municated, then the bond of obedience is taken off from subjects; and they may and ought to drive him, like another Nebuchadnezzar, ex hominum Christianorum dominatu, from exercising dominion over Christians: and to this they are bound

virtue of divine precept, and by all the ties of conscience, under no less penalty than damnation. If they answer me, (as a learned priest has lately written,) that this doctrine of the Jesuits is not de fide, and that consequently they are not obliged by it, they must pardon me if I think they have said nothing to the purpose; for it is a maxim in their church, where points of faith are not decided, and that doctors are of contrary opinions, they may follow which part they please; but more safely, the most received and most authorized. And their champion, Bellarmine, has told the world in his Apology, that the King of England is a vassal to the Pope, ratione directi dominii, and that he holds in villanage of his Roman landlord; which is no new claim put in for England: our chronicles are his authentick witnesses, that King John was deposed by the same plea, and Philip Augustus admitted tenant. And, which makes the more for Bellarmine, the French King was again ejected, when our King submitted to the church, and the crown received under the sordid condition of a vassalage.

It is not sufficient for the more moderate and well-meaning papists, (of which I doubt not there are many,) to produce the evidences of their loyalty

to the late King, and to declare their innocency in this plot. I will grant their behaviour in the first to have been as loyal and as brave as they desire, and will be willing to hold them excused as to the second (I mean when it comes to my turn, and after my betters, for it is madness to be sober alone, while the nation continues drunk); but that saying of their father Cres. is still running in my head,-that they may be dispensed with in their obedience to an heretick prince, while the necessity of the times shall oblige them to it; (for that, as another of them tells us, is only the effect of Christian prudence;) but when once they shall get power to shake him off, an heretick is no lawful King, and consequently to rise against him is no rebellion. I should be glad therefore, that they would follow the advice which was charitably given them by a reverend prelate of our church, namely, that they would join in a publick act of disowning and detesting those Jesuitick principles, and subscribe to all doctrines which deny the Pope's authority of deposing Kings, and releasing subjects from their oath of allegiance; to which I should think they might easily be induced, if it be true that this present Pope has condemned the doctrine of king-killing, (a thesis of the Jesuits,) amongst others, ex cathedra, as they call it, or in open consistory.

8 Hugh, al. Serenus, Cressy, I suppose, is meant; a Roman catholick, who published several controversial tracts on religious subjects between 1663 and 1673.

Leaving them, therefore, in so fair a way (if they please themselves) of satisfying all reasonable men of their sincerity and good meaning to the government, I shall make bold to consider that other extreme of our religion,-I mean the fanaticks, or schismaticks, of the English church. Since the Bible has been translated into our tongue, they have used it so, as if their business was not to be saved, but to be damned, by its conIf we consider only them, better had it been for the English nation that it had still remained in the original Greek and Hebrew, or at least in the honest Latin of St. Jerome, than that several texts in it should have been prevaricated to the destruction of that government which put it into so ungrateful hands.

tents.

How many heresies the first translation of Tyndal produced in few years, let my Lord Herbert's History of Henry the Eighth inform you; insomuch that for the gross errours in it, and the great mischiefs it occasioned, a sentence passed on the first edition of the Bible, too shameful almost to be repeated. After the short reign of Edward the Sixth, (who had continued to carry on the reformation, on other principles than it was begun,) every one knows that not only the chief promoters of that work, but many others, whose consciences would not dispense with popery, were forced, for fear of persecution, to change climates;

› See Herbert's Hist, of Henry VIII. p. 559.

from whence returning at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, many of them who had been in France, and at Geneva, brought back the rigid opinions and imperious discipline of Calvin to graft upon our reformation; which, though they cunningly concealed at first, (as well knowing how nauseously that drug would go down in a lawful monarchy, which was prescribed for a rebellious commonwealth,) yet they always kept it in reserve, and were never wanting to themselves either in court or parliament, when either they had any prospect of a numerous party of fanatick members in, the one, or the encouragement of any favourite in the other, whose covetousness was gaping at the patrimony of the church. They who will consult the works of our venerable Hooker, or the account of his life, or more particularly the letter written to him on this subject by George Cranmer,' may see by what gradations they proceeded; from the dislike of cap and

I

George Cranmer was great-nephew to Archbishop Cranmer, and a pupil of Hooker's at Corpus Christi College, in Oxford. He travelled for some years in France, Germany, and Italy, with the learned Sir Edwyn Sandys, and afterwards was Secretary to Sir Henry Killigrew, the English Ambassador at Paris. After Sir Henry's death, he accompanied Lord Mountjoy to Ireland in 1600, where in an engagement with the rebels near Carlingford, he unfortunately received a wound of which he died. The letter here referred to was addressed by Cranmer to his former tutor in Feb. 1598-9, and was annexed by Isaac Walton to his Life of Hooker, 8vo. 1665.

hanged

surplice, the very next step was admonitions to the parliament against the whole government ecclesiastical: then came out volumes in English and Latin in defence of their tenets; and immediately practices were set on foot to erect their discipline without authority. Those not succeeding, satire and railing was the next; and Martin Mar-prelate, (the Marvel of those times) was the first presbyterian scribbler who sanctified libels and scurrility to the use of the good old cause: which was done (says my author) upon this account; that their serious treatises having been fully answered and refuted, they might compass by railing what they had lost by reasoning; and when their cause was sunk in court and parliament, they might at least hedge in a stake amongst the rabble, for to their ignorance all things are wit, which are abusive; but if church and state were made the theme, then the doctoral degree of wit was to be taken at Billingsgate. Even the most saintlike of

2 The presbyterian scribbler whom our author describes as the prototype of Andrew Marvel, and who was usually distinguished by the name of Martin Marprelate, (from his violent animosity against episcopacy,) was John Penry, alias ap Henry, a Welchman, who in 1578 became a subsizer of Peter-House College, in Cambridge. After publishing above twenty controversial and seditious tracts, with ridiculous titles, he was hung at St. Thomas-aWatering, May 29, 1593. A full account of this furious zealot and his works may be found in Wood's ATH. OXON. i. 258.