doctrines." If these latter doctrines are false doctrines, their right to establish them is already abridged upon other principles: if they are true, co-ordinate powers can be under no common obligations to one another, but by common consent; otherwise they are not co-ordinate.

He hath here confounded two cases, which ought to have been carefully distinguished; and in this confusion lies the whole merit of his argument. For Protestant Churches may either act separately for themselves, within their own confines, as he pretended at first to suppose; or they may act for the whole body of Protestants at large. If they act in this latter capacity, they cannot act authoritatively, unless they act jointly, or, as he expresses it, without the unanimous consent of all the rest: but the Author must have known that this was not the case he had before him. Did the Church of England ever pretend that preachers in France or Denmark are bound to qualify themselves by subscribing the English Confession, and confining themselves to the use of the English Liturgy? The contrary is expressly declared in the Preface to the book of Common Prayer-" In these our doings we condemn no other nations, nor. prescribe any thing but to our own people only." Such an extent of power is indeed assumed by the Church of Rome; but it is an absurd usurpation, and was never claimed by any community of Protestants; who well know that they cannot act for other Churches, but so far only as they can assist in a general council.

One national Church, then, cannot act for another, upon this very principle, that they are co-ordinate: but it cannot hence be inferred, that national Churches have no power to act separately for themselves. The

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kingdoms of Europe are co-ordinate kingdoms, and, as such, cannot act for the whole, unless they act in confederacy. If it should follow, as in the logic of the Confessional, that they cannot, upon this principle, act for their own security at home, then it would appear, as perhaps the Author intended it should, that co-ordinate power is no power, and that there ought to be no such thing as authority upon earth, either civil or ecclesiastical.

To prepare his readers for this loose way of thinking, he observes, that "no Church can have a right to establish any doctrines, but upon a supposition that they are true. If the doctrines established in one Church are true, the contrary doctrines established in another Church must be false; and no Church will contend for a right to establish false doctrines *." He hath a strange art of throwing a cause up into the air, and contriving the matter so that it always falls upon its back; whereas a fairer writer would sometimes suffer it to light upon its legs. He might have said, with as much truth, and much more ingenuity, that if the doctrines established in one Church are false, the contrary doctrines established in another Church will be true; and every Church has a right to establish true doctrines. It is judiciously observed, by the learned and respectable writer of the Three Letters, that this objection strikes as deeply at the rights of private judgment in individuals, as at the authority of separate Churches: for if the doctrines believed by one person are true, the contrary doctrines believed by another will be false; and no person will contend for a right to believe false doctrines; consequently, no person can have a right to believe any doctrines,

but with the unanimous consent of every other person: besides, to use another of his arguments, how can any one person, more than any one Church, use his own private judgment, without encroaching on the right of another's private judgment? If these reasonings are thus carried to their natural issue, private rights as well as public will fall before them, and religious persuasion can no more be supported in individuals than in societies. Men may be mistaken, and societies may be mistaken; but the rights of one society are no more affected by the mistakes of a foreign society, than the rights of private judgment in any one man at London is affected by the groundless determinations of another at York. If any one foreign society may be admitted as a check upon establishments here in England, why not another? Papists are of the human species; not only invested with the common rights of reason and private judgment, and as such upon a level with those at Geneva, but they also produce texts of Scripture, in their own sense, for all their innovations. As they admit doctrines contrary to our doctrines, and both cannot be true, we ought to establish nothing, lest, in contradiction to the Pope, we should establish false doctrine.

It was asserted above, that all particular Churches are co-ordinate; they have all the same right in the same degree. If these particular Churches are national Churches, subsisting under the laws of independent countries, the assertion is true; but it is extended to an extravagant latitude in the Confessional, and comprehends under the name of Churches all the different parties or denominations of sectaries in the same Protestant state*. I beg leave to spend some time upon

* P. 34.

this position, because it is of great consequence, and will shew the depth of this writer's ecclesiastical polity.

Let us ask then, in the first place, whence this coordination of Churches in the same Protestant state is derived? Not from the form and doctrine of the apostolical Church in the primitive ages, nor yet from the principles or practices of this Church at the Reformation. To derive it from the former of these, is to suggest that Christianity made its public entry into the kingdoms of the world under the different forms of the Anabaptists, the Calvinists, the Quakers, the Independents, the Racovians, &c. &c. That all these forms were thrown down before the magistrate, for him to pick up which he liked best, and that there was nothing but fancy to direct him in his choice. Had this been a fact, the co-ordination here spoken of had been of some authority, and Christianity itself would have done what its persecutors could never accomplish for nothing but everlasting opposition and confusion could have arisen from the co-equality of such an heterogeneous institution. But in reality the faith and polity of the Christian church, for the two or three first centuries, had but one face all over the world; therefore, a supposed co-ordination in favour of all sects, can find no precedent in this state of the Church.

Neither can it be deduced from our Reformation of Popery: for the episcopal Church of England was a Church of Christ before the Reformation, though a corrupt one; as a man is still a man, though he is blind and scorbutic. The co-ordinate principle, therefore, must suppose, with the Papists, that the Church of England was then annihilated, and that some new thing started up in the place of it, of the same date

and authority with all the other novel forms we have amongst us. Our adversaries of the Church of Rome have laboured hard to prove that this Church is, in this respect, but upon a footing with one of her own sectaries, that they may bring a scandal upon the episcopal Reformation. But it does not follow that this Church had been dead and buried, because it was reformed. A man may be cured of a leprosy without being first killed. Our Author, however, grants as much as the Papists will require. This, co-ordination, he observes, must be admitted upon the genuine grounds of separation from the Church of Rome*. But these genuine grounds are no more than the imaginary grounds which he hath substituted instead of the true ones for here again I must remind the reader, that the Papists have never failed to charge all the wild extravagances of some hot-headed Protestants upon the genuine principles of the Reformation. They call it, as this writer doth, a separation; and instruct their people, that all other separations, indeed all the confusion that can be set on foot with pretence of religion, may be justified upon the same grounds. But in answer both to the Papists, and this gentleman, it must be remembered, that there was a time when they who called themselves Roman Catholics, came in great numbers to our churches, and had no objection to conformity with us as a true Church, till the Pope terrified them with an interdict, and excommunicated Queen Elizabeth †. But what is more to the purpose, our Reformation can never be improved into a separation, analogous to that of the sectaries, but by allowing the supremacy of the Pope over the

P. 33.

See Strype's Annals, or Collier's Eccl, Hist, vol. ii. p. 436,