tian, by anything that appears in these Dialogues. And of this he seems apprehensive enough; he could not forbear acquainting us what opinion he thought the world was like to have of him; his own conscience reminded him what kind of censures he might justly expect. For, says he :* "As to my religion, I doubt not but that my readers will be divided in their judgments of me; if a Papist reads me, he will swear I am an Atheist; if a Protestant, he will say I am a Papist, and that my drift is to cast dirt upon his Church; the honest Quaker will say I am a profane man; others perhaps will say, I am of no religion, but a despiser of all." This, I believe, is very rightly guessed: they that read him will be apt to pass such judgments upon him, as he surmises; and he knows best, and any one may see, what occasion he has given them to entertain such thoughts of him; but how he will be able to excuse himself from any of these imputations, I leave it to him to be considered of at his leisure. There is indeed such a vein of profaneness, that discovers itself in the whole contexture of his Dialogues, which scarce any one could be guilty of, that were not, what he very reasonably imagines his readers will think him, a conceited scornful despiser of all religion. He does so frequently sport himself with an abusive application of Scripture expressions, that it is hard to judge, whether his principal design were to ridicule the Reformation or the Bible: but it is certain, the trifling way in which he treats them, argues a very great contempt of both. Every leaf affords us instances of this; I will mention but one or two. When Ishmaelt was not satisfied, that "if a silly woman, cobler, or other tradesmen, read Scripture, and give their sense of it, that must be called the doctrine of the Reformation:" Isaac replies with the greatest seeming gravity imaginable, but as much real scorn and derision as is possible; as his usual manner is: "Do not limit God's infinite goodness, by measuring his mercies towards his creatures with your narrow apprehensions: take notice," he says, "he has chosen the weak and contemptible of the world, for to confound the strong ones: I confess unto you, Father, that you have hid these things," &c. It is enough to occasion something of horror in any sober Christian, to think that the infinite goodness and mercies of Almighty God, and his Holy Word, should be thus shamefully exposed by such an idle scoffing companion. But to omit many more, there is one passage, which, I believe, no man can read, and I wonder how he could write it, without trembling. Ishmael had told him plainly :* "All that your discourse drives at, by what I can perceive, is either to beat me from the Reformation, by shewing me the absurdity of its Rule of Faith; or oblige me to believe scandalous and blasphemous tenets, as necessary sequels out of that rule." And he cannot deny that that is apparently the drift of all the impertinent tattle that makes up his seven Dialogues. But what answer does Isaac give to this? "Why," says he, "the Lord, who is the searcher of hearts, knows you misconstrue my intentions:" he makes the most solemn appeal to the Divine Omniscience, in the most sacred expressions, for the vouching of that which flatly contradicts his own conscience. For that can tell him, and that God, whom he invokes so presumptuously, does know, that what he makes Ishmael to speak, is the truth; very that his whole discourse is little else but one continued irony; and that the only design of it, is to laugh men out of their religion, and draw them over to the Church of Rome, by charging the Protestant Rule of Faith with the greatest absurdities he could possibly devise. And he that dares thus boldly call God to witness that which himself knows, and all the world sees, is most certainly false, seems to have lost all sense of the Deity, and is advanced some degrees beyond that licentiousness, and Paganism too, which he very industriously, though without any success, strives to prove very easily deducible from the principles of the Reformation. After this, the uncharitable censures he passes upon Protestants, may seem but a slight and venial sin: he that is not afraid openly to affront Almighty God, will be little concerned for the severest and most unjust reflections he can make upon his neighbour. But to shew his kindness, he tells us, thatt "We are so far from any smack of hypocrisy, that you shall not see in all London the least appearance of virtue." He that will not discover so much as this, in that great city, must look upon it with a very spiteful and malicious eye. God be praised, there are many examples there of a truly sober and Christian life; and if all be not such, we heartily lament it; though I believe it is no more than other populous places are guilty of; and if he had pleased, he might as reasonably have + Pag. 41. * Pag. 83. levelled the same objection against all the great societies of men in the world. Were I minded to imitate his rash way of judging, I could requite him with a large relation of the lewdnesses that have been commonly practised in Rome itself; and tell him of some religious houses, and whole countries that have adhered to that Church, where the looseness of their lives has been more catholic than their faith; and all this attested, beyond denial, by their own authors. But I do not like his pharasaical way of justifying ourselves, by reproaching others. The scandalous living of some of all religions, proves nothing effectually, but the great corruption of human nature, that will not always be reformed by any. Therefore, to insist upon this in a matter of dispute, is but a frivolous thing at the best; for a true doctrine will be true still, notwithstanding the unsuitable lives of those that profess it. However, I must needs commend Isaac's ingenuity, that was so wise as to understand his own talent, and having thrust himself into a controversy, chooses the weapon he was best able to manage, and so makes railing serve instead of argument, and contents himself with aspersing those he cannot confute. Most of the second-hand quotations, he makes use of, are mustered up upon the same grand