of the Confessional is so intimately affected by these two principles, that it was necessary they should appear under some disadvantage. But if the former of them is strictly enforced by the Gospel, and the latter evident to reason and common-sense, the unhappiness with which they were adopted is rather to the Author himself than to the first Reformers. It is a determined point with St. Paul, that the Christian society is edified by love or charity, which is the end of the commandment †, or consummation of Christian virtue and this writer's performance would yield us too pregnant a proof, though there were few others, that men do not love those Christians from whom they differ in opinion. Nothing indeed is so subversive of the pacific intention of the Gospel, as strife, wrangling, contention, envy, hatred, and malice; all of which, by unhappy experience, seem to arise more naturally from mistakes and differences in religion, than from any other causes whatsoever: and it may have a foundation in reason, that the division will be greatest of all, when men are divided by that which ought to unite them the most. -Happy, therefore, would it be for the world, if we could but once see men reconciled to that one religion (it cannot be more than one) which hath been delivered to them by Jesus Christ and his Apostles! For as there is no enmity so restless and dangerous, as that which is generated by religious differences, so there is no friendship upon carth so strong and extensive, as that which arises from religious agreement. So long as there is variety of opinion in the Church, there will be wrangling and animosity; and under this state, our Master hath informed us, that his disciples are scarcely to be dis

tinguished from unbelievers, and men of this world*. Nor is it necessary that the matter in agitation should be some of the higher doctrines of faith; for the smallest spark will be sufficient to kindle a flame, which, howsoever low it may begin, will soon extend itself to the higher parts of the edifice. What altercations and heart-burnings have we seen in this country! and how have some consciences been galled and overburthened with the weight of this question : Whether it is as lawful for a minister of Christ to appear in a garment of flar as in one of sheep's-wool? A difference no more worthy of putting Christian love to the trial, than that of some Jewish rabbies, whose consciences (while they were swallowing a camel) could never be well satisfied concerning the precise number of white hairs which ought to determine a beast not to be a red heifer.

So great was the diversity of opinion amongst some of the first Protestants, that it exposed them heartily to the obloquy and contempt of the Church of Rome. It broke them into sects; some of which, as the Author describes them in strong terms, were scandals to all religion, and nuisances to all civil society. Their opinions as Protestants being neither restrained nor condemned by any general form of Christian doctrine, the Papists had a favourable opportunity of calumniating the whole body as the maintainers of every heresy, abettors of every sedition, which Europe had heard of or seen in that generation. Such was the condition of the Protestants, by his own account, before they were reduced to an uniformity of opinion by the orderly establishment of some common system of faith. The Reformers, therefore, having their eyes

open to the plainest maxim of the Scripture, and seeing it thus confirmed by the experience of their own time, would have been without excuse, had they been so vain as to expect any edification in religious society without uniformity of opinion. In this, however, our Author cannot follow them: for why? the Bishop of Clogher, in his Essay on Spirit, was of another mind; and his authority is introduced in the following manner: "I apprehend, says Dr. Clayton, any attempt towards avoiding diversity of opinion, not only to be an useless but impracticable scheme. In which I entirely agree with him*;" and so do many others, with whom this Author, perhaps, would think it hard to be associated. However, I am willing to own, that the first of these unhappily-adopted maxims is not of so much importance to religious society, if the Author can make good his censure against the second. For if the true sense of Scripture can be more than one, men may differ in their feligion, without departing from the truth; and in such a case, but little danger is to be apprehended; unless this difference should be blended with a spirit of pride and opposition, which delights in mischief. But how far this is possible, he hath not attempted to shew us; either by reason, or any pertinent examples from the Scrip

ture itself.

Different senses may be either collateral or contradictory. By collateral senses, I mean such as agree in effect, though they differ in terms; or such as do not contradict any express proposition of the Scrip

* P. 201. In another of his publications, he is so far from regarding the love of uniformity as a Christian virtue, that he scoffs at it in the worthy writer of the Three Letters, as "a brain-sick anxiety for the safety and preservation of ecclesiastical peace!" Occas. Rem. part i. p. 57.

ture. Of these there may be different sorts, and all of them inoffensive, at least not attended with immediate danger, provided the passage be obscure, or the matter indifferent *. But of contradictory senses; it is impossible that more than one can be the true sense; such, for example, as are given by the Author's friends on one side, and by the Church of England, in conjunction with the primitive Church, on the other. It would carry me far beyond my present design, if I should descend to particulars; which the case doth not require, especially as Dr. Clarke hath saved me the trouble, by an attempt to reconcile the language of our liturgical forms to the sense of Arianism; of which his readers could easily see the impropriety; and he disserved the cause by it very much; for which he is blamed in the sixth chapter of the Confessional, by the same person, who, in the course of the same performance, declares it to be his own private opinion, in opposition to the Reformers, that the Scripture (written with at least as great precision as any human forms) may have more true senses than one! The liberty of private interpretation, for which he hath pleaded, must drive him either upon this absurdity, or another equal to it. For if the true sense can be but one, and he hath insisted on a right in every individual to put his own sense; supposing withal, after the Essay on Spirit, that no two thinking men are agreed exactly in their opinion about any one of

* The texts relating to the secret decrees of God, are of this sort; and therefore, the seventeenth article of this Church is purposely left open, or inclining to a neutral sense. . This neutrality is very vehemently and disingenuously opposed in the Confessional; though it hath been frequently proved by learned men in the clearest manner. There is no better account of it extant, than what is given by the learned writer of the Three Letters. See Let. II. p. 160, &c.

the articles*; then it may come to pass, that he hath been pleading for a right in nine men out of ten to put false sense upon their Bible. Of these two evils he hath chosen the former, as the more specious in theory; though in practice they are but one and the

same.

To gain some credit to his own project of reformation, he hath ventured to furnish the Reformers with such principles, as they do not appear any where to have professed. And where they are suffered to speak their own sentiments, he pronounces them to have been unhappily adopted. His scheme, therefore, is such as can find no precedents, but with some of the rabble of the Reformation †, who either had no settled principles at all, or were made no account of; and so were not worth being referred to as authorities.

How far he is to be trusted in his representation of the sentiments of other persons, will appear from the liberty he hath taken with Dr. Clarke, whose principles fall short of our Author's system, and stand in need of some correction: for which purpose he assumes, as we shall see, an expurgatorial authority.

* Conf. p. 4.

+ Such were Muntzer, Buckhold, Knipperdoling, Servetus, David George, &c. with whom a certain writer of their lives hath joined Arius and Mahomet; because the first Protestants who blasphemed the Holy Trinity were found amongst the tribe of Anabaptists. Private REVELATION immediately from God, TRUE LIBERTY, the Restoration of the KINGDOM of Jesus Christ, and the reading of no book but the Bible only, were the fundamental principles by which these enthusiasts were carried first to error and delusion, and thence to rebellion, plunder, and massacre. See the Apocalypsis, published at the end of Ross's View of all Religions, edit. iii. p. 5, 11. The like private revelation was pretended to by Socinus. See the Full Answer, p. 85, &c.