A treatise of miscellany questions wherein many useful questions and cases of conscience are…A treatise of miscellany questions wherein many usefull questions and cases of conscience are…

This argument is much insisted upon by the Author of the Queries touching Ordination: If it can do any thing, yet it is no new light, but the very same which hath been formerly objected by Papists, and answered by Protestant writers. Whereof see one instance in Gerhard, loc: com: tom: 6. de Minist: Eccles: § 157.

This argument is much insisted upon by the Author of the Queries touching Ordination: If it can do any thing, yet it is no new light, but the very same which hath been formerlie objected by Papists, and answered by Protestant writers. Whereof see one instance in Gerhard, loc: com: tom: 6. de Minist: Eccles: § 157.

And now that those who drive so furiously after this Popish argument, may forever be ashamed of it: I return these answers. 1. By retortion, the argument will conclude as much against the Baptism, and Church estate of Independents, Anabaptists, and who ever they be that make any use of this ⟨p. 62⟩way of arguing against us. For by this argument, those who first gathered their Churches, baptized, and incorporated them into the body of Christ, were not only no true Ministers, but no true Church-members, having no other baptism, but what was received, either in the Church of Rome, or from those who were baptized in the Church of Rome: But who can bring a clean thing, out of that which is unclean. Where note by the way, that this argument of theirs, will also make the Scripture it self unclean now, because we have it out of an unclean thing, (the Church of Rome): So that all that will stand to this argument, must unchurch, unbaptize, unchristen themselves: If they will have their recourse to that promise, where two or three are met together, there am I in the midst of them, and think to lay the foundation of their Churches there, without any derivation from the Church of Rome, they must allow us to •o so too, but then they must pass from their argument. What will they say then? Either, there can be in our days atr•e Church with all the ordinances of Christ in it, independent upon the Church of Rome, and without building or leaning upon a lineal succession, or derivation from the Church of Rome, or there cannot. If they hold the affirmative, their argument is not worth a straw, for Ordination being one of the ordinances of Christ (which is here to be supposed, and hath been in the precedent Chapter proved) the reformed Churches had power to set it up, and restore it by virtue of Christs own institution. If the Negative, our Opposites, must all turn Seekers, their Churches are no Churches, their Baptism no Baptism, &c. 2. Suppose those protestant Ministers, who first ordained other Ministers, were themselves ordained by such as had no power to ordain them. Nay suppose the first reforming Ministers, to have been at the beginning of the Reformation, no Ministers, but private Persons, not pretending to be ordained. What will they conclude from