descend to liturgy and episcopacy. Answ. The overflow being past, you cannot now in your own judgment impute any bitterness to their foling discourses. Remonst. Dr. Hall, whom you name I dare say for honour's sake. Answ. You are a merry man, sir, and dare say much. Remonst. And why should not I speak of martyrs, as the authors and users of this holy liturgy? devotion of it yieldeth no cause of offence to a very pope's ear. Answ. O new and never heard of supererogative height of wisdom and charity in our liturgy! Is the wisdom of God or the charitable framing of God's word otherwise inoffensive to the pope's ear, than as he may turn it to the working of his mysterious iniquity? A little pulley would have stretched your wise and charitable frame it may be three inches further, that the devotion of it might have yielded no cause of offence to the very devil's ear, and that had been the same wisdom and charity surmounting to the highest degree. For Antichrist we know is but the devil's vicar, and therefore please him with your liturgy, and you please his master. Remonst. Would you think it requisite, that we should chide and quarrel when we speak to the God of peace? Answ. Fie, no sir, but forecast our prayers so, that Satan and his instruments may take as little exception against them as may be, lest they should chide and quarrel with us. Answ. As the authors! the translators, you might perhaps have said: for Edward the sixth, as Hayward hath written in his story, will tell you upon the word of a king, that the order of the service, and the use thereof in the English tongue, is no other than the old service was, and the same words in English which were in Latin, except a few things omitted, so fond, that it had been a shame to have heard them in English; these are his words: whereby we are left uncertain who the author was, but certain that part of the work was esteemed so absurd by the translators thereof, as was to be ashamed of in English. O but the martyrs were the refiners of it, for that only is left you to say. Admit they were, they could not refine a scorpion into a fish, though they had drawn it, and rinced it with never so cleanly cookery, which made them fall at variance among themselves about the use either of it, or the ceremonies belonging to it. Remonst. Slight you them as you please, we bless hath run up and down the world like an English galGod for such patrons of our good cause. loping nun proffering herself, but we hear of none yet that bids money for her. Answ. O Benedicite! Qui color ater erat, nunc est contrarius atro. Are not these they which one of your bishops in print scornfully terms the Foxian confessors? Are not these they whose acts and monuments are not only so contemptible, but so hateful to the prelates, that their story was almost come to be a prohibited book, which for these two or three editions hath crept into the world by stealth, and at times of advantage, not without the open regret and vexation of the bishops, as many honest men that had to do in setting forth the book will justify? And now at a dead lift for your liturgies you bless God for them: out upon such hypocrisy ! Remonst. As if we were bound to make good every word that falls from the mouth of every bishop. Answ. Your faction then belike is a subtile Janus, and hath two faces: your bolder face to set forward any innovations or scandals in the church, your cautious and wary face to disavow them if they succeed not, that so the fault may not light upon the function, lest it should spoil the whole plot by giving it an irrecoverable wound. Wherefore else did you not long ago, as a good bishop should have done, disclaim and protest against them? Wherefore have you sat still, and complied and hood-winked, till the general complaints of the land have squeezed you to a wretched, cold, and hollow-hearted confession of some prelatical Remonst. It is no little advantage to our cause and piety, that our liturgy is taught to speak several languages for use and example. Answ. The language of Ashdod is one of them, and that makes so many Englishmen have such a smattering of their Philistian mother. And indeed our liturgy Remonst. As for that sharp censure of learned Mr. Calvin, it might well have been forborn by him in aliena republica. Answ. Thus this untheological remonstrant would divide the individual catholic church into several republics: know, therefore, that every worthy pastor of the church of Christ hath universal right to admonish over all the world within the church; nor can that care be aliened from him by any distance or distinction of nation, so long as in Christ all nations and languages are as one household. Remonst. Neither would you think it could become any of our greatest divines, to meddle with his charge. Answ. It hath ill become them indeed to meddle so maliciously, as many of them have done, though that patient and christian city hath borne hitherto all their profane scoffs with silence. Remonst. Our liturgy passed the judgment of no less reverend heads than his own. Answ. It bribed their judgments with worldly engagements, and so passed it. Remonst. As for that unparalleled discourse concerning the antiquity of liturgies, I cannot help your wonder, but shall justify mine own assertion. Answ. Your justification is but a miserable shifting off those testimonies of the ancientest fathers alleged against you, and the authority of some synodal canons, which are now arrant to us. We profess to decide our controversies only by the Scriptures; but