A27050:291
A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort…
A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort of diocesan churches, prelacy and government, which casteth out the primitive church-species, episcopacy, ministry and discipline and confoundeth the Christian world by corruption, usurpation, schism and persecution : meditated in the year 1640, when the et cætera oath was imposed : written 1671 and cast by : published 1680 by the importunity of our superiors, who demand the reasons of our nonconformity / by Richard Baxter.A treatise of episcopacy confuting by Scripture, reason, and the churches testimony that sort of diocesan churches, prelacy and government, which casteth out the primitive church-species, episcopacy, ministry and discipline and confoundeth the Christian world by corruption, usurpation, schism and persecution : meditated in the year 1640, when the et cætera oath was imposed : written 1671 and cast by : published 1680 by the importunity of our superiours, who demand the reasons of our nonconformity / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed for Nevil Simmons, 1681
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
And page 69. when the Canons for Bishops spare course of living are objected, he saith, that those Canons were made when Bishops lived of the same Purse which served as well for a number of others as for them, and yet all at their disposing; Intimating the old Course, when every Church had its Bishop and inferior Clergy. But Innovation is lawful for our Prelacy.
And page 69. when the Canons for Bishops spare course of living are objected, he saith, that those Canons were made when Bishops lived of the same Purse which served as well for a number of others as for them, and yet all at their disposing; Intimating the old Course, when every Church had its Bishop and inferiour Clergy. But Innovation is lawful for our Prelacy.
And now he that can find any thing in Hooker against the points which I defend, or for that Prelacy which I oppose, any more worth the answering than this that I have recited, let him rejoice in the perfection of his eye-sight. And if thus much be worthy to be confuted, or such as this, let them do it that have nothing else to do. So ridiculous is the Challenge of one that glorieth to write a Book with the same Title [of Ecoles. Policy,] who insultingly provoketh us to write a full Confutation of Hooker, who saith so little to the main point in Controversy, our Diocesan Form of Prelacy, and writeth his whole Book in a tedious Preaching stile, where you may read many leaves for so much Argumentation, as one Syllogism may contain; that I think I might as wisely have challenged himself to con••ue Mr. F•x's Book of Martyrs, or Baronius his Annals, almost, or at least may say as Dr. John Burges doth of Mr. Parker (another sort of Parker) his Book of the Cross, which Dr. Ames saith was never answered, that if any will reduce that gaudy Treatise into Argument (it being indeed almost all made up of the ⟨p. 52⟩fruits of Reading, History, Sentences, &c. of purpose to confute them that said the Nonconformists were no Scholars) he should quickly have an Answer to it. So if any will reduce all that is in Mr. Hooker's 8 Books (in tedious Discourses into Syllogism, (which is against what I maintain,) I believe it will not all fill up one half or quarter of a page; and it shall, God-willing, be soon answered. In the mean time the popular Principles of his First and Eighth Book, subverting all true Government, I have already confuted elsewhere (in my Christian Directory.)