rightly understandeth the tenets of the Romish Church, but will easily grant; if he shall duly consider what a mass of humane traditions, both in point of belief and worship, are imposed upon the judgments and consciences of all that may be suffered to live in the visible communion of that Church, and that with opinion of necessity, and under pain of damnation. The Pope's Supremacy, Worshipping of Images, Invocation of Saints and Angels, the Propitiatory Sacrifice of the Mass, Purgatory, the Seven Sacraments, Transubstantiation, Adoration of the Host, Communion under one kind, Private Masses, forbidding Priests' Marriage, Monastical Vows, Prayer in an unknown tongue, Auricular Confession.-All these, and I know not how many more, are such, as even by the confession of their own learned writers, depend upon unwritten Traditions more than upon the Scriptures. True it is, that for most of these they pretend to Scripture also; but with so little colour at the best, and with so little confidence at the last, that when they are hard put to it, they are forced to fly from that hold, and to shelter themselves under their great Diana Tradition. Take away that, it is confessed that many of the chief articles of their faith nutare et vacillare videbuntur, will seem even to totter and reel, and have much ado to keep up. For what else could we imagine should make them strive so much to debase the Scripture all they can, denying it to be a rule of Faith, and charging it with imperfection, obscurity, uncertainty, and many other defects; and on the other side, to magnify Traditions as every way more

absolute but merely their consciousness, that sundry of their doctrines, if they should be examined to the bottom, would appear to have no sound foundation in the written Word. And then must we needs conclude from what hath been already delivered, that they ought to be received (or rather not to be received but rejected) as the doctrines and commandments of men.

"14. Nor will their flying to Tradition help them in this case, or free them from Pharisaism; but rather make the more against them. For to omit that it hath been the usual course of false teachers, when their doctrines were found not to be Scripture-proof, to fly to Tradition; do but enquire a little into the original and growth of Phari-saical Traditions, and you shall find that one egg is not more like another than the Papists and the Pharisees are alike in this matter. When Saduc (or whosoever else was the first author of the sect of the Sadducees) and his followers began to vent their pestilent and atheistical doctrines against the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and other like: the best learned among the Jews (the Pharisees especially) opposed against them by arguments and collections drawn from the Scriptures. The Sadducees, finding themselves unable to hold argument with them, (as having two shrewd disadvantages-but a little learning and a bad cause,) had no other means to avoid the force of all their arguments, than to hold them precisely to the letter of the text, without admitting any exposition thereof, or collection therefrom. Unless they could bring clear text that should

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affirm, totidem verbis, what they denied, they would not yield. The Pharisees, on the contrary, refused (as they had good cause) to be tied to such unreasonable conditions: but stood upon the meaning of the Scriptures, as the Sadducees did upon the letter; confirming the truth of their interpretations, partly from reason and partly from Tradition. Not meaning by Tradition (as yet) any doctrine other than what was already sufficiently contained in the Scriptures; but merely the doctrine which had been, in all ages, constantly taught and received with an universal consent among the people of God, as consonant to the Holy Scriptures, and grounded thereon. By this means, though they could not satisfy the Sadducees (as heretics and sectaries commonly are obstinate), yet so far they satisfied the generality of the people, that they grew into very great esteem with them, and within a while carried all before them: the detestation of the Sadducees and of their loose errors also conducing not a little thereunto. And who now but the Pharisees, and what now but Tradition? In every man's eye and mouth. Things being at this pass, any wise man may judge how easy a matter it was for men so reverenced as the Pharisees were, to abuse the credulity of the people, and the interest they had in their good opinion to their own advantage to make themselves lords of the people's faith, and by little and little to bring into the worship whatsoever doctrines and observances they pleased; and all under the acceptable name of the Traditions of the Elders. And so they did, winning continually upon the

people by their cunning and shows of religion, and proceeding still more and more till the Jewish worship, by their means, was grown to that height of superstition and formality as we see it was in our Saviour's days. Such was the beginning, and such the rise of these Pharisaical Traditions.

Popish Traditions, also, both came in and grew up just after the same manner. The orthodox bishops and doctors in the ancient Church, being to maintain the Trinity of Persons in the Godhead, the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, the hypostatical union of the two Natures in the Person of Christ, the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, and other like articles of Catholic religion, against the Arrians, Eunomians, Macedonians, and other heretics for that the words Trinity, Homoösion, Hypostasis, Procession, &c. (which for the better expressing of the Catholic sense they were forced to use), were not expressly to be found in the Holy Scriptures, had recourse, therefore, very often, in their writings against the heretics of their times, to the Tradition of the Church: whereby they meant not (as the Papists would now wrest their words) any unwritten doctrine not contained in the Scriptures, but the very doctrine of the Scriptures themselves, as they had been constantly understood and believed by all faithful Christians in the Catholic Church, down from the Apostles' times till the several present ages wherein they lived. This course of theirs, of so serviceable and necessary use in those times, gave the first occasion and after-rise to that heap of errors and

superstitions, which in process of time (by the power and policy of the Bishop of Rome especially) were introduced into the Christian Church under the specious name and colour of Catholic Traditions. Thus have they trodden in the steps of their forefathers the Pharisees; and stand guilty, even as they, of the superstition here condemned by our Saviour, in teaching for doctrines men's precepts."

SECTION IV. 2nd Part.-Evils of holding this Trentism instead of its hidden Truths.

ONE great possession of the Church of Christ is an objective infallibility: by holding as a divine and perfect object the Faith once delivered to the saints she is infallible. For this Faith does not consist of opinions, but of facts and living truths, and the peculiar martyrdom of the noble army of martyrs, who walked in the fresh footsteps of their Head, was that they witnessed to things, not notions, e. g. even to the death and resurrection and ascension of the Son of God, to the very perfect substance of salvation and life. Now the evil consequence of holding Romish Traditions to be equal to Holy Writ, and to the defined Catholic Tradition of the faith, is, that a subjective infallibility is set up-an idol or false image of the true. Not the subjective infallibility, which is correlative and subordinate to the objective, and which every member of the Church may possess by faithfully holding the objective, but a subjective infallibility claiming