yet to repress your vain-glory, there will be voluntarily bestowed upon you a sufficient conviction of your novelties out of succeeding antiquity. durst for that old pharasaical fear that still dogs them, the fear of the people; though you will say you are none of those, still you would seem not to have joined with the worst, and yet keep aloof off from that which is best. I would you would either mingle, or part: most true it is what Savanarola complains, that while he endeavoured to reform the church, his greatest ene Remonst. I cannot see how you will avoid your own contradiction, for I demand, is this order of pray-mies were still these lukewarm ones. ing and administration set or no? If it be not set, how is it an order? And if it be a set order both for matter and form Answ. Remove that form, lest you tumble over it, while you make such haste to clap a contradiction upon others. Remonst. If the forms were merely arbitrary, what use was the prescription of an order? Remonst. And if the Lord's prayer be an ordinary and stinted form, why not others? Answ. Because there be no other Lords, that can stint with like authority. Remonst. If Justin Martyr said, that the instructor of the people prayed (as they falsely term it) " accordtoing to his ability." Answ. Όση δύναμις αυτῷ will be so rendered to the world's end by those that are not to learn Greek of the Remonstrant, and so Langus renders it to his face, if he could see; and this ancient father mentions no antiphonies or responsories of the people here, but the only plain acclamation of Amen. Remonst. The instructor of the people prayed according to his ability, it is true, so do ours: and yet we have a liturgy, and so had they. Answ. Nothing will cure this man's understanding but some familiar and kitchen physic, which, with pardon, must for plainness sake be administered to him. Call hither your cook. The order of breakfast, dinner, and supper, answer me, is it set or no? Set. Is a man therefore bound in the morning to poached eggs and vinegar, or at noon to brawn or beef, or at night to fresh salmon, and French kickshose? May he not make his meals in order, though he be not bound to this or that viand? Doubtless the neat-fingered artist will answer yes, and help us out of this great controversy without more trouble. Can we not under- Remonst. Neither is this liberty of pouring out ourstand an order in church-assemblies of praying, read-selves in our 'prayers ever the more impeached by a ing, expounding, and administering, unless our prayers public form. be still the same crambe of words? Answ. A quick come-off. The ancients used pikes and targets, and therefore guns and great ordnance, because we use both. Answ. Yes, the time is taken up with a tedious numRemonst. What a poor exception is this, that litur- ber of liturgical tautologies, and impertinencies. gies were composed by some particular men? Remonst. The words of the council are full and affirmative. Answ. It is a greater presumption in any particular men, to arrogate to themselves, that which God universally gives to all his ministers. A minister that cannot be trusted to pray in his own words without being chewed to, and fescued to a formal injunction of his rote lesson, should as little be trusted to preach, besides the vain babble of praying over the same things immediately again; for there is a large difference in the repetition of some pathetical ejaculation raised out of the sudden earnestness and vigour of the inflamed soul, (such as was that of Christ in the garden,) from the continual rehearsal of our daily orisons; which if a man shall kneel down in a morning, and say over, and presently in another part of the room kneel down again, and in other words ask but still for the same things as it were out of one inventory, I cannot see how he will escape that heathenish battology of multiplying words, which Christ himself, that has the putting up of our prayers, told us would not be acceptable in heaven. Well may men of eminent gifts set forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please; but to impose them on ministers lawfully called, and sufficiently tried, as all ought to be ere they be admitted, is a supercilious tyranny, impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves. Answ. Set the grave councils up upon their shelves again, and string them hard, lest their various and jangling opinions put their leaves into a flutter. I shall not intend this hot season to bid you the base through the wide and dusty champaign of the councils, but shall take counsel of that which counselled them, reason: and although I know there is an obsolete reprehension now at your tongue's end, yet I shall be bold to say, that reason is the gift of God in one man as well as in a thousand: by that which we have tasted already of their cisterns, we may find that reason was the only thing, and not any divine command that moved them to enjoin set forms of liturgy. First, lest any thing in general might be missaid in their public prayers through ignorance, or want of care, contrary to the faith: and next, lest the Arians, and Pelagians in particular, should infect the people by their hymns, and forms of prayer. By the leave of these ancient fathers, this was no solid prevention of spreading heresy, to debar the ministers of God the use of their noblest talent, prayer in the congregation; unless they had forbid the use of sermons, and lectures too, but such as were ready made to their hands, as our homilies: or else he that