A27050:430
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.
This is enough to say of Spalatensis, save that all that he saith for Bishops against us, is so little a part of what is said by the rest, that it can require no new Answer. And if this great Moderator, (who returned to Rome, though for a miserable imprisonment and end) because we are not yet near enough to Antiquity, (or rather being flattered into covetous and ambitious hopes) be able to prove no greater a difference between Bishops and Presbyters, we need not think that any other is like to do it.
16. The last great, Learned, Sober Defender of Episcopacy, and the1 last that I need to mention here, is Doctor Hammond, who in his Annotations, and his Treat. of the Keys, and especially his Dissertations against Blondel, and his Defence of them against the London▪ Ministers, hath said much in this Cause. But his way is new (save that he followeth Petavius in the main supposition:) He forsaketh almost all the Fathers, and almost all the Patrons of Episcopacy of later times (who have written for it) in the Exposition of all the Texts of Scripture which mention the Elders and Bishops of Churches in those times, supposing that they all speak of Bishops only.
- 1Dr. Hammond answered.
In his Treat. of the Keys, he maintaineth that the power of them was given to the Apostles only by Christ, and to Bishops as their Successors by the Apostles. But I take it for undeniable truth, that the Bishops and Elders settled in every Church by the Apostles in their own time, had this power, and I need not expect a contradiction in it. And how fitly those are called the Apostles Successors, whom they set over the Churches in their own time, even from the beginning that they settled Churches, and with whom they continued in the same Churches many Months or Years (as Paul in Asia, I leave to others to judge.