The Scripture Gospel defended, and Christ, grace, and free justification vindicated against the libertines…

The plain inconsistency of a Perfect Conformity to the Law made our own, with Christs dying for sin, and our need of pardon, constrained a great part of the famousest Divines of the last Age, to go too far, in my Judgment, in excluding Christs Active, and Habitual Righteousness, to our Justification, and confining it to the Passive only: Such as Olevian, Ursine, Piscator, Paraeus, Scultetus, Wendeline, Beckman, and others in Germany; and Camero, with his most Judicious and Learned followers in France; and Dr. Twice (whose M.S. I before mentioned) Mr. Wotton, Mr. Gataker and others in England: And yet the two last, I think, go not so far as the rest. But Mr. Bradshaw truly told them, that it is not the excluding the Active from Imputation that must untie the knot, but the taking Imputation it self in a sound sense, and forsaking the unsound rigid notion of it, both as to the Active and Passive Righteousness. Grotius de Satisfactione hath gone the middle way, and if that Book had been more studied, fewer would have made us a new Gospel in terms, who, I hope, in sense do mean better than they speak.

The plain inconsistency of a Perfect Conformity to the Law made our own, with Christs dying for sin, and our need of pardon, constrained a great part of the famousest Divines of the last Age, to go too far, in my Judgment, in excluding Christs Active, and Habitual Righteousness, to our Justification, and confining it to the Passive only: Such as Olevian, Ʋrsine, Piscator, Paraeus, Scultetus, Wendeline, Beckman, and others in Germany; and Camero, with his most Judicious and Learned followers in France; and Dr. Twisse (whose M.S. I before mentioned) Mr. Wotton, Mr. Gataker and others in England: And yet the two last, I think, go not so far as the rest. But Mr. Bradshaw truly told them, that it is not the excluding the Active from Imputation that must untie the knot, but the taking Imputation it self in a sound sense, and forsaking the unsound rigid notion of it, both as to the Active and Passive Righteousness. Grotius de Satisfactione hath gone the middle way, and if that Book had been more studied, fewer would have made us a new Gospel in terms, who, I hope, in sense do mean better than they speak.

§. 20. In your explication you further own the subverting sense; viz. That Christs perfect Righteousness is made the Righteousness of Believers (forma dat nomen) and is accordingly