was heretically disposed, had as fair an Remonst. Do we abridge this liberty by ordaining a opportunity of infecting in his discourse as in his prayer public form. or hymn. As insufficiently, and to say truth, as imAnsw. Your bishops have set as fair to do it as they | prudently, did they provide by their contrived liturgies, lest any thing should be erroneously prayed through ignorance, or want of care in the ministers. For if they were careless and ignorant in their prayers, certainly they would be more careless in their preaching, and yet more careless in watching over their flock; and what prescription could reach to bound them both in these? What if reason, now illustrated by the word of God, shall be able to produce a better prevention than these councils have left us against heresy, ignorance, or want of care in the ministry, that such wisdom and diligence be used in the education of those that would be ministers, and such strict and serious examination to be undergone, ere their admission, as St. Paul to Timothy sets down at large, and then they need not carry such an unworthy suspicion over the preachers of God's word, as to tutor their unsoundness with the *Abcie of a liturgy, or to diet their ignorance, and want of care, with the limited draught of a matin, and evensong drench. All this may suffice after all their laboursome scrutiny of the councils. Remonst. Our Saviour was pleased to make use in the celebration of his last and heavenly banquet both of the fashions and words which were usual in the Jewish feasts. Answ. What he pleased to make use of, does not justify what you please to force. Remonst. The set forms of prayer at the Mincha. Ausw. We will not buy your rabbinical fumes; we have one that calls us to buy of him pure gold tried in the fire. Remonst. In the Samaritan chronicle. Answ. As little do we esteem your Samaritan trumpery, of which people Christ himself testifies, Ye worship ye know not what. Remonst. They had their several songs. of the liturgy will be considered by wiser heads than your own. Answ. We doubt it not, because we know your head looks to be one. Remonst. Our liturgy symbolizeth not with popish mass, neither as mass nor as popish. Answ. A pretty slipskin conveyance to sift mass into no mass, and popish into not popish; yet saving this passing fine sophistical boulting hutch, so long as she symbolizes in form, and pranks herself in the weeds of popish mass, it may be justly feared she provokes the jealousy of God, no otherwise than a wife affecting whorish attire kindles a disturbance in the eye of her discerning husband. Remonst. If I find gold in the channel, shall I throw it away because it was ill laid? Answ. You have forgot that gold hath been anathematized for the idolatrous use; and to eat the good creatures of God once offered to idols, is in St. Paul's account to have fellowship with devils, and to partake of the devil's table. And thus you throttle yourself with your own similies. Remonst. If the devils confessed the Son of God, shall I disclaim that truth? Answ. You sifted not so clean before, but you shuffle as foully now; as if there were the like necessity of confessing Christ, and using the liturgy: we do not disclaim that truth, because we never believed it for their testimony; but we may well reject a liturgy which had no being that we can know of, but from the corruptest times if therefore the devil should be given never so much to prayer, I should not therefore cease from that duty, because I learned it not from him; but if he would commend to me a new Pater-noster, though never so seemingly holy, he should excuse me the form Answ. And so have we our several psalms for several which was his; but the matter, which was none of his, occasions, without gramercy to your liturgy. Remonst. Those forms which we have under the names of Saint James, &c., though they have some insertions which are plainly spurious, yet the substance of them cannot be taxed for other than holy and ancient. Answ. Setting aside the odd coinage of your phrase, which no mint-master of language would allow for sterling, that a thing should be taxed for no other than holy and ancient, let it be supposed the substance of them may savour of something holy or ancient, this is but the matter; the form, and the end of the thing, may yet render it either superstitious, fruitless, or impious, and so worthy to be rejected. The garments of a strumpet are often the same, materially, that clothe a chaste matron, and yet ignominious for her to wear: the substance of the tempter's words to our Saviour were holy, but his drift nothing less. he could not give me, nor I be said to take it from him. It is not the goodness of matter therefore which is not, nor can be owed to the liturgy, that will bear it out, if the form, which is the essence of it, be fantastic and superstitious, the end sinister, and the imposition violent. Remonst. Had it been composed into this frame on purpose to bring papists to our churches. Answ. To bring them to our churches? alas, what was that? unless they had been first fitted by repentance, and right instruction. You will say, the word was there preached, which is the means of conversion; you should have given so much honour then to the word preached, as to have left it to God's working without the interloping of a liturgy baited for them to bite at. Remonst. The project had been charitable and gracious. Answ. It was pharisaical, and vain-glorious, a greedy desire to win proselytes by conforming to them