The nonconformists plea for peace, or, An account of their judgment in certain things…

2. If they referred but to the Doctrine of the Trinity, and not to the particulars of that explication, it would not be excepted against: But some R. Reverend Conformists do profess that those sentences are untrue, and not to be approved.

3. But such think that the Churches meaning is not to require us to Assent or Approve them as true, but only to Consent to use them: And they prove it, because the same Church requireth us to Read the Books of Tobit, &c. which have palpable untruths, and not to believe them to be true.

4. But that reason seemeth null and vain; 1. Because the Apocrypha is no part of the Book to which we must Profess Assent, Approbation and Consent, nor to which by the Canon we must ex animo subscribe, that there is nothing in it contrary to the Word of God. But Athanasius's Creed, with those damnatory sentences, are part of that Book. Indeed the Liturgy requireth us to read those Apocryphal untruths, but they are no part of the Book: 2. And it being not the sense of the Liturgy, but of a Statute of Parliament, which we here doubt of, it seemeth insufficient, if not impertinent, to tell us what is taken for the sense of the Church; for the doubt is What is the sense of the Parliament, which we can no otherwise know but by the plain words, till they will otherwise declare their meaning.