A27050:370
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.
Obj. But all the rest did the same, as soon as they had People enow to make many Churches?
Ans. 1. I have told you Grotius and Dr. Hammond think that there were more Bishops than one in a City for some time. 2. This multiplication was not till long after in the third Century, and with most in the fourth, when it was no wonder that the Church fell into the Imperial Form: And when they did so, the Roman Primacy arose with the rest. 3. Yet even ⟨p. 67⟩then the Presbyters were Episcopi gregis, and had the true, full, Pastoral power as to their Flocks, as aforesaid. So that there were no Bishops that yet deposed the Presbyters as now.
Page 125. He saith, [Neither was this a thing peculiar to the Bishops of Alexandria, but common to others.—Ignatius was Bishop not only of Antioch, but of Syria: Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, was Bishop of the Churches in France, &c.
Ans. 1. This openeth the former case: These were not Diocesans, deposing all the Episcopos gregis, and become sole Bishops, but Archbishops that had under them Bishops in each particular Church. Yet note, that it is the French Synod of Bishops which Euseb. ib. l. 5. c. 23. Iren. is said to oversee, as it's said, ibid. that Palmas did so among the Bishops of Pontus in their Synod, and that Victor was President in the Bishops Synod at Rome, and Theophilus of Caesarea, and Narcissus of Jerusalem in the Palestine Synod: Which is nothing to our case.