unlawfully; like the desire of Tamar, who, to raise up seed to her husband, sate in the common road drest like a Remonst. In what sense we hold the Roman a true church, is so cleared that the iron is too hot for their fingers. Answ. Have a care it be not the iron to sear your courtezan, and he that came to her committed incest own conscience. with her. This was that which made the old Christians Remonst. You need not doubt but that the alteration paganize, while by their scandalous and base conform i. e. A, b, c. ing to heathenism they did no more, when they had done their utmost, but bring some pagans to christianize; for true Christians they neither were themselves, nor could make other such in this fashion. Remonst. If there be found aught in liturgy that may endanger a scandal, it is under careful hands to remove it. Answ. Such careful hands as have shewn themselves sooner bent to remove and expel the men from the scandals, than the scandals from the men, and to lose a soul rather than a syllable or a surplice. Answ. Do you not perceive the noose you have brought yourself into, whilst you were so brief to taunt other men with weakness? Is it clean out of your mind what you cited from among the councils; that the principal scope of those liturgy-founders was to prevent either the malice or the weakness of the ministers; their malice, of infusing heresy in their forms of prayer; their weakness, lest something might be composed by them through ignorance or want of care contrary to the faith? Is it not now rather to be wondered, that such a weakness could fall from the pen of such a wise Remonst. It is idolized they say in England, they remonstrant man? mean at Amsterdam. Remonst. Their main drift was the help of the Answ. Be it idolized therefore where it will, it is people's devotion, that they knowing before the matter only idolatrized in England. that should be sued for, Remonst. Multitudes of people they say distaste it; more shame for those that have so mistaught them. Answ. More shame for those that regard not the troubling God's church with things by themselves confessed to be indifferent, since true charity is afflicted, and burns at the offence of every little one. As for the christian multitude which you affirm to be so mistaught, it is evident enough, though you would declaim never so long to the contrary, that God hath now taught them to detest your liturgy and prelacy; God who hath promised to teach all his children, and to deliver them out of your hands that hunt and worry their souls: hence is it that a man shall commonly find more savoury knowledge in one layman, than in a dozen of cathedral prelates; as we read in our Saviour's time that the common people had a reverend esteem of him, and held him a great prophet, whilst the gowned rabbies, the incomparable and invincible doctors, were of opinion that he was a friend of Beelzebub. Remonst. If the multitude distaste wholesome doctrine, shall we, to humour them, abandon it? Answ. Yet again! as if there were like necessity of saving doctrine, and arbitrary, if not unlawful, or inconvenient liturgy: who would have thought a man could have thwacked together so many incongruous similitudes, had it not been to defend the motley incoherence of a patched missal? Remonst. Why did not other churches conform to us? I may boldly say ours was, and is, the more noble church. Answ. O Laodicean, how vainly and how carnally dost thou boast of nobleness and precedency! more lordly you have made our church indeed, but not more noble. Remonst. The second quære is so weak, that I wonder it could fall from the pens of wise men. Answ. You are but a bad fencer, for you never make a proffer against another man's weakness; but you leave your own side always open: mark what follows. Remonst. Brethren, can ye think that our reformers had any other intentions than all the other founders of liturgies, the least part of whose care was the help of the minister's weakness? Answ. A solicitous care, as if the people could be ignorant of the matter to be prayed for; seeing the heads of public prayer are either ever constant, or very frequently the same. Remonst. And the words wherewith it should be clothed, might be the more prepared, and be so much the more intent and less distracted. Answ. As for the words, it is more to be feared lest the same continually should make them careless or sleepy, than that variety on the same known subject should distract; variety (as both music and rhetoric teacheth us) erects and rouses an auditory, like the masterful running over many chords and divisions; whereas if men should ever be thumbing the drone of one plain song, it would be a dull opiate to the most wakeful attention. Remonst. Tell me, is this liturgy good or evil? Answ. It is evil; repair the acheloian horn of your dilemma how you can, against the next push. Remonst. If it be evil, it is unlawful to be used. Answ. We grant you, and we find you have not your salve about you. Remonst. Were the imposition amiss, what is that to the people? Answ. Not a little, because they bear an equal part with the priest in many places, and have their cues and verses as well as he. Remonst. The ears and hearts of our people look for a settled liturgy. Answ. You deceive yourself in their ears and hearts, they look for no such matter. Remonst. The like answer serves for homilies, surely they were enjoined to all, &c. Answ. Let it serve for them that will be ignorant, we know that Hayward their own creature writes, that for defect of