us.

The power vested in priests to absolve men from their sins, hath been declared by many in such sort, as hath in effect made the will of God himself to be determined by their will, or even their humour. It may be summed up in these two points; that men can have no hopes of a pardon from God, but by absolution from the mouth of a priest, and a priest ordained to a nicety according to a particular notion of regularity; and that God must pardon those whom a priest pronounces to be pardoned;' that is, that they are not so much obliged by almighty God's will, as almighty God is by their's, and that God is never so much honoured, as when weak and fallible men are placed in his throne.

Some have changed this absurdity of an authoritative absolution, which they see they cannot so easily defend, into an authoritative intercession of the priest, who is now become with us a mediator between God and man; still securing to themselves the same power and privilege in a less scandalous. manner. This creates the same dependence of the laity upon the piests, and shows again how dexterous we are in changing words, when there is occasion, without changing things at all.

But your Holiness will easily guess the meaning of all this, when I let you know that the same persons declare, that auricular confession, and a particular unburthening the conscience of all its secrets, must precede the great benefit. And this, you well

know, is an engine of an unmeasurable influence, that can rule families, and overturn states, and govern the world.

Add to this another point greatly contended for of late, and very much to your advantage in the issue ; that all baptisms, unless by Episcopal priests in a regular line from you, are declared invalid and of no effect to instate men in God's peculium.

We have, indeed, openly declared against your doctrine of making the sacraments depend upon the intention of the priest; but we are doing a much worse thing, if the doctrine of some men can prevail, and that is, making them depend upon what neither priest nor layman can ever come to any satisfaction about, viz. the Episcopal ordination of the priest in a regular, uninterrupted line of succession from Christ himself. This, indeed, sweeps whole parishes away at once, which perhaps have had preachers never ordained, and unpeoples the christian world without mercy. But it is supposed it must make the poor distressed laity adore the men, who have this privilege of entitling them to God's favour, or debarring them from it.

Yet, with some, it may be turned another way; and they may begin to ask, if the clergy of our church, which received all through the hands of the Romish, be vested with this glorious prerogative; how much more sure is it in that church which communicated it to ours? If we are so positive we had it from

them, by whom we were ordained, and could not have it otherwise, how much more must it be in them who ordained us?

After this, why should I mention, what must be known to you, the zeal of many for the multiplying of ceremoniousness and bowings in public worship; for the cathedral pronunciation of prayers (which is the protestant unknown tongue to such as are not accustomed to it ;) our altars and the never-lighted candles upon them; the decorations of our churches. which, you have experienced, never stop where the honest men, who first begin them, design they should; the consecration of our church yards, and the like; in which you find this benefit; that several, who take the impression of these things deep into them, are easily inclined, with a little art and management, to believe that church must be the best, which hath the greatest number of these good things.

We have not, indeed, many images or pictures left in our churches besides Moses and Aaron, whose figures, though they have nothing to do in our places of worship, give me the less concern, because christians are in no danger of idolizing Jews.

But we have one very common and very scandalous representation, in multitudes of our churches, which, in my opinion, comprehends all possible absurdities of that sort; and that is, of the trinity in unity, figured in a triangle, and generally inclosed in

a circle, over our altars, as it is in the pictures which are now become fashionable in our common prayer books. This is justly esteemed the most inexplicable and unintelligible mystery of our faith. And yet it is suffered by those, who so esteem it, to be set forth even to men's eyes by a mathematical figure, which always supposeth the clearest and fullest ideas possible; and the eternal Father of all things is represented to christians as one side of an equilateral triangle. In this point I am almost ready to give up the cause to you, and to own that all your crucifixes, and all the figures of your saints, who were once men and women and therefore representable, put together, have not any part of the monstrous absurdity of this single representation.

The preaching, as it is called, of our popular men, upon which we used to value ourselves exceedingly, is now come to that degree of offence, that in many places persons of sense and seriousness stay at home out of piety, and absent themselves from our assemblies for fear of hearing. For the truth of what I affirm, I appeal to the intelligence sent you by the agents of your church amongst us, who have of late been seen to take notes from the mouths of some of our followed preachers. For my own part, I have imagined myself sometimes to be at the late negotiations at Utrecht, and to hear one of the French king's plenipotentiaries setting forth the glorious and advantageous terms of peace, which

his master hath yielded to us; sometimes to be in the midst of commissioners of trade, hearing the terms of our commerce extolled to heaven; sometimes at the funeral of a late princess, and my ears filled with the sound of fulsome panegyric; sometimes, in a cabal of malecontent jacobites, disburthening all their spleen, as far as they dare, in invective and satire and insinuation, against the late revolution and their present superiors; sometimes in one of the meetings of some of our old rigid separatists, inveighing against their bishops; sometimes in one of your Holiness' courts of judicature amidst the thunderings of wrath and damnation denounced against all heretics and schismatics; in a word, sometimes at the Bear Garden, and sometimes at Bedlam; but at last I have roused myself up, and found myself where I should least of all expect to hear either such subjects or such language.

About the end of January and the beginning of February, we are, in a more than ordinary manner, called upon to knock one another on the head, because our forefathers, and particularly the forefathers of many of our modern high church champions, happened to be great villains above sixty years ago; and this is thought an excellent topic to be insisted upon from generation to generation; nay, it is esteemed by many to be seasonable all the year round.