ent, in her huge drag-net, whether fish or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, those are the fathers.

How can they bring satisfaction from such an author, to whose every essence the reader must be fain to contribute his own understanding? Had God ever intended that we should have sought any part of useful instruction from Ignatius, doubtless he would not have so ill provided for our knowledge as to send him to our hands in this broken and disjointed plight; and if he intended no such thing, we do injuriously in thinking to taste better the pure evangelic manna, by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps and fragments of an unknown table, and searching among the verminous and polluted rags dropped overworn from the toiling shoulders of time, with these deformedly to quilt and interlace the entire, the spotless, and undecaying robe of truth, the daughter not of time, but of Heaven, only bred up here below in Christian hearts, between two grave and holy nurses, the doctrine and discipline of the Gospel.

He that thinks it the part of a well-learned man to have read diligently the ancient stories of the Church, and to be no stranger in the volumes of the fathers, shall have all judicious men consenting with him; not hereby to control and newfangle the Scripture, God forbid! but to mark how corruption and apostasy crept in by degrees, and

to gather up wherever we find the remaining sparks of original truth, wherewith to stop the mouths of our adversaries, and to bridle them. with their own curb, who willingly pass by that which is orthodoxal in them, and studiously cull out that which is commentitious, and best for their turns, not weighing the fathers in the balance of Scripture, but Scripture in the balance of the fathers. If we, therefore, making first the Gospel our rule and oracle, shall take the good which we light on in the fathers, and set it to oppose the evil which other men seek from them, in this way of skirmish we shall easily master all superstition and false doctrine; but if we turn this our discreet and wary usage of them into a blind devotion towards them, and whatsoever we find written by them, we both forsake our own grounds and reasons which led us at first to part from Rome, that is, to hold to the Scriptures against all antiquity; we remove our cause into our adversaries' own court, and take up there those cast principles which will soon cause us to solder up with them again; inasmuch as, believing antiquity for itself in any one point, we bring an engagement upon ourselves of assenting to all that it charges upon us,

FROM THE

REASON OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT
URGED AGAINST PRELATY.

N the publishing of human laws, which for the most part aim not beyond the good of civil society, to set them barely forth to the people without reason or preface, like a physical prescript, or only with threatenings, as it were a lordly command, in the judgment of Plato was thought to be done neither generously nor wisely. nor wisely. His advice was, seeing that persuasion certainly is a more winning and more manlike way to keep men in obedience than fear, that to such laws as were of principal moment, there should be used as an induction some well-tempered discourse, showing how good, how gainful, how happy it must needs be to live according to honesty and justice; which being uttered with those native colors and graces of speech, as true eloquence, the daughter of virtue, can best bestow upon her mother's praises, would so incite, and in a manner charm, the mul

Plato prefer

tu

Moses to shows

titude into the love of that which is really good,
as to embrace it ever after, not of custom and
awe, which most men do, but of choice and pur-
pose, with true and constant delight. But this
practice we may learn from a better and more
ancient authority than any heathen writer hath to
give us; and, indeed, being a point of so high wis-
dom and worth, how could it be but we should
find it in that book within whose sacred context
all wisdom is unfolded? Moses, therefore, the
only lawgiver that we can believe to have been to
visibly taught of God, knowing how vain it was
to write laws to men whose hearts were not first
seasoned with the knowledge of God and of his
works, began from the book of Genesis, as a pro-
logue to his laws; which Josephus right well hath
noted: that the nation of the Jews, reading there-
in the universal goodness of God to all creatures
in the creation, and his peculiar favor to them
in his election of Abraham, their ancestor, from
whom they could derive so many blessings upon
themselves, might be moved to obey sincerely, by
knowing so good a reason of their obedience. If,
then, in the administration of civil justice, and
under the obscurity of ceremonial rites, such care
was had by the wisest of the heathen, and by
Moses among the Jews, to instruct them at least
in a general reason of that government to which
their subjection was required, how much more
ought the members of the Church, under the

& much more ht th

~ght

ch instructio

church god.

REASON OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT

the reasons Gospel, seek to inform their understanding in the

aplice is

rouist in

mau

life

reason of that government which the Church claims to have over them! Especially for that Church hath in her immediate cure those inner parts and affections of the mind, where the seat of reason is having power to examine our spiritual knowledge, and to demand from us, in God's behalf, a service entirely reasonable.

THERE is not that thing in the world of more grave and urgent importance throughout the whole life of man than is discipline. What need I instance! He that hath read with judgment of nations and commonwealths, of cities and camps, of peace and war, sea and land, will readily agree that the flourishing and decaying of all civil societies, all the moments and turnings of human occasions, are moved to and fro as upon the axle of discipline. So that whatsoever power or sway in mortal things weaker men have attributed to fortune, I durst with more confidence (the honor of Divine Providence ever saved) ascribe either to the vigor or the slackness of discipline. Nor is there any sociable perfection in this life, civil or sacred, that can be above discipline; but she is that which with her musical cords preserves and holds all the parts thereof together. Hence in those perfect armies of Cyrus in Xenophon, and Scipio in the Roman stories, the excellence of military