mercenary whoredom under those fornicated arches, | captive minds, as returning with an insatiate greediwhich she calls God's house, and in the sight of those ness and force upon your worldly wealth and power, her altars, which she hath set up to be adored, makes wherewith to deck and magnify herself, and her false merchandise of the bodies and souls of men. Rejecting worships, he shall spoil and havoc your estates, disturb purgatory for no other reason, as it seems, than because your ease, diminish your honour, enthral your liberty her greediness cannot defer, but bad rather use the ut- under the swelling mood of a proud clergy, who will most extortion of redeemed penances in this life. But not serve or feed your souls with spiritual food; look because these matters could not be thus carried without not for it, they have not wherewithal, or if they had, it a begged and borrowed force from worldly authority, is not in their purpose. But when they have glutted therefore prelaty, slighting the deliberate and chosen their ungrateful bodies, at least, if it be possible that council of Christ in his spiritual government, whose those open sepulchres should ever be glutted, and when glory is in the weakness of fleshly things, to tread upon they have stuffed their idolish temples with the wastethe crest of the world's pride and violence by the powerful pillage of your estates, will they yet have any comof spiritual ordinances, hath on the contrary made these her friends and champions, which are Christ's enemies in this his high design, smothering and extinguishing the spiritual force of his bodily weakness in the discipline of his church with the boisterous and carnal tyranny of an undue, unlawful, and ungospel-like jurisdiction. And thus prelaty, both in her fleshly supportments, in her carnal doctrine of ceremony and tradition, in her violent and secular power, going quite counter to the prime end of Christ's coming in the flesh, that is, to reveal his truth, his glory, and his might, in a clean contrary manner than prelaty seeks to do, thwarting and defeating the great mystery of God; I do not conclude that prelaty is antichristian, for what need I? the things themselves conclude it. Yet if such like practices, and not many worse than these of our prelates, in that great darkness of the Roman church, have not exempted both her and her present members from being judged to be antichristian in all orthodoxal esteem; I cannot think but that it is the absolute voice of truth and all her children to pronounce this prelaty, and these her dark deeds in the midst of this great light wherein we live, to be more antichristian than antichrist himself. passion upon you, and that poor pittance which they have left you; will they be but so good to you as that ravisher was to his sister, when he had used her at his pleasure; will they but only hate ye, and so turn ye loose? No, they will not, lords and commons, they will not favour ye so much. What will they do then, in the name of God and saints, what will these manhaters yet with more despite and mischief do? I will tell ye, or at least remember ye, (for most of ye know it already,) that they may want nothing to make them true merchants of Babylon, as they have done to your souls, they will sell your bodies, your wives, your children, your liberties, your parliaments, all these things; and if there be ought else dearer than these, they will sell at an outcry in their pulpits to the arbitrary and illegal dispose of any one that may hereafter be called a king, whose mind shall serve him to listen to their bargain. And by their corrupt and servile doctrines boring our ears to an everlasting slavery, as they have done hitherto, so will they yet do their best to repeal and erase every line and clause of both our great charters. Nor is this only what they will do, but what they hold as the main reason and mystery of their advancement that they must do; be the prince never so just and equal to his subjects, yet such are their malicious and depraved eyes, that they so look on him, and so understand him, as if he required no other gratitude or piece of service from them than this. And indeed they stand so opportunely for the disturbing or the destroying of a state, being a knot of creatures, whose dignities, means, and preferments have no foundation in the gospel, as they themselves acknowledge, but only in the prince's faI ADD one thing more to those great ones that are so vour, and to continue so long to them, as by pleasing fond of prelaty: this is certain, that the gospel being him they shall deserve: whence it must needs be they the hidden might of Christ, as hath been heard, that should bend all their intentions and services to no other ever a victorious power joined with it, like him in the ends but to his, that if it should happen that a tyrant Revelation that went forth on the white horse with his (God turn such a scourge from us to our enemies) bow and his crown conquering and to conquer. If we should come to grasp the sceptre, here were his spearlet the angel of the gospel ride on his own way, he men and his lances, here were his firelocks ready, he does his proper business, conquering the high thoughts, should need no other pretorian band nor pensionary and the proud reasonings of the flesh, and brings them than these, if they could once with their perfidious under to give obedience to Christ with the salvation of preachments awe the people. For although the premany souls. But if ye turn him out of his road, and lates in time of popery were sometimes friendly enough in a manner force him to express