A vