your adversaries, by exerting that authority which is peculiar to sovereigns in ecclesiastical matters. But it is not strange that such people should join with your enemies. Errors that are most opposite and contradictory will more easily be reconciled to each other, than to the truth, though it lies in the middle, &c.”

From this letter we may observe two things: the first is, that father Paul adhered to the opinions of the Dominica s and the Contraremonstrants in the point of predestination; which is likewe obvious in his history of the council of Trent, concerning which the English divine, Heylin, write, "Tha the authority of father Paul, whatever credit he may deserve in historical matters, ought not to be admitted in doctrinal points, any further than it is supported by reason." In the next place, we may observe from his letter, what ill impressions Heinsius eems to have made on him in prejudice of the Remonstrants, by treating them as people who sided with the common enemy: but the falsity of this charge hath since appeared plainly enough. As for the rest of his letter, I leave it as I find it, and the reader may judge of it as he pleases.' Brandt, vol. iv. p. 80.

Every reasonable man must judge it to be excessively mean and fanatical, and altogether unworthy of fa ther Paul. Daniel Heinsius was secretary to the synod, and treated the Remonstrants there with great unfairness and rudeness. He also wrote against them, and undertook a task for which he was very unfit;

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which provoked them to attack his conduct and character, and to set him in a disadvantageous light.

The Contraremonstrants hated the memory of their countryman Erasmus, as much as they did the persons of Episcopius and Grotius, and wanted to have his statue pulled down. They could not bear the sight of this hero, even in brass: it had the same effect upon them as Statius supposes the image of Hercules to have had upon the Argives;

Haud illum impavidi, quamvis et in ære, suumque
Inachidæ videre decus z.

Two of their divines, elated with victory, insulted a poor fellow who was a Remonstrant, and said, What are you thinking on, with that grave and woful face? I was thinking, gentlemen, said he, of a controverted question, Who was the author of sin? Adam shifted it off from himself, and laid it to his wife; she laid it to the serpent; the serpent, who was then young and bashful, had not a word to say for himself; but afterwards growing older and more audacious, he went to the synod of Dort, and there he had the assurance to charge it upon God. Brandt.

Bayle, in his disputes against the wisdom and the goodness of God, being pushed by his antagonists, and compelled to declare what sort of a Christian he pretended to be, professed himself a Predestinarian Protestant of the most rigid sort; but no Protestant of

Theb. vi. 272.

any denomination ever was simple enough to believe him.

Bayle frequently took occasion to show his disapprobation of the Remonstrants. The true cause of his disgust seems to have been this: they endeavoured to prove the reasonableness of Christianity, and to vindicate the goodness of God, and would not give up the divine perfections as unintelligible and indefensible. They ought not,' says he, 'to have removed the bounds set up by their fathers.' I should have thought that the apostles and evangelists were to be looked upon as our Christian fathers, rather than the Calvins and the Bezas.

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"They ought not,' says he, to have made disturbances.' But that was not their fault; it was the fault of those who quarrelled with them, and would not tolerate them. Their refinements,' says he, 'signified nothing, and they could not defend Christianity any better than the Calvinists; for it is all one, whether God be the author and the punisher of sin, or whether he foresees sin, and permits it, and then punishes it with eternal misery.' These and the rest of his objections, drawn up with such a profusion of words, and so much pains, and parade, and indecent language, were considered and fully confuted by Le Clerc in his Bibliothèque Chois.

The system of the Remonstrants, as he is pleased to observe, is full of considerable errors. This is the mean and spiteful remark of a man who knew al

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most as little of divinity as he did of natural philosophy.

In England, at the time of the synod of Dort, we also were much divided in our opinions concerning the controverted articles; but our divines having taken the liberty to think and judge for themselves, and the civil government not interposing, it hath come to pass that, from that time to this, almost all persons here of any note for learning and abilities have bid adieu to Calvinism, have sided with the Remonstrants, and have left the Fatalists to follow their own opinions, and to rejoice (since they can rejoice) in a religious system, consisting of human creatures without liberty, doctrines without sense, faith without reason, and a God without mercy.

This system, so far as it relates to the eternal misery of infants for the fault of Adam, is the very fable of the Wolf and the Lamb:

Ante hos sex menses male, ait, dixisti mihi.
Respondit agnus: Equidem natus non eram.
Pater, hercule, tuus, inquit, maledixit mihi.

"Nothing burns in hell, but our own will." So says Bernard, a father, and a saint of the twelfth century: and he is highly to be commended for being the father of so good an aphorism, which is worth half his writings, and all his miracles.

Our dissenters, in the last century, were generally

* Justice and candour require us to except many of those of the present times.

absolute Predestinarians, and one of their constant clamours against the clergy of the church of England was that they were Arminians, a name which sounded as dreadfully in Supralapsarian ears, as that of Infidel, or Atheist.

Heylin wrote the history of the five articles, in which he endeavours to show that the church of England, though willing to tolerate the Calvinists, yet hath always been of the opinion of the Remonstrants in those points.

Whitby published some tracts on election, reprobation, and original sin; and in these treatises he confuted Calvinism even to a demonstration.

HE who is desirous to find religious truth must seek her in the Holy Scriptures, interpreted by good sense and sober criticism, and embrace no theological systems any further than as they are found consistent with the word of God, with right reason, and with themselves. A theological system is too often a temple consecrated to implicit faith, and he who enters in there to worship, instead of leaving his shoes, after the Eastern manner, must leave his understanding at the door; and it will be well if he find it when he comes out again.