his irresistible power to Magna Charta, it was because they stood upon their by a doctrine of carnal might, as prelaty is, he will own bottom, without their main dependance on the use that fleshly strength, which ye put into his hands, royal nod: but now being well acquainted that the to subdue your spirits by a servile and blind supersti-protestant religion, if she will reform herself rightly tion; and that again shall hold such dominion over your by the Scriptures, must undress them of all their gilded THE CONCLUSION. The mischief that prelaty does in the state. vanities, and reduce them as they were at first, to the lowly and equal order of presbyters, they know it concerns them nearly to study the times more than the text, and to lift up their eyes to the hills of the court, from whence only comes their help; but if their pride grow weary of this crouching and observance, as ere long it would, and that yet their minds climb still to a higher ascent of worldly honour, this only refuge can remain to them, that they must of necessity contrive to bring themselves and us back again to the pope's supremacy; and this we see they had by fair degrees of late been doing. These be the two fair supporters between which the strength of prelaty is borne up, either of inducing tyranny, or of reducing, popery. Hence also we may judge that prelaty is mere falsehood. For the property of truth is, where she is publicly taught to unyoke and set free the minds and spirits of a nation first from the thraldom of sin and superstition, after which all honest and legal freedom of civil life cannot be long absent; but prelaty, whom the tyrant custom begot, a natural tyrant in religion, and in state the agent and minister of tyranny, seems to have had this fatal gift in her nativity, like another Midas, that whatsoever she should touch or come near either in ecclesial or political government, it should turn, not to gold, though she for her part could wish it, but to the dross and scum of slavery, breeding and settling both in the bodies and the souls of all such as do not in time, with the sovereign treacle of sound doctrine, provide to fortify their hearts against her hierarchy. The service of God who is truth, her liturgy confesses to be perfect freedom; but her works and her opinions declare, that the service of prelaty is perfect slavery, and by consequence perfect falsehood. Which makes me wonder much that many of the gentry, studious men as I hear, should engage themselves to write and speak publicly in her defence; but that I believe their honest and ingenuous natures coming to the universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastical bur in their throats, as hath stopped and hindered all true and generous philosophy from entering, cracked their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms, and hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men prelatically addicted, whose unchastened and unwrought minds were never yet initiated or subdued under the true lore of religion or moral virtue, which two are the best and greatest points of learning; but either slightly trained up in a kind of hypocritical and hackney course of literature to get their living by, and dazzle the ignorant, or else fondly over-studied in useless controversies, except those which they use with all the specious and delusive subtlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta; having a gospel and church-government set before their eyes, as a fair field wherein they might exercise the greatest virtues and the greatest deeds of christian authority, in mean fortunes and little furniture of this world; (which even the sage heathen writers, and those old Fabritii and Curii well knew to be a manner of working, than which nothing could liken a mortal man more to God, who delights most to work from within himself, and not by the heavy luggage of corporeal instruments ;) they understand it not, and think no such matter, but admire and dote upon worldly riches and honours, with an easy and intemperate life, to the bane of Christianity: yea, they and their seminaries shame not to profess, to petition, and never leave pealing our ears, that unless we fat them like boars, and cram them as they list with wealth, with deaneries and pluralities, with baronies and stately preferments, all learning and religion will go underfoot. Which is such a shameless, such a bestial plea, and of that odious impudence in churchmen, who should be to us a pattern of temperance and frugal mediocrity, who should teach us to contemn this world and the gaudy things thereof, according to the promise which they themselves require from us in baptism, that should the Scripture stand by and be mute, there is not that sect of philosophers among the heathen so dissolute, no not Epicurus, nor Aristippus with all his Cyrenaic rout, but would shut his schooldoors against such greasy sophisters; not any college of mountebanks, but would think scorn to discover in themselves with such a brazen forehead the outrageous desire of filthy lucre. Which the prelates make so little conscience of, that they are ready to fight, and if it lay in their power, to massacre all good Christians under the names of horrible schismatics, for only finding fault with their temporal dignities, their unconscionable wealth and revenues, their cruel authority over their brethren that labour in the word, while they snore in their luxurious excess: openly proclaiming themselves now in the sight of all men, to be those which for awhile they sought to cover under sheep's clothing, ravenous and savage wolves, threatening