design, of endeavouring to blemish the whole Reformation, by imputing unto it many gross corruptions, both in doctrine and practice. To examine them all would be a very troublesome and unnecessary labour ; for whatever the private opinions of Luther or Calvin, or any man else may be, we esteem ourselves no more obliged to embrace them as articles of our belief, than he thinks himself bound to receive all the positions which Bellarmine, Perron, or the Sorbonne, have at any time advanced for undoubted doctrines of the catholic Church. And to shew you how often he mistakes the scope of his authors, and to defend their true sense against his little cavils, would engage me in so many tedious digressions, nothing at all to the main purpose, that I think it very unreasonable, that either I or my reader should be forced to undergo so severe a penance for Isaac's impertinence. It may be sufficient, therefore, only to observe by the way, that many, if not all the passages he has produced out of some Protestant writers, by which he attempts to discredit their religion, are taken upon trust from Mr. Brerely and if he had not, by very good luck, published his Apology, our Pax Vobis Dialogues, as well as some others, had wanted many choice embellishments. I will give you a knot of them as they lie together Musculus, a learned Lutheran, writes thus:* "Thus it is with us at present, that if any be desirous to see a great rabble of knaves, turbulent spirits, deceitful persons, cozeners, and debauched men, let him go to a city where the Gospel is purely preached, and he shall find them by multitudes; for it is more manifest than the day-light, that never were there more unbridled and unruly people among the Turks and Infidels, than the professors of the Reformed Gospel." Luther himself says as much :† "The world grows daily worse, and men are now more covetous, revengeful, and licentious, than they were in Popery." Mr. Stubs says no less : "After my travels round about all England, I found the people in most parts proud, malicious, ambitious, and careless of good works." Mr. Richard Jeffrey, in his Sermon at St. Paul's Cross, printed anno 1604:§ "I may freely speak what I have plainly seen, that in Flanders, never was there more drunkenness, in Italy, more wantonness, in Jewry, more hypocrisy, in Turkey, more impiety, in Tartary, more iniquity, than is practised generally in England, and particularly in London." I have taken these four, as I found them altogether, without adding or diminishing a syllable. In the margin I have referred to the places in Mr. Brerely, where they may be easily seen and compared; and where any one that takes pleasure in discovering petty larceny, and is not unwilling to be at the trouble, may at any time be furnished with plenty of instances in the same kind. In these I have chosen out of the rest, Isaac very careful to keep close to his voucher, seldom varying in the least from the translation of the Apologist, and to be sure, never adding a word more than he found there. And to make it evident, almost to a demonstration, that he never vouchsafed to consult the authors themselves; besides the wonderful harmony betwixt him and Brerely, he pitches upon some, which, I am pretty confident, he never saw in all his life. Luther and Musculus, are names that must needs have come to his ears, and some of their works, it is possible, he may have seen; but for Stubs and Jeffrey, let him affirm, if he dares, that he ever knew any more of them, than what he found laid up to his hand in that common storehouse; and which, to be just to him, he has copied out very faithfully. But for what end he has done it, I cannot conjecture; for is Pag. 40. Brerely, Apol. p. 590. + Pag. 40. Brerely, p. 414. suppose that a loose conversation were, as he imagines, exception enough against the truth of a doctrine; and that we should confess the charge, which he cannot prove; and that his own Church should plead not guilty, which, I believe, he will not be over forward to maintain; and that popular invectives against such vices, as have been always too common, might be allowed for an exact history of the times, which no wise man before Isaac ever thought; yet for all this, it must certainly be a piece of the highest injustice to condemn the present age for the sins of their great grandfathers; and execute the credit of this generation, when the youngest evidence that is brought against it is upward of fourscore. What pity it is that we want a Brerely the second! That Mr. Stubs should happen to write in Queen Elizabeth's days!* And that it should be eighty-four years, almost complete, since Mr. Richard Jeffrey preached before my Lord Mayor! What hard shifts men put themselves to, when they are resolved to find any pretence to vilify their brethren! But I shall pass over these, and the other quotations he has borrowed of Mr. Brerely, without any further inquiry about them; and consider one, which, I believe, is properly his own. He repeats it in almost every leaf, and it is the main hinge on which he makes the controversy to turn; if you rob him of this, you utterly ruin his whole design. He lays it down boldly for the grand principle of all the Reformation, and often fixes it in particular upon the Church of England; and in one place he tells yout it is "in the sixth of our Thirty-nine Articles," where he makes us to speak thus: "We have no other rule of faith but Scripture, as each person of sound judgment in the Church understands it, and what is proved by: it." In what sense we could admit of this rule he has made for us, shall be considered hereafter; in the mean time it must argue a very strange degree of assurance, when a man can have the face to refer to a particular passage in those Articles that are in every one's hands; when it is apparent as the sun, that there are no such words, nor any like them, neither in the sixth, nor any other of all the Thirty-nine. In that he pretends to recite, there is not a syllable of "each person of sound judgment;" the very subject of it is not concerning the interpretation, but the sufficiency of the Scriptures. For that which our Church teaches us in that place, is nothing |