nature, which we cannot otherwise define than by saying it is infinite; as if infinite were definable, or infinity a subject for our narrow understanding. They who would prove religion by reason, do but weaken the cause which they endeavour to support: it is to take away the pillars from our faith, and to prop it only with a twig; it is to design a tower like that of Babel, which if it were possible, as it is not, to reach heaven, would come to nothing by the confusion of the workmen. For every man is building a several way; impotently conceited of his own model and his own materials: reason is always striving, and always at a loss; and of necessity it must so come to pass, while it is Let us be content at last to know God by his own methods; at least, so much of him as he is pleased to reveal to us in the sacred scriptures: to apprehend them to be the word of God, is all our reason has to do; for all beyond it is the work of faith, which is the seal of heaven impressed upon our human understanding.

have satisfied myself that I had done honestly not to have written what was my own. It has always been my thought, that heathens who never did, nor without miracle could, hear of the name of Christ, were yet in a possibility of salvation. Neither will it enter easily into my belief, that before the coming of our Saviour, the whole world, excepting only the Jewish nation, should lie under the inevitable necessity of everlasting punishment, for want of that revelation, which was confined to so small a spot of ground as that of Palestine. Among the sons of Noah we read of one only who was accursed; and if a blessing in the ripeness of time was reserved for Japhet, (of whose progeny we are) it seems unaccountable to me, why so many gene-exercised about that which is not its proper object. rations of the same offspring, as preceded our Saviour in the flesh, should be all involved in one common condemnation, and yet that their posterity should be entitled to the hopes of salvation: as if a bill of exclusion had passed only on the fathers, which debarred not the sons from their succession. Or that so many ages had been delivered over to Hell, and so many reserved for Heaven, and that And now for what concerns the holy bishop Athathe Devil had the first choice, and God the next. nasius, the preface of whose creed seems inconTruly I am apt to think, that the revealed religionsistent with my opinion; which is, that heathens which was taught by Noah to all his sons, might continue for some ages in the whole posterity. That afterwards it was included wholly in the family of Sem, is manifest; but when the progenies of Cham and Japhet swarmed into colonies, and those colonies were subdivided into many others: in process of time their descendants lost by little and little the primitive and purer rites of divine worship, retaining only the notion of one deity; to which succeeding generations added others: for men took their degrees in those ages from conquerors to gods. Revelation being thus eclipsed to almost all mankind, the light of nature as the next in dignity was substituted; and that is it which St. Paul concludes to be the rule of the heathens, and by which they are hereafter to be judged. If my supposition be true, then the consequence which I have assumed in my poem may be also true; namely, that deism, or the principles of natural worship, are only the faint remuants or dying flames of revealed religion in the posterity of Noah: and that our modern philosophers, nay and some of our philosophising divines, have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained, that, by their force, mankind has been able to find out that there is one supreme agent or intellectual being, which we call God: that praise and prayer are his due worship; and the rest of those deducements, which I am confident are the remote effects of revelation, and unattainable by our discourse, I mean as simply considered, and without the benefit of divine illumination. So that we have not lifted up ourselves to God, by the weak pinions of our reason, but he has been pleased to descend to us; and what Socrates said of him, what Plato writ, and the rest of the heathen philosophers of several nations, is all no more than the twilight of revelation, after the sun of it was set in the race of Noah. That there is something above us, some principle of motion, our reason can apprehend, though it cannot discover what it is by its own virtue. And indeed it is very improbable, that we, who by the strength of our faculties cannot enter into the knowledge of any being, not so much as of our own, should be able to find out by them, that supreme VOL. VIII.