inroads and bloody incursions upon the flock of Christ, which they took upon them to feed, but now claim to devour as their prey. More like that huge dragon of Egypt, breathing out waste and desolation to the land, unless he were daily fattened with virgin's blood. Him our old patron St. George, by his matchless valour slew, as the prelate of the garter that reads his collect can tell. And if our princes and knights will imitate the fame of that old champion, as by their order of knighthood solemnly taken they vow, far be it that they should uphold and side with this English dragon; but rather to do as indeed their oaths bind them, they should make it their knightly adventure to pursue and vanquish this mighty sail-winged monster, that menaces to swallow up the land, unless her bottomless gorge may be satisfied with the blood of the king's daughter the church; and may, as she was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of the saints. Nor will any one have reason to think this as too incredible or too tragical to be spoken of prelaty, if he consider well from what a mass of slime and mud the slothful, the covetous, and ambitious hopes of church-promotions and fat bishoprics, she is bred up and nuzzled in, like a great Python, from her youth, to prove the general poison both of doctrine and good discipline in the land. For certainly such hopes and such principles of earth giving parliament, yourselves, worthy peers and commons, can best testify; the current of whose glorious and immortal actions hath been only opposed by the obscure and pernicious designs of the prelates, until their insolence broke out to such a bold affront, as bath justly immured their haughty looks within strong walls. Nor have they done any thing of late with more diligence, than to hinder or break the happy assembling of parliaments, however needful to repair the shattered and disjointed frame of the commonwealth; or if they cannot do this, to cross, to disenable, and traduce all parliamentary proceedings. And this, if nothing else, plainly accuses them to be no lawful members of the house, if they thus perpetually mutiny against their own body. And though they pretend, like Solomon's as these wherein she welters from a young one, are the immediate generation both of a slavish and tyrannous life to follow, and a pestiferous contagion to the whole kingdom, till like that fen-born serpent she be shot to death with the darts of the sun, the pure and powerful beams of God's word. And this may serve to describe to us in part, what prelaty hath been, and what, if she stand, she is like to be towards the whole body of people in England. Now that it may appear how she is not such a kind of evil, as hath any good or use in it, which many evils have, but a distilled quintessence, a pure elixir of mischief, pestilent alike to all; I shall shew briefly, ere I conclude, that the prelates, as they are to the subjects a calamity, so are they the greatest underminers and betrayers of the monarch, to whom they seem to be most favourable. I cannot bet-harlot, that they have right thereto, by the same judgter liken the state and person of a king than to that ment that Solomon gave, it cannot belong to them, mighty Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from whenas it is not only their assent, but their endeavour his birth in the precepts and the practice of temperance continually to divide parliaments in twain; and not and sobriety, without the strong drink of injurious and only by dividing, but by all other means to abolish and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and destroy the free use of them to all posterity. For the perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, which, and for all their former misdeeds, whereof this the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoul- book and many volumes more cannot contain the ders. And while he keeps them about him undiminished moiety, I shall move ye, lords, in the behalf I dare say and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that of many thousand good Christians, to let your justice is, with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and and speedy sentence pass against this great malefactor put to confusion thousands of those that rise against prelaty. And yet in the midst of rigour I would behis just power. But laying down his head among the seech ye to think of mercy; and such a mercy, (I fear strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and thinks I shall overshoot with a desire to save this falling preno harm, they wickedly shaving off all those bright | laty,) such a mercy (if I may venture to say it) as may and weighty tresses of his laws, and just prerogatives, exceed that which for only ten righteous persons would which were his ornament and strength, deliver him have saved Sodom. Not that I dare advise ye to conover to indirect and violent counsels, which, as those tend with God, whether he or you shall be more merPhilistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his ciful, but in your wise esteems to balance the offences natural discerning, and make him grind in the prison- of those peccant cities with these enormous riots of unhouse of their sinister ends and practices upon him: till godly misrule, that prelaty hath wrought both in the he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have bereft him of church of Christ, and in the state of this kingdom. his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the And if ye think ye may with a pious presumption strive golden beams of law and right: and they sternly