submission, the church hath resigned all pretensions to independency, and given up its powers into the hands of the state. The truth of the case is this. A few centuries past, the church was found guilty of a dangerous rebellion and high treason against the state. While it lay thus at mercy, as a criminal before its judge, its pardon and life were given it upon the terms of its resigning all claims of independency, and submitting itself thenceforward to the will of the prince. But, behold, these terms of submission you have now, it seems, refined into terms of alliance; and the church, from a pardoned criminal, now claims to be a rival power, and to have its rights and jurisdiction independent of the state! "Our ceremonies and forms of worship "are ordained by ecclesiastical, as well as civil authority." But these, alas! are but illusions which mock your heated fancy; for, ecclesiastical authority, as distinguished from civil, you may rest assured, there is none. Ask your learned bishops, and they will utterly disclaim it. Ask your able lawyers, and they will tell you, that you incur the danger of a premunire by presuming to exert any one single act of authority of this kind. Ask all the knowing members of the convocation itself, and they will answer with one voice,---" It is not in us:---Authority we have none." Yea, ask the meanest novice in the history of the reformation, and of the establishment of your church, and he will presently acquaint you, that your ceremonies and forms were not ordained by BOTH ecclesiastical and civil authority, but by civil authority ONLY, the ecclesiastics in convocation and in the two universities obstinately refusing to give their concurrence, and even entering their very solemn and zealous protest against it.

But you still insist upon it, as if it were of some weight, that the convocation at last gave their

assent. Pray, how did they give it? Not till they had been first garbled and packed by the magistrate; all the bishops, save one, exiled, im'prisoned, turned out, by his authority; and new ones, according to his taste, put into their room : besides this, the invincible artillery of deaneries, prebends, snug and fat livings, played strongly upon the inferior clergy, who hoped that by their submission, they might the more readily succeed those dignitaries who had been deprived by the civil power. And, is it strange that the convocation, thus powerfully attacked, made no long resistance, but yielded, however reluctant, to what parliament had done:* But their concurrence, I must again tell you, whether free or forced, gave, and could give, no authority to the new establishment; because, by our constitution, they had not the smallest degree of authority to give. Suppose the convocation had refused their concurrence to that act of the legislature, would the law not have had its force? You dare not affirm it. Suppose, again, the clergy had established any new forms without an act of parliament, would the people have been obliged to yield obedience to them? Neither durst you assert this.

However, not to discourage good beginnings, I will take you where you are. We are come, then, to this issue: that the civil magistrate has ́ power to ordain ceremonies and rites of worship, and to make new terms of christian communion; and that the things of this kind, which are done

* Hear what even Echard, who was never fufpected of partiality against the church, fays, " Fourteen bithops, twelve deans, "twelve archdeacons,fifteen heads of colleges, fifty prebendaries, **and eighty rectors, were deprived by the QUEEN. But it was ftrongly believed, that of the reft, the greatest part complied "against their confciences, and would have been ready for another "turn if the Queen had died while that race of Incumbents lived, "and the next fucceffor had been of another religion.”

Echard's Hift. Eng. page 330.

in the church of England, are done, at least in part, by civil authority. This is what you now grant. But the question then returns, with unanswerable weight upon you,---Who gave him this power? What charter has lodged it in him? Not, surely, the scriptures, the only charter of the christian church. For, all the power or authority which the scriptures give the magistrate, relates only, and can relate only, to things of a civil nature, but cannot at all relate to things of worship and religion. This never can be contested, because the magistrate, at the time when the scriptures were written, and for near three hundred years after, was Infidel or Pagan. St. Paul, therefore, by commanding us to be subject to the higher powers, and to obey magistrates, for conscience-sake, because they are the ministers of God, for good, does not, in the least, require our obedience to their decrees as to ceremonies and forms of worship; or, our conformity to their establishments in things of a religious nature. No: St. Paul himself was a zealous nonconformist. He was accused of the heinous sin of schism by that great champion of the Pagan Ephesian church, Demetrius, the shrine maker to the goddess Diana; and, so far was this great apostle from submitting himself to every ordinance of man, that he was publicly charged with having not only at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, persuaded and turned away much people (from the then established religion,) saying, that they be no gods which are made with hands. And, when certain of the philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him at Athens, and brought him unto Areopagus, that they might know what that new doctrine was whereof he spoke, he entered on his subject with

a spirited unqualified protest against the esta blished religion of the state.

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. So that, though St. Paul knew that the powers that be, are ordained of God,* he also knew that these powers were confined to those civil purposes for which society was instituted, that the magistrate was to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil: and, therefore, so far was St. Paul from extending this authority of the powers that be, over the rights of conscience and private judgment, that he made it the grand scope of his labours, as did all the other apostles, by their preaching and their lives, to persuade and draw men off from the established forms of worship, and to convince them, that, in these affairs, there was one King only, and one Lord, to whom their homage alone was due,---even JESUS, who, by his sufferings, had merited this high honour, and to whom alone God had commanded that, in things of religion, every knee shall bow.

Here, then, I again call upon and provoke you to tell me,--Who gave the civil magistrate this anthority in religious matters? You are silent, and cannot say.---Well, then, if he hath none by the command of Almighty God, and by the original constitution of the christian church, consequently the subjects of Jesus Christ are under no obligation to obey his injunctions in things of a religious nature; they are guilty of no fault in dissenting from established forms; your censures of them, therefore, as great sinners for so doing, are extremely rash and uncharitable, for which it becomes you to be humbled greatly before God, and to ask pardon of men...

See now, the unhappy dilemma to which you are reduced. If you say the magistrate has au

* Romans xiii. 3.

thority to decree ceremonies and forms of worship, to make new terms of communion, and to determine controversies of faith, you then sin against the undoubted rights and constitution of the christian church, against God, against Jesus Chsist, against reason and common sense. But, if you say that he has not, you then sin against the church of England, against its laws and constitution. You are a dissenter, at least, in principle; but, perhaps, have not fortitude enough to sacrifice what you call your snugness, by openly professing your dissent.

Having thus considered the former part of your self-repugnant scheme, 1. That the magistrate has not,---And, 2. That he has the authority which he claims and exercises in your church: I should now proceed to the other, viz. That it is lodged in the church's pastors and governors. But, here, to the surprise of every attentive reader, you content yourself with asserting, without paying them the compliment of so much as attempting to prove that they are possessed of this power. The bible, I thought you knew to be the religion of protestants, and the scriptures the only rule of their practice and faith. But, behold! a protestant, a divine, claiming a high power for his pastors and governors, a power in which the peace and purity of the christian church are essentially concerned, and yet not able, nor when called upon even pretending, to produce one single text of scripture in support of this claim.

I have pointed out to you several express commands of the sacred law, which directly forbid and condemn this pretended power,---have shewn you, that christians are the Lord's freed-men; . that they are, each for himself, to study and search the scriptures,---to-examine and try the spirits,--to call no man upon earth master, and are not to be called RABBI, i.e. are neither to acknow