upon every age and sex, attributing to all men, and requiring from them the ability of searching, trying, examining all things, and by the spirit discerning that which is good; and as the scriptures themselves pronounce their own plainness, so do the fathers testify of them.

6

I will not run into a paroxysm of citations again in this point, only instance Athanasius in his forementioned first page. The knowledge of truth,' saith he, wants no human lore, as being evident in itself, and by the preaching of Christ now opens brighter than the sun.' If these doctors, who had scarce half the light that we enjoy, who all, except two or three, were ignorant of the Hebrew tongue, and many of the Greek, blundering upon the dangerous and suspectful translations of the apostate Aquila, the heretical Theodotion, the judaized Symmachus, the erroneous Origen; if these could yet find the Bible so easy, why should we doubt, that have all the helps of learning, and faithful industry that man in this life can look for, and the assistance of God as near now to us as ever? But let the scriptures be hard; are they more hard, more crabbed, more abstruse than the fathers? He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected style of the scriptures, will be ten times more puzzled with the knotty Africanisms, the pampered metaphors, the intricate and involved sentences of the fathers, besides the fantastic and declamatory flashes, the cross-jingling periods which cannot but disturb, and come thwart a settled devotion, worse than the din of bells and rattles.

Now, sir, for the love of holy reformation, what can be said more against these importunate clients of antiquity, than she herself, their patroness, hath said? Whether, think ye, would she approve; still to doat upon immeasurable, innumerable, and therefore unneces

sary and unmerciful volumes, choosing rather to err with the specious name of the fathers; or, to take a sound truth at the hand of a plain upright man, that all his days hath been diligently reading the holy scriptures, and thereto imploring God's grace, while the admirers of antiquity have been beating their brains about their ambones, their dyptichs, and meniaias? Now, he that cannot tell of stations and indictions, nor has wasted his precious hours in the endless conferring of councils and conclaves that demolish one another; although I know many of those that pretend to be great rabbies in these studies, have scarce saluted them from the strings and the titlepage, or, to give them more, have been but the ferrets and mousehunts of an index; yet what pastor or minister, how learned, religious, or discreet soever, does not now bring both his cheeks full blown with œcumenical and synodical, shall be counted a lank, shallow, insufficient man, yea, a dunce, and not worthy to speak about reformation of church discipline. But I trust they for whom God hath reserved the honor of reforming this church, will easily perceive their adversaries' drift in thus calling for antiquity. They fear the plain field of the scriptures; the chase is too hot; they seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest; they would imbosk; they feel themselves strook in the transparent streams of divine truth; they would plunge, and tumble, and think to lie hid in the foul weeds and muddy waters, where no plummet can reach the bottom. But let them beat themselves like whales, and spend their oil till they be dragged ashore. Though wherefore should the ministers give them so much line for shifts and delays? Wherefore should they not urge only the gospel, and hold it ever in their faces like a mirror of diamond, till it dazzle and pierce their misty eyeballs? maintaining it the

honor of its absolute sufficiency and supremacy inviolable; for if the scripture be for reformation, and antiquity to boot, it is but an advantage to the dozen, it is no winning cast; and though antiquity be against it, while the scriptures be for it, the cause is as good as ought to be wished, antiquity itself sitting judge.

But to draw to an end; the second sort of those that may be justly numbered among the hinderers of reformation, are libertines; these suggest that the discipline sought would be intolerable; for one bishop now in a diocese, we should then have a pope in every parish. It will not be requisite to answer these men, but only to discover them; for reason they have none, but lust and licentiousness, and therefore answer can have none. It is not any discipline that they could live under; it is the corruption and remissness of discipline that they seek. Episcopacy duly executed, yea, the Turkish and Jewish rigor against whoring and drinking; the dear and tender discipline of a father, the sociable and loving reproof of a brother, the bosom admonition of a friend, is a presbytery, and a consistory to them. It is only the merry friar in Chaucer can disple them.

Full sweetly heard he confession,
And pleasant was his absolution;

He was an easy man to give penance.

And so I leave them; and refer the political discourse of episcopacy to a second book.

OF

REFORMATION IN ENGLAND.

THE SECOND BOOK.

SIR,

It is a work good and prudent to be able to guide one man; of larger extended virtue to order well one house; but to govern a nation piously and justly, which only is to say happily, is for a spirit of the greatest size, and divinest mettle. And certainly of no less a mind, nor of less excellence in another way, were they who by writing laid the solid and true foundations of this science, which being of greatest importance to the life of man, yet there is no art that hath been more cankered in her principles, more soiled, and slubbered with aphorisming pedantry, than the art of policy; and that most, where a man would think should least be, in christian commonwealths. They teach not, that to govern well, is to train up a nation in true wisdom and virtue, and that which springs from thence, magnanimity, (take heed of that) and that which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likeness to God, which in one word we call godliness; and that this is the true flourishing of a land, other things follow as the shadow does the substance; to teach thus were mere pulpitry to them. This is the masterpiece of a modern politician, how to qualify and mould the sufferance and subjection of the people to the length of that foot that is to tread

on their necks; how rapine may serve itself with the fair and honorable pretences of public good; how the puny law may be brought under the wardship and control of lust and will; in which attempt if they fall short, then must a superficial color of reputation by all means, direct or indirect, be gotten to wash over the unsightly bruise of honor. To make men governable in this manner, their precepts mainly tend to break a national spirit and courage, by countenancing open riot, luxury, and ignorance, till having thus disfigured and made men beneath men, as Juno in the fable of Io, they deliver up the poor transformed heifer of the commonwealth to be stung and vexed with the breese and goad of oppression, under the custody of some Argus with a hundred eyes of jealousy. To be plainer, sir, how to solder, how to stop a leak, how to keep up the floating carcase of a crazy and diseased monarchy or state, betwixt wind and water, swimming still upon her own dead lees, that now is the deep design of a politician. Alas, sir! a commonwealth ought to be but as one huge christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body; for look what the grounds and causes are of single happiness to one man; the same ye shall find them to a whole state, as Aristotle, both in his ethics and politics, from the principles of reason lays down; by consequence therefore, that which is good and agreeable to monarchy will appear soonest to be so, by being good and agreeable to the true welfare of every christian; and that which can be justly proved hurtful and offensive to every true christian, will be evinced to be alike hurtful to monarchy; for God forbid that we should separate and distinguish the end and good of a monarch, from the end and good of the monarchy, or of that, from christianity.