I. PART should go about to enforce them by new laws, and oaths to maintain their usurpations over general Councils, to which all Christians are more obliged than to any Patriarch; lastly, suppose a Patriarchal city shall lie in the dominions of one prince, and the province in the dominions of another, who are in continual war and hostility the one with the other, so as the subjects can neither have licence nor security to make use of their Patriarch;-ought not the respective provinces in all these cases to provide for themselves? Put the case, that a king going to war in the Holy Land should commit the regency to his council, and they constitute a governor of a principal city, who fails in his trust, and makes the citizens swear allegiance to himself and to maintain him against the council; all men will judge that the citizens should do well, if he were incorrigible, to turn him out of their gates. Christ was this King; Who, ascending into the Holy of Holies, left the regiment of His Church with the Apostolical college, and their successors, a general Council. They made the Bishop of Rome a principal governor, and he rebels against them. There needs no further application. Now to close up this point.-The end is more excellent than the means. The end of the primitive Fathers in establishing the external regiment of the Church in a conformity to the civil government was 'salus populi Christiani'—the ease and advantage of Christians, the avoiding of confusion and the clashing of jurisdictions. We pursue the same ends with them; we approve of their means in particular, as most excellent for those times, and in general for all times, that is, the conforming of the one regiment to the other. But God [James i. alone is without any "shadow of turning" by change. It is 17.] not in our power to prevent the conversion of sublunary things. Empires and cities have their diseases and their deaths as well as men. One is, another was, a third shall be. Mother-cities become villages, and poor villages become mother-cities. The places of the residence of the greatest kings and emperors are turned to deserts for owls to screech in and satyrs to dance in. Then, as a good pilot must move his rudder according to the variable face of the heavens, so, if we will pursue the prudent grounds of the primitive Fathers, we must change our external regiment according to [Isai. xiii. 21.] III. the change of the empire. This is better, than by adhering DISCOURSE too strictly to the private interest of particular places, to destroy that public end for which external regiment at first was so established. I confess, that this is most proper for a general Council to redress. Every thing is best loosed by the same authority by which it was bound. But in case of necessity, where there can be no recourse to a general Council, every sovereign prince within his own dominions, with the advice and concurrence of his clergy, and due submission to a future ecumenical Council, is obliged to provide remedies for growing inconveniences, and to take order that external discipline be so administered, as may most conduce to the glory of God and the benefit of his Christian subjects. I made three conditions of a lawful reformation, "just grounds, due moderation, and sufficient authority." He saith, Henry the Eighth had "none of these:" Henry's di ful, but no ground of mation. First, "no just ground, because his ground was, that the 1. King Pope would not give him leave to forsake his lawful wife and vorce lawtake another s." Perhaps the Pope's injustice might, by God's just dis- the Reforposition, be an occasion, but it was no "ground," of the Reformation; and if it had, yet neither this nor his other exceptions do concern the cause at all. There is a great difference between bonum and bene, between a good action and an action well done. An action may be good and lawful in itself, and yet the ground of him that acteth it sinister, and his manner of proceeding indirect, as we see in Jehu's reformation. This concerned King Henry's [2 Kings x. 18-29.] person, but it concerns not us at all. King Henry protested, that it was his "conscience;" they will not believe him. Queen Katherine accused Cardinal Wolsey as the author of it"; she never accused Anne Boleyn, who was in France when that business began. The Bishop of Lincoln was em I. PART ployed to Oxford, and Bishop Gardiner and Dr. Fox to Cambridge', to see the cause debated. Besides our own Universities, the Universities of Paris, Orleans, Anjou, Bourges, Bononia, Padua, Tholouse, and I know not how many of the most learned doctors of that age, did all sub-217 scribe to the unlawfulness of that marriage, which he calleth lawful. The