nations are in, than any of your predecessors in the Holy See ever enjoyed; and this, without any further ceremony, just in the order in which they shall arise in my own mind.

Your Holiness is not perhaps aware, how near the churches of us Protestants have at length come to those privileges and perfections, which you boast of, as peculiar to your own. So near, that many of the most quicksighted and sagacious persons have not been able to discover any other difference between us, as to the main principle of all doctrine, government, worship, and discipline, but this one, viz. that you cannot err in any thing you determine, and we never do. That is, in other words, that you are infallible, and we always in the right. We cannot but esteem the advantage to be exceedingly on our side, in this case, because we have all the benefits of infallibility, without the absurdity of pretending to it; and without the uneasy task of maintaining a point so shocking to the understanding of mankind. And you must pardon us, if we cannot help thinking it to be as great and as glorious a privilege in us to be always in the right, without the pretence to infallibility, as it can be in you to be always in the wrong with it.

Thus the Synod of Dort, for whose unerring decisions, public thanks to almighty God are every three years offered up, with the greatest solemnity, by the magistrates in that country; the Councils of

the Reformed in France; the Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland; and, if I may presume to name it, the Convocation of England, have been all found to have the very same unquestionable authority, which your church claims solely upon the infallibility which resides in it; and the people, to be under the very same strict obligation of obedience to their determinations, which, with you, is the consequence only of an absolute infallibility. The reason, therefore, why we do not openly set up an infallibility, is because we can do without it. Authority results as well from power, as from right; and a majority of votes is as strong a foundation for it, as infallibility itself. Councils that may err, never do; and besides, being composed of men, whose peculiar business it is to be in the right, it is very immodest for any private person to think them not so; because this is to set up a private corrupted understanding, above a public uncorrupted judgment.

Thus it is in the north, as well as the south; abroad, as well as at home. All maintain the exercise of the same authority in themselves; which yet they know not how so much as to speak of without

ridicule in others.

In England it stands thus. The synod of Dort is of no weight; it determined many doctrines wrong. The assembly of Scotland hath nothing of a true authority, and is very much out in its scheme of doctrines, worship, and government. But the church

of England is vested with all authority, and justly challengeth all obedience.

If one crosses a river in the north, there it stands thus. The church of England is not enough reformed; its doctrines, worship, and government have too much of antichristian Rome in them. But the kirk of Scotland hath a divine right, from its only head, Christ Jesus, to meet and to enact what to it shall seem fit, for the good of his church.

Thus we left you for your enormous, unjustifiable claim to an unerring spirit, and have found out a way, unknown to your Holiness and your predecessors, of claiming all the rights that belong to infallibility, even whilst we disclaim and abjure the thing itself.

As for us of the Church of England, if we will believe many of its greatest advocates, we have bishops in a succession as certainly uninterrupted from the Apostles, as your church could communicate it to us. And upon this bottom, which makes us a true church, we have a right to separate from you; but no persons living have any right to differ or separate from us. And they again, who differ from us, value themselves upon something or other, in which we are supposed defective; or upon being free from some superfluities which we enjoy; and think it hard, that any will be still going farther, and refine upon their scheme of worship and discipline.

Thus we have indeed left you; but we have fixed ourselves in your seat; and make no scruple to resemble you, in our defences of ourselves and censures of others, whenever we think it proper.

We have all sufficiently felt the load of the two topics of heresy and schism. We have been persecuted, hanged, burnt, massacred, as your Holiness well knows, for heretics and schismatics. But all this hath not made us sick of those two words. We can still throw them about us and play them off upon others as plentifully and as fiercely, as they are dispensed to us from your quarter. It often puts me in mind, (your holiness must allow me to be a little ludicrous, if you admit me to your conversation,) it often, I say, puts me in mind of a play which I have seen amongst some merry people ; a man strikes his next neighbour with all his force, and he, instead of returning it to the man who gave it, communicates it with equal zeal and strength to another; and this to another; and so it circulates, till it returns perhaps to him who set the sport agoing. Thus your Holiness begins the attack. You call us heretics and schismatics, and burn and destroy us as such; though God knows there is no more right any where to use heretics or schismatics barbarously, than those who think and speak as their superiors bid them. But so it is, you thunder

We think it ill man

out the sentence against us. ners to give it you back again; but we throw it out

upon the next brethren that come in our way; and they upon others; and so it goes round, till some perhaps have sense and courage enough to throw it back upon those who first began the disturbance, by pretending to authority where there can be none.

We have not, indeed, now the power of burning heretics, as our forefathers of the reformation had. The civil power hath taken away the act, which continued that glorious privilege to them, upon the remonstrance of several persons, that they could not sleep whilst that act was awake. But then every thing on this side death still remains untouched to us; we can molest, harass, imprison, and ruin any man who pretends to be wiser than his betters. And the more unspotted the man's character is, the more necessary we think it to take such crushing methods. Since the toleration hath been authorized in these nations, the legal zeal of men hath fallen the heavier upon heretics, (for it must always, it seems, be exercised upon some sort of persons or other ;) and, amongst these, chiefly upon such as differ from us in points, in which, above all others, a difference of opinion is most allowable; such as are acknowledged to be very abstruse and unintelligible, and to have been in all ages thought of and judged of with the same difference and variety.

Sometimes we of the established church can manage a prosecution (for I must not call it a persecution) ourselves, without calling in any other help.