"chief interest consists in their fidelity to the crown." But true policy will teach them, to find a safer interest in the common friendship of England, than in the ruins of one ejected family.

CHAPTER XIV.

Upon the Covenant.

231. UPON this theme his discourse is long, his matter little but repetition, and therefore soon answered. First, after an abusive and strange apprehension of covenants, as if men "pawned their souls" to them with whom they covenant, he digresses to plead for bishops; first from the antiquity of their "possession here, since the first plantation of Christianity in this island;" next from "a universal prescription since the apostles, till this last century." But what avails the most primitive antiquity against the plain sense of Scripture? which, if the last century have best followed, it ought in our esteem to be the first. And yet it hath been often proved by learned men, from the writings and epistles of most ancient Christians, that episcopacy crept not up into an order above the presbyters, till many years after that the apostles were deceased.

232. He next "is unsatisfied with the covenant,”

not only for "some passages in it referring to himself," as he supposes, "with very dubious and dangerous limitations," but for binding men" by oath and covenant" to the reformation of church discipline. First, those limitations were not more dangerous to him, than he to our liberty and religion; next, that which was there vowed, to cast out of the church an antichristian hierarchy which God had not planted, but ambition and corruption had brought in, and fostered to the church's great damage and oppression, was no point of controversy to be argued without end, but a thing of clear moral necessity to be forthwith done. Neither was the "covenant superfluous, though former engagements, both religious and legal, bound us before;" but was the practice of all churches heretofore intending reformation. All Israel, though bound enough before by the law of Moses "to all necessary duties;" yet with Asa their king entered into a new covenant at the beginning of a reformation and the Jews, after captivity, without consent demanded of that king who was their master, took solemn oath to walk in the commandments of God.

233. All Protestant churches have done the like, notwithstanding former engagements to their several duties. And although his aim were to sow variance between the protestation and the covenant, to reconcile them is not difficult. The protestation was but one step, extending only to the doctrine of the church of England, as it was distinct from church discipline; the covenant went further, as it

pleased God to dispense his light and our encouragement by degrees, and comprehended churchgovernment:-former with latter steps, in the progress of well-doing need not reconcilement. Nevertheless he breaks through to his conclusion, "that all honest and wise men ever thought themselves sufficiently bound by former ties of religion;" leaving Asa, Ezra, and the whole church of God, in sundry ages, to shift for honesty and wisdom from some other than his testimony. And although after-contracts absolve not till the former be made void, yet he first having done that, our duty returns back, which to him was neither moral nor eternal, but conditional.

234. Willing to persuade himself that many "good men" took the covenant, either unwarily or out of fear, he seems to have bestowed some thoughts how these "good men," following his advice, may keep the covenant and not keep it. The first evasion is, presuming "that the chief end of covenanting in such men's intentions was to preserve religion in purity, and the kingdom's peace." But the covenant will more truly inform them, 7 that purity of religion and the kingdom's peace was not then in state to be preserved, but to be restored; and therefore binds them not to a preservation of what was, but to a reformation of what was evil, what was traditional, and dangerous, whether novelty or antiquity, in church or state. To do this, clashes with "no former oath" lawfully sworn either to God or the king, and rightly understood.

235. In general, he brands all "such confedera

tions by league and covenant, as the common road used in all factious perturbations of state and church." This kind of language reflects, with the same ignominy, upon all the Protestant reformations that have been since Luther; and so indeed doth his whole book, replenished throughout with hardly other words or arguments than papists, and especially popish kings, have used heretofore against their Protestant subjects, whom he would persuade to be " every man his own pope, and to absolve himself of those ties," by the suggestion of false or equivocal interpretations too oft repeated to be now answered.

236. The parliament, he saith, "made their covenant, like manna, agreeable to every man's palate." This is another of his glosses upon the covenant; he is content to let it be manna, but his drift is that men should loath it, or at least expound it by their own "relish" and "latitude of sense;" wherein, lest any one of the simpler sort should fail to be his craftsmaster, he furnishes him with two or three laxative, he terms them "general clauses, which may serve somewhat to relieve them" against the covenant taken: intimating, as if “what were lawful and according to the word of God," were no otherwise so, than as every man fancied to himself. From such learned explications and resolutions as these upon the covenant, what marvel if no royalist or malignant refuse to take it, as having learnt from these princely instructions his many "salvoes, cautions, and reservations," how to be a covenanter and anticovenanter, how at once to be a Scot,

and an Irish rebel. He returns again to disallow of "that reformation which the covenant" vows,

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as being the partial advice of a few divines." But matters of this moment, as they were not to be decided there by those divines, so neither are they to be determined here by essays and curtal aphorisms, but by solid proofs of Scripture.

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237. The rest of his discourse he spends, highly accusing the parliament, "that the main reformation by" them "intended, was to rob the church," and much applauding himself both for his forwardness" to all due reformation, and his averseness from all such kind of sacrilege. All which, with his glorious title of the "Church's Defender," we leave him to make good by "Pharaoh's divinity," if he please, for to Joseph's piety it will be a task unsuitable. As for "the parity and poverty of ministers," which he takes to be so sad of “ sequence," the Scripture reckons them for two special legacies left by our Saviour to his disciples; under which two primitive nurses, for such they were indeed, the church of God more truly flourished than ever after, since the time that imparity and church-revenue rushing in, corrupted and belepered all the clergy with a worse infection than Gehazi's; some one of whose tribe, rather than a king, I should take to be compiler of that unsalted and Simonical prayer annexed: although the prayer itself strongly prays against them. For never such holy things as he means were given more to swine, nor the church's bread more to dogs, than when it fed ambitious, irreligious, and dumb prelates.