Bishop of Worcester prosecuted the divorce; the Bishops of York, Duresme, Chester, were sent unto Queen Katherine to persuade her to lay aside the title of Queen ; the Bishops of Canterbury, London, Winchester, Bath, Lincoln, did give sentence against the marriage; Bishop Bonner made the appeal from the Popee. The greatest sticklers were most zealous Roman Catholics f. And if wise men were not mistaken, that business was long plotted between Rome and France and Cardinal Wolsey, to break the league with the emperor, and to make way for a new marriage with the Duchess of Alençon, sister to the king of France, and a stricter league with that Crown g. [Job v.13.] But God did "take the wise in their own craftiness." Yea, even Clement the Seventh had once given out a Bull privately to declare the marriage unlawful and invalid, if his legate Campeius could have brought the king to comply with the Pope's desiresh. I will conclude this point with two testimonies; the one of Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester, "Quid aliud debuit aut potuit," &c.-" What else ought the king or could the king do, than, with the full consent of his people and judgment of his Church, . . . to be loosed from an unlawful contract, and to enjoy one that was lawful and -350.] e See [Viz. to a general Council. Sharon Turner, Hist. of Engl., in Hen. VIII., bk. i. c. 26. pp. 343-345.] All the Cardinals of Rome opposed the dispensation. [i. e. the original dispensation for the marriage. Herbert, in Hen. VIII., p. 8. " Many of the Cardinals in vain opposing it."] Acworth, Cont. Monarch. Sanderi, lib. ii. cc. 13, 14. [pp. 137-140.]— Hall, [Chron.,] in 19 Hen. VIII. an. [1528], fol. 161.-Sander., De Schism., pp. 11, 12. [ed. 1585.-lib. i. pp. 11— 13. ed. 1610.] [See Just Vindic., c. vi. vol. i. p 196. note p.] III. allowed, and, ... leaving her whom neither law nor equity did DISCOURSE permit him to hold, to apply himself to a chaste and lawful marriage? in which cause, whereas the sentence of the Word of God alone had been sufficient, to which all ought to submit without delay, yet his Majesty disdained not to use the censures of the gravest men and most famous Universities":" -the second is the testimony of two Archbishops, two Dukes, three Marquisses, thirteen Earls, five Bishops, six and twenty Barons, two and twenty Abbots, with many Knights and doctors, in their letter to the Pope, " Causæ ipsius justitia," &c.-" the justice of the cause itself being approved everywhere by the judgments of most learned men, and determined by the suffrages of most famous Universities, being pronounced and defined by English, French, Italians, as every one among them doth excel the rest in learning,' &c. Though he call it a "lawful marriage," yet it is but one doctor's opinion. And if it had been lawful, the Pope and the clergy were more blame-worthy than King Henry. Secondly, he saith he wanted "due moderation,” because "he 2. The forced the parliament by fear to consent to his proceedings." not forced; I have shewed sufficiently that they were not forced, [and so due by their letter to the Pope, by their sermons preached at in the Reformation.] St. Paul's Cross, by their persuasions to the King, by their printed books; to which I may add their Declaration, called the Bishops' Book, signed by two Archbishops and nineteen Bishops'. Nor do I remember to have read of any of note that opposed it but two, who were prisoners and no parliamentmen at that time: Sir Thomas More (yet when King Henry writ against Luther, he advised him to take heed how he advanced the Pope's authority too much, lest he diminished his own"); and Bishop Fisher, who had consented in Convo- A. D. 1530. cation to the king's title of the "Supreme Head of the English Church, quantum per Christi legem licet "." But Parliament moderation PART 1. ["ut uno verbo dicam."] 3. [Henry because Bishop Gardiner is the only witness whom he pro- To the third condition he saith only, that Henry the the Eighth had suffi- Eighth had not "sufficient authority" to reform,— cient autho rity.] First, "because it was the power of a small part of the Church against the whole." I have showed the contrary;-that our Reformation was not made in opposition, but in pursuance, of the acts of general Councils; neither did our Reformers meddle without their own spheres. And, secondly, because the Papacy is of " Divine" right'. Yet before he told us that it was doubtful, and very courteously he would put it upon me to prove, that "the regiment of the Church by the Pope is of human institution." have learned better,-that the proof rests upon his side; both because he maintains an affirmative, and because we are in 218 |