preachers, homilies were appointed to be read in churches, while Edward VI. reigned. Remonst. Away then with the book, whilst it may be supplied with a more profitable nonsense. Answ. Away with it rather, because it will be hardly supplied with a more unprofitable nonsense, than is in some passages of it to be seen. SECT. III. REMONST. Thus their cavils concerning liturgy are vanished. Answ. You wanted but hey pass, to have made your transition like a mystical man of Sturbridge. But for all your sleight of hand, our just exceptions against liturgy are not vanished, they stare you still in the face. Remonst. Certainly had I done so, I had been no less worthy to be spitten upon for my saucy uncharitableness, than they are now for their uncharitable falsehood. Answ. We see you are in a choler, therefore till you cool awhile we turn us to the ingenuous reader. See how this Remonstrant would invest himself conditionally with all the rheum of the town, that he might have sufficient to bespaul his brethren. They are accused by him of uncharitable falsehood, whereas their only crime hath been, that they have too credulously thought him, if not an over-logical, yet a well-meaning man; but now we find him either grossly deficient in his principles of logic, or else purposely bent to delude the parliament with equivocal sophistry, scattering among his periods ambiguous words, whose interpretation he will afterwards dispense according to his pleasure, laying before us universal propositions, and then thinks when he will to pinion them with a limitation: say, Remonstrant, for Remonst. Episcopal government is cried down abroad by either weak or factious persons. Remonst. Of the same strain is their witty descant of my confoundedness. Answ. Speak no more of it, it was a fatal word that God put into your mouth when you began to speak for episcopacy, as boding confusion to it. Remonst. I am still, and shall ever be thus self-confounded, as confidently to say, that he is no peaceable and right-affected son of the church of England, that doth not wish well to liturgy and episcopacy. Answ. If this be not that saucy uncharitableness, with which, in the foregoing page, you voluntarily invested yourself, with thought to have shifted it off, let the parliament judge, who now themselves are deliberating whether liturgy and episcopacy be to be well wished to, or no. Remonst. This they say they cannot but rank amongst my notorious-speak out, masters; I would not have that word stick in your teeth or in your throat. Answ. Take your spectacles, sir, it sticks in the paper, and was a pectoral roule we prepared for you to swallow down to your heart. Remonst. Wanton wits must have leave to play with their own stern. Answ. A meditation of yours doubtless observed at Lambeth from one of the archiepiscopal kittens. Remonst. As for that form of episcopal government, surely could those look with my eyes, they would see cause to be ashamed of this their injurious misconceit. Answ. We must call the barber for this wise sentence; one Mr. Ley the other day wrote a treatise of the sabbath, and his preface puts the wisdom of Balaam's ass upon one of our bishops, bold man for his labour; but we shall have more respect to our Remon Answ. Choose you whether you will have this proposition proved to you to be ridiculous or sophistical; for one of the two it must be. Step again to bishop Downam your patron, and let him gently catechise you in the grounds of logic; he will shew you that this axiom, "episcopal government is cried down abroad by either weak or factious persons," is as much as to say, they that cry down episcopacy abroad, are either weak or factious persons. He will tell you that this axiom contains a distribution, and that all such axioms are general; and lastly, that the distribution in which any part is wanting, or abundant, is faulty, and fallacious. If therefore distributing by the adjuncts of faction and weakness, the persons that decry epis-strant, and liken him to the ass's master, though the copacy, and you made your distribution imperfect for the nonce, you cannot but be guilty of fraud intended toward the honourable court to whom you wrote. If you had rather vindicate your honesty, and suffer in your want of art, you cannot condemn them of uncharitable falsehood, that attributed to you more skill than you had, thinking you had been able to have made a distribution, as it ought to be, general and full; and so any man would take it, the rather as being accompanied with that large word, (abroad,) and so take again either your manifest leasing, or manifest ig norance. Remonst. Now come these brotherly slanderers. Answ. Go on, dissembling Joab, as still your use is, call brother and smite; call brother and smite, till it be story say he was not so quick-sighted as his beast. Is not this Balaam the son of Beor, the man whose eyes are open, that said to the parliament, Surely, could those look with my eyes? Boast not of your eyes, it is feared you have Balaam's disease, a pearl in your eye, Mammon's prestriction. Remonst. Alas, we could tell you of China, Japan, Peru, Brazil, New England, Virginia, and a thousand others, that never had any bishops to this day. Answ. O do not foil your cause thus, and trouble Ortelius; we can help you, and tell you where they have been ever since Constantine's time at least, in a place called Mundus alter et idem, in the spacious and rich countries of Crapulia, Pamphagonia, Yuronia, and in the dukedom of Orgilia, and Variana, and their metro |