our,

may possibly be saved: in the first place I desire it may be considered that it is the preface only, not the creed itself, which, till I am better informed, is of too hard a digestion for my charity. It is not that I am ignorant how many several texts of scripture seemingly support that cause; but neither am I ignorant how all those texts may receive a kinder and more mollified interpretation. Every man who is read in church history, knows that belief was drawn up after a long contestation with Arius, concerning the divinity of our blessed Saviand his being one substance with the father; and that thus compiled it was sent abroad among the christian churches, as a kind of test, which whosoever took was looked upon as an orthodox believer. It is manifest from hence, that the heathen part of the empire was not concerned in it; for its business was not to distinguish betwixt pagans and Christians, but betwixt heretics and true believers. This, well considered, takes off the heavy weight of censure, which I would willingly avoid from so venerable a man; for if this proposition, "whosoever will be saved," be restrained only to those to whom it was intended, and for whom it was composed, I mean the Christians; then the anathema reaches not the heathens, who had never heard of Christ, and were nothing interested in that dispute. After all, I am far from blaming even that prefatory addition to the creed, and as far from cavilling at the continuation of it in the liturgy of the church, where on the days appointed it is publicly read: for I suppose there is the same reason for it now, in opposition to the Socinians, as there was then against the Arians; the one being a heresy, which seems to have been refined out of the other; and with how much more plausibility of reason it combats our religion, with so much more caution it ought to be avoided : therefore the prudence of our church is to be commended, which has interposed her authority for the recommendation of this creed. Yet to such as are grounded in the true belief, those explanatory creeds, the Nicene and this of Athanasius, might perhaps be spared; for what is supernatural, will always be a mystery in spite of exposition; and

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for my own part, the plain apostles' creed is most suitable to my weak understanding, as the simplest diet is the most easy of digestion.

I have dwelt longer on this subject than I intended, and longer than perhaps I ought; for having laid down, as my foundation, that the scripture is a rule; that in all things needful to salvation it is clear, sufficient, and ordained by God Almighty for that purpose, I have left myself no right to interpret obscure places, such as concern the possibility of eternal happiness to heathens: because whatsoever is obscure is concluded not necessary to be known.

this they are bound by 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 inaxim in their church, where points of faith are not decided, and that doctors are of contrary opinions, they may foliow 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 domini, and that he holds in villanage of his Roman landlord. Which is no new claim put in for England. Our chronicles are his authentic 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 was received under the sordid condition of a vassalage.

It is not sufficient for the more moderate and

are many, to produce the evidences of their loyalty to the late king, and to declare their innocency in th's 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 a 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 heretic 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 pru dence; but when once they shall get power to shake him off, an heretic 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 public act of disowning and detest

But, by asserting the scripture to be the canon of our faith, I have unavoidably created to myself two sorts of enemies: the papists indeed, more directly, because they have kept the scripture from us what they could; and have reserved to themselves a right of interpreting what they have delivered, under the pretence of infallibility: and the fanatics more collaterally, because they have assumed what amounts to an infallibility, in the private spirit and have detorted those texts of scripture which are not necessary to salvation, to the damnable uses of sedition, disturbance and destruc-well-meaning papists, of which I doubt not there tion of the civil government. To begin with the papists, and to speak freely, I think them the less dangerous, at least in appearance, to our present state; for not only the penal laws are in force against them, and their number is contemptible; but also their peers and commons are excluded from parliament, and consequently those laws in no probability of being repealed. A general and uninterrupted plot of their clergy, ever since the reformation, I suppose all protestants believe; for it is not reasonable to think but that so many of their orders, as were outed from their fat possessions, would endeavour a re-entrance against those whom they account heretics. As for the late design, Mr. Coleman's letters, for aught I know, are the best evidence; and what they discover, without wire-drawing their sense, or malicious glosses, all men of reason conclude credible. If there be any thing more than this required of me, I must believe it as well as I am able, in spite of the witnesses, and out of a decent conformity to the votes of par-ing those Jesuitic principles; and subscribe to all liament; for I suppose the fanatics will not allow the private spirit in this case. Here the infallibility is at least in one part of the government; and our understandings as well as our wills are represented. But to return to the Roman catholics, how can we be secure from the practice of jesuited papists in that religion? For not two or three of that order, as some of them would impose upon us, but almost the whole body of them are of opinion, that their Leaving them therefore in so fair a way, if they infallible master has a right over kings, not only in please themselves, of satisfying all reasonable men spirituals but temporals. Not to name Mariana, of their sincerity and good meaning to the governBellarmine, Emanuel Sa, Molina, Santare, Siman-ment, I shall make bold to consider that other extreme cha, and at least twenty others of foreign countries; in our religion, I mean the fanatics, or schismatics, we can produce of our own nation, Campian, and of the English church. Since the Bible has been Doleman or Parsons, besides many are named translated into our tongue, they have used it so, as whom I have not read, who all of them attest this if their business was not to be saved, but to be doctrine, that the pope can depose and give away damned by its contents. If we consider only them, the right of any sovereign prince, si vel paulum de better had it been for the English nation, that it flexeret, if he shall never so little warp: but if he had still remained in the original Greek and Hebrew, once comes to be excommunicated, then the bond or at least in the honest Latin of St. Jerome, than of obedience is taken off from subjects; and they that several texts in it should have been prevari may and ought to drive him like another Nebu-cated to the destruction of that government, which chadnezzar, ex hominum christianorum dominatu, put it into so ungrateful hands. from exercising dominion over christians; and to

