his Gospel called all men unto liberty, the glorious liberty of the sons of God, and restored them to the privilege of working out their own salvation by their own understandings and endeavours*. For this doctrine,

as I observed above, we are referred only to the whole body of Protestants in the gross; no particular writers of that class being cited upon the occasion. We are, therefore, to take it as the doctrine which this Author hath adopted, and to consider how far it is agreeable to truth.

That Jesus Christ hath called all men to liberty, will readily be allowed as an express declaration of his Gospel. In what sense the Scripture itself understands this liberty, we shall see presently. In the mean time, it is certainly true, that Jesus Christ did likewise call all men to obedience and subjection for conscience sake; and was himself the greatest example of it in all the occurrences of his life; from his birth, which happened while his parents were attending a summons from the Roman Emperor, to his condemnation by Pontius Pilate. He absolved no man from his duty to the powers that were set over him; but commanded his hearers to submit to the authority even of corrupt Scribes and Pharisees, because they sat in Moses's seat †; only with this reserve, that they should not do after their works, because these were very far short of the perfection and purity prescribed by their teaching. It is equally true, that the present governors of this Church sit in the seat of the Apostles, though they are none of them invested with miraculous powers: for the Scribes and Pharisees wrought no miracles; yet their authority devolved to them from Moses, who wrought many. They were

also as distant from Moses in point of time, as the present Church is from the age of the Apostles; and, I hope, as unlike to Moses in their practical endowments, as the Bishops of this Church are unlike to the Apostles, even in the estimation of the Author of the Confessional.

Now it would be wrong to suppose that Christ was more solicitous concerning the peace, order, and dis cipline of the Jewish Church, than concerning the government of the Christian: for the sake of which he invested his disciples with the same authority as was committed to himself-As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you, &c.*; and he left them with this promise-Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world; not with these individual persons to whom he then spake, but with those who should succeed to their ministration in the Church: for you, and your posterity or successors, mean the same thing in the language of the Scripture. Thus Jacob says to Joseph: "God shall be with you, and bring you again unto the land of your fathers $;" that is, with their children, who were brought out of Egypt four hundred years afterwards. St. Paul hath a remarkable passage to the same effect in his first Epistle to Timothy--" I charge thee in the sight of God, and before Jesus Christ, that thou keep this commandment without spot, and unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ." Upon which text we have the following remark in Bishop Overall's Convocation Book, p. 180. "It was impossible for Timothy to observe these things till the coming of Christ, he being to die long before; therefore, the precepts and rules which St. Paul had given unto him

• John xx. 21.

+ Matth. xxviii. 20. ‡ Gen. xlviii. 21.

to observe in his episcopal government, did equally appertain, as well to Bishops, his successors, as to himself; and were to be executed by them successively after his death unto the world's end.”

There is no necessary connection betwixt the miraculous powers of the Apostles, and their ecclesiastical commission as rulers in the Church: for they wrought miracles with a view to those only who did not believe*: but their authority, as ministers of the Church, was committed to them for the sake of those only who were within the Church: and the occasions of the people render the like ministerial authority as necessary now as it was then.

The late Bishop Coneybeare is reflected upon, for arguing from the consent required by the Apostles to their doctrines, to the consent required by succeeding Church-governors to human articles †, in what the Author calls his famous subscription sermon. It doth not appear that he hath done this, unless his text is taken for an argument of his sermon: yet he might have done it very safely, the argument being allowable when properly expressed: otherwise it cannot be true, that Christ, according to his promise, is with his Apostles (that is, their successors) to the end of the world. If we may have the liberty of expressing the argument in our own terms, rather than those which the Author puts into our mouths, it will stand thus-The Apostles required a consent to their doctrines; therefore, their successors may require a consent to the same doctrines. The argument hath now a very different face; and it will not be easy to answer it; because it will be requisite to point out and demonstrate, that there is a disagreement between

* 1 Cor. xiv. 22.

+ P. 23. Note B.

our present doctrines and those of the Apostles delivered to us in the Scripture; of which labour the Author is remarkably sparing throughout his whole performance; quoting the Scripture but seldom, and then chiefly in a sense of accommodation, as it furnishes him with phrases to express his own jests and

sarcasms.

Let us now examine to what species of liberty Christ hath called men by his Gospel. And here, to guard against some false ideas of liberty, we may venture to affirm, that Christ never called any man to a liberty of rejecting his own laws, and denying his own doctrines; and that there can be no such thing amongst Christians, as a liberty against God. I should have thought it superfluous to say this, had I not lately seen it maintained, in express terms, by an advocate for reformation, and the advancement of primitive Christianity, that "no man ought to pay any submission to that doctrine and discipline which he DOES NOT LIKE All the liberty of which I can find any account in the Scripture, is a deliverance from the bondage of sint; and a glorious liberty it is: but then it is such as leaves a man the servant of righteousness. There is another sort of liberty, which sets us free from the burthensome yoke of the services and ceremonies of the Mosaic law; and there is likewise a liberty, which the servants of Jesus Christ may plead upon just occasions, and which was accordingly pleaded by many at the Reformation: I mean, that of obeying God rather than man, where the commands of the latter are inconsistent with

those of the former. Yet this is more properly a state of subjection to the laws of God, attended with the privilege of suffering shame for his name *, than a state of freedom from human authority: and indeed the Gospel-state, in whatever light we shall view it, provided we do not pervert and transform it into something else, will prove at last to be a state of obedience. The first reformers, that they might preserve their obedience to the divine laws, retained the substance of religion as it was before; removing only the sinful impositions and modern superstitions which had been introduced without any warrant of Scripture, or precedent of the purest ages; and the most zealous and forward amongst them never extended Christian liberty to matters of faith, but confined it to things in their nature indifferent t. We meet with none of these distinctions in the Confessional, though they were religiously attended to by the more learned and sober sort of Protestants, who did not then set up a new system, but corrected the new, as nearly as they were able, by the old: which is the duty of our Author to do, if he is infected with any unscriptural novelties. And when he recommends liberty, he ought to make some proper reservations in favour of obedience: for there is a wild and dangerous species of liberty, which sometimes takes upon it the name of conscience, and in this disguise treads under foot the laws of God, and would soon abolish the very name of Christianity, if it were left to its own ways.

See Acts iv. 19. and v. 41.

† Hæc indifferentia sunt, et in Ecclesiæ libertate posita. Calvin Instit. lib. iv. c. 17. § 43. and Mr. Cruden, in his Concordance, (a book of more authority than some hundreds of Commentaries) defines the liberty of the New Testament as a power or freedom in using things indifferent: referring to the texts of 1 Cor. viii. 9, 10, 29.