shook, to go beyond God in mercy, I shall not be one now thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil that would dissuade ye. Though God for less than ten counsellors, but not without great affliction to himself. just persons would not spare Sodom, yet if you can This is the sum of their loyal service to kings; yet find, after due search, but only one good thing in prethese are the men that still cry, The king, the king, the laty, either to religion or civil government, to king or Lord's anointed. We grant it, and wonder how they parliament, to prince or people, to law, liberty, wealth, came to light upon any thing so true; and wonder or learning, spare her, let her live, let her spread among more, if kings be the Lord's anointed, how they dare ye, till with her shadow all your dignities and honours, thus oil over and besmear so holy an unction with the and all the glory of the land be darkened and obscured. corrupt and putrid ointment of their base flatteries; But on the contrary, if she be found to be malignant, which, while they smooth the skin, strike inward and hostile, destructive to all these, as nothing can be surer, envenom the lifeblood. What fidelity kings can ex- then let your severe and impartial doom imitate the pect from prelates, both examples past, and our present divine vengeance; rain down your punishing force experience of their doings at this day, whereon is upon this godless and oppressing government, and bring grounded all that hath been said, may suffice to inform such a dead sea of subversion upon her, that she may And if they be such clippers of regal power, and never in this land rise more to afflict the holy reformed shavers of the laws, how they stand affected to the law-church, and the elect people of God. us. ANIMADVERSIONS UPON THE REMONSTRANT'S DEFENCE AGAINST SMECTYMNUUS. [FIRST PUBLISHED 1641.] THE PREFACE. ALTHOUGH it be a certain truth, that they who undertake a religious cause need not care to be men-pleasers ; yet because the satisfaction of tender and mild consciences is far different from that which is called men-pleasing ; to satisfy such, I shall address myself in few words to give notice beforehand of something in this book, which to some men perhaps may seem offensive, that when I have rendered a lawful reason of what is done, I may trust to have saved the labour of defending or excusing hereafter. We all know that in private or personal injuries, yea in public sufferings for the cause of Christ, his rule and example teaches us to be so far from a readiness to speak evil, as not to answer the reviler in his language, though never so much provoked: yet in the detecting and convincing of any notorious enemy to truth and his country's peace, especially that is conceited to have a voluble and smart fluence of tongue, and in the vain confidence of that, and out of a more tenacious cling to worldly respects, stands up for all the rest to justify a long usurpation and convicted pseudepiscopy of prelates, with all their ceremonies, liturgies, and tyrannies, which God and man are now ready to explode and hiss out of the land; I suppose, and more than suppose, it will be nothing disagreeing from christian meekness to handle such a one in a rougher accent, and to send home his haughtiness well bespurted with his own holywater. Nor to do thus are we unautoritied either from the moral precept of Solomon, to answer him thereafter that prides him in his folly; nor from the example of Christ, and all his followers in all ages, who, in the refuting of those that resisted sound doctrine, and by subtile dissimulations corrupted the minds of men, have wrought up their zealous souls into such vehemencies, as nothing could be more killingly spoken: for who can be a greater enemy to mankind, who a more dangerous deceiver, than he who, defending a traditional corruption, uses no common arts, but with a wily stratagem of yielding to the time a greater part of his cause, seeming to forego all that man's invention hath done therein, and driven from much of his hold in Scripture; yet leaving it hanging by a twined thread, not from divine command, but from apostolical prudence or assent; as if he had the surety of some rolling trench, creeps up by this mean to his relinquished fortress of divine authority again, and still hovering between the confines of that which he dares not be openly, and that which he will not be sincerely, trains on the easy Christian insensibly within the close ambushment of worst errours, and with a sly shuffle of counterfeit principles, chopping and changing till he have gleaned all the good ones out of their minds, leaves them at last, after a slight resemblance of sweeping and garnishing, under the seven-fold possession of a desperate stupidity? And therefore they that love the souls of men, which is the dearest love, and stirs up the noblest jealousy, when they meet with such collusion, cannot be blamed though they be transported with the zeal of truth to a well-heated fervency; especially, seeing they which thus offend against the souls of their brethren, do it with delight to their great gain, ease, and advancement in this world; but they that seek to discover and oppose their false trade of deceiving, do it not without a sad and unwilling anger, not without many hazards; but without all private and personal spleen, and without any thought of earthly reward, whenas this very course they take stops their hopes of ascending above a lowly and unenviable pitch in this life. And although in the serious uncasing of a grand imposture, (for to deal plainly with you, readers, prelaty