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 kingkilling, a thesis of the Jesuits maintained, amongst others, ex cathedra, as they call it, or in open consistory.

How many heresies the first translation of Tindal

produced in few years, let my lord Herbert's his- | tory 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: 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 fanatic members of 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 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 the 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 the party, though they durst not excuse this contempt and vilifying of the government, yet were pleased, and grinned at it with a pious smile; and called it a judgment of God against the hierarchy. Thus sectaries, we may see, were boru with teeth, foulmouthed and scurrilous from their infancy: and if spiritual pride, venom, violence, contempt of superiors, and slander, had been the marks of orthodox belief; the presbytery and the rest of our schismatics, which are their spawn, were always the most visible church in the Christian world.

It is true, the government was too strong at that time for a rebellion; but to show what proficiency they had made in Calvin's school, even then their mouths watered at it: for two of their gifted brotherhood, Hacket and Coppinger, as the story tells us, got up into a pease-cart and harangued the people, to dispose them to an insurrection, and to

establish their discipline by force: so that however it comes about, that now they celebrate queen Elizabeth's birth-night, as that of their saint and patroness; yet then they were for doing the work of the Lord by arms against her: and in all probability they wanted but a fanatic lord mayor and two sheriffs of their party, to have compassed it.

Our venerable Hooker, after many admonitions which he had given them, towards the end of his preface, breaks out into this prophetic speech. 'There is in every one of these considerations most just cause to fear, lest our hastiness to embrace a thing of so perilous consequence (meaning the presbyterian discip'ine) should cause posterity to feel those evils, which as yet are more easy for us to prevent, than they would be for them to remedy."

How fatally this Cassandra has foretold, we know too well by sad experience: the seeds were sown in the time of queen Elizabeth, the bloody harvest ripened in the reign of king Charles the Martyr: and because all the sheaves could not be carried off without shedding some of the loose grains, another crop is too like to follow; nay, I fear it is unavoidable if the conventiclers be permitted still to scatter.

A man may be suffered to quote an adversary to our religion, when he speaks truth: and it is the observation of Maimbourg, in his history of Calvinism, that wherever that discipline was planted and embraced, rebellion, civil war, and misery, attended it, And how indeed should it happen otherwise? Reformation of church and state has always been the ground of our divisions in England. While we were papists, our holy father rid us, by pretending authority out of the scriptures to depose princes; when we shook off his authority, the sectaries furnished themselves with the same weapons; and out of the same magazine, the Bible: so that the scriptures, which are in themselves the greatest security of governors, as commanding express obedience to them, are now turned to their destruction; and never, since the Reformation, has there wanted a text of their interpreting to authorize a rebel. And it is to be noted by the way, that the doctrines of king-killing and deposing, which have been taken up only by the worst party of the papists, the most frontless flatterers of the pope's authority, have been espoused, defended, are still maintained by the whole body of non-conformists and republicans. It is but dubbing themselves the people of God, which it is the interest of their preachers to tell them they are, and their own interest to believe; and after that, they cannot dip into the Bible, but one text or another will turn up for their purpose; if they are under persecution, as they call it, then that is a mark of their election; if they flourish, then God works miracles for their deliverance, and the saints are to possess the earth.

They may think themselves to be too roughly handled in this paper; but I, who know best how far I could have gone on this subject, must be bold to tell them they are spared: though at the same time I am not ignorant that they interpret the mildness of a writer to them, as they do the mercy of the government; in the one they think it fear, and conclude it weakness in the other. The best way for them to confute me is, as I before advised the papists, to disclaim their principles and re