of the ministry be. And in like manner, if the form of the ministry be grounded in the worldly degrees of authority, honor, temporal jurisdiction, we see with our eyes it will turn the inward power and purity of the gospel into the outward carnality of the law; evaporating and exhaling the internal worship into empty conformities and gay shows. And what remains then but that we should run into as dangerous and deadly apostasy as our lamentable neighbours the papists, who by this very snare and pitfall of imitating the ceremonial law, fell into that irrecoverable superstition as must needs make void the covenant of salvation to them that persist in this blindness?

CHAPTER IV.

That it is impossible to make the Priesthood of Aaron a Pattern whereon to ground Episcopacy.

THAT which was promised next, is to declare the impossibility of grounding evangelic government in the imitation of the Jewish priesthood; which will be done by considering both the quality of the persons, and the office itself.

Aaron and his sons were the princes of their tribe before they were sanctified to the priesthood; that personal eminence which they held above the other Levites, they received not only from their office, but partly brought it into their office; and so from that time forward the priests were not chosen out of the whole number of the Levites, as our bishops, but were born inheritors of the dignity. Therefore, unless we shall choose our prelates only out of the nobility and let them run in a blood, there can be no possible imitation of lording over their brethren in regard of their persons altogether unlike.

As for the office, which was a representation of Christ's own person more immediately in the high priest, and of his whole priestly office in all the other, to the performance of which the Levites were but as servitors and deacons, it was necessary there should be a distinction of dignity between two functions of so great odds. But there being no such difference among our ministers, unless it be in reference to the deacons, it is impossible to found a prelaty upon the imitation of this priesthood. For wherein, or in what work is the office of a prelate excellent above that of a pastor? In ordination, you will say; but flatly against scripture; for there we know Timothy received ordination by the hands of the presbytery, notwithstanding all the vain delusions that are used to evade that testimony and maintain an unwarrantable usurpation. But wherefore should ordination be a cause of setting up a superior degree in the church? Is not that whereby Christ became our Saviour a higher and greater work, than that whereby he did ordain messengers to preach and publish him our Saviour? Every minister sustains the person of Christ in his highest work of communicating to us the mysteries of our salvation, and hath the power of binding and absolving; how should he need a higher dignity to represent or execute that which is an inferior work in Christ? Why should the performance of ordination, which is a lower office, exalt a prelate, and not the seldom discharge of a higher and more noble office, which is preaching and administering, much rather depress him? Verily, neither the nature nor the example of ordination, doth any way require an imparity between the ordainer and the ordained; for what more natural than every like to produce his like, man to beget man, fire to propagate fire? And in examples of highest opinion, the ordainer is inferior to the

ordained; for the pope is not made by the precedent pope, but by cardinals, who ordain and consecrate to a higher and greater office than their own.

CHAPTER V.

To the Arguments of Bishop Andrews and the Primate. It follows here to attend to certain objections in a little treatise lately printed among others of like sort at Oxford, and in the title said to be out of the rude draughts of bishop Andrews; and surely they be rude draughts indeed, insomuch that it is marvel to think what his friends meant, to let come abroad such shallow reasonings with the name of a man so much bruited for learning.

In the twelfth and twentythird pages he seems most notoriously inconstant to himself; for in the former place he tells us he forbears to take any argument of prelaty from Aaron, as being the type of Christ. In the latter he can forbear no longer, but repents him of his rash gratuity, affirming that to say, Christ being come in the flesh, his figure in the high priest ceaseth, is the shift of an anabaptist; and stiffly argues, that Christ being as well king as priest, was as well foreresembled by the kings then, as by the high priest; so that if his coming take away the one type, it must also the other. Marvellous piece of divinity! and well worth that the land should pay six thousand pounds a year for, in a bishopric; although I read of no sophister among the Greeks that was so dear, neither Hippias nor Protagoras, nor any whom the Socratic school famously refuted without hire. Here we have the type of the king sewed to the tippet of the bishop, subtly to cast a jealousy upon the crown,

as if the right of kings, like Meleager in the Metamorphosis, were no longerlived than the firebrand of prelaty. But more likely the prelates, fearing, for their own guilty carriage protests they do fear, that their fair days cannot long hold, practise by possessing the king with this most false doctrine, to engage his power for them, as in his own quarrel, that when they fall they may fall in a general ruin; just as cruel Tiberius would wish;

'When I die let the earth be rolled in flames.'

But where, O Bishop, doth the purpose of the law set forth Christ to us as a king? That which never was intended in the law can never be abolished as part thereof. When the law was made, there was no king. If before the law or under the law, God by a special type in any king would foresignify the future kingdom of Christ, which is not yet visibly come, what was that to the law? The whole ceremonial law, and types can be in no law else, comprehends nothing but the propitiatory office of Christ's priesthood, which being in substance accomplished, both law and priesthood fades away of 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 seventeenth 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