is no better,) there be mixed here and there such a grim laughter, as may appear at the same time in an austere visage, it cannot be taxed of levity or insolence: for even this vein of laughing (as I could produce out of grave authors) bath ofttimes a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting; nor can there be a more proper object of indignation and scorn together, than a false prophet taken in the greatest, dearest, and most dangerous cheat, the cheat of souls: in the disclosing whereof, if it be harmful to be angry, and withal to cast a lowering smile, when the properest object calls for both, it will be long enough ere any be able to say, why those two most rational faculties of human intellect, anger and laughter, were first seated in the breast of man. Thus much, readers, in favour of the softer spirited Christian, for other exceptioners there was no thought taken. Only if it be asked, why this close and succinct manner of coping with the adversary was rather chosen, this was the reason chiefly, that the ingenuous reader, without further amusing himself in the labyrinth of controversial antiquity, may come to the speediest way to see the truth vindicated, and sophistry taken short at the first false bound. Next, that the Remonstrant himself, as oft as he pleases to be frolic, and brave it with others, may find no gain of money, and may learn not to insult in so bad a cause. But now he begins. SECT. I. REMONSTRANT. My single remonstrance is encountered with a plural adversary. Answer. Did not your single remonstrance bring along with it a hot scent of your more than singular affection to spiritual pluralities, your singleness would be less suspected with all good Christians than it is. Remonst. Their names, persons, qualities, numbers, I care not to know. Answ. Their names are known to the all-knowing Power above; and in the mean while, doubtless, they reck not whether you or your nomenclator know them or not. and christian warfare, the luggage is too great that Answ. To the bar with him then. Gladly you say. We believe you as gladly as your whole faction wished and longed for the assembling of this parliament, as gladly as your beneficiaries the priests came up to answer the complaints and outcries of all the shires. Remonst. The Areopagi! who were those? Truly, my masters, I had thought this had been the name of Remonst. But could they say my name is Legion, the place, not of the men. for we are many? Answ. Wherefore should ye begin with the devil's name, descanting upon the number of your opponents? Wherefore that conceit of Legion with a by-wipe? Was it because you would have men take notice how you esteem them, whom through all your book so bountifully you call your brethren? We had not thought that Legion could have furnished the Remonstrant with so many brethren. Remonst. My cause, ye gods, would bid me meet them undismayed, &c. Answ. Ere a foot further we must be content to hear a preambling boast of your valour, what a St. Dunstan you are to encounter Legions, either infernal or human. Remonst. My cause, ye gods. Answ. What gods? Unless your belly, or the god of this world be he? Shew us any one point of your remonstrance that does not more concern superiority, pride, ease, and the belly, than the truth and glory of God, or the salvation of souls. Remonst. My cause, ye gods, would bid me meet them undismayed, and to say with holy David, "though a host, &c." Answ. Do not think to persuade us of your undaunted courage, by misapplying to yourself the words of holy David; we know you fear, and are in an agony at this present, lest you should lose that superfluity of riches and honour, which your party usurp. And whosoever covets, and so earnestly labours to keep such an incumbering surcharge of earthly things, cannot but have an earthquake still in his bones. You are not armed, Remonstrant, nor any of your band; you are not dieted, nor your loins girt for spiritual valour, Answ. A soar-eagle would not stoop at a fly; but sure some pedagogue stood at your elbow, and made it itch with this parlous criticism; they urged you with a decree of the sage and severe judges of Athens, and you cite them to appear for certain paragogical contempts, before a capacious pedanty of hot-livered grammarians. Mistake not the matter, courteous Remonstrant, they were not making Latin: if in dealing with an outlandish name, they thought it best not to screw the English mouth to a harsh foreign termination, so they kept the radical word, they did no more than the elegantest authors among the Greeks, Romans, and at this day the Italians, in scorn of such a servility use to do. Remember how they mangle our British names abroad; what trespass were it, if we in requital should as much neglect theirs? And our learned Chaucer did not stick to do so, writing Semyramis for Semiramis, Amphiorax for Amphiaraus, K. Sejes for K. Ceyx the husband of Alcyone, with many other names strangely metamorphosed from the true orthography, if he had made any account of that in these kind of words. Remonst. Lest the world should think the press had of late forgot to speak any language other than libellous, this honest paper hath broken through the throng. Answ. Mince the matter while you will, it shewed but green practice in the laws of discreet rhetoric to blurt upon the ears of a judicious parliament with such a presumptuous and overweening proem: but you do well to be the fewer of your own mess. Remonst. That which you miscall the preface, was a too just complaint of the shameful number of libels. Answ. How long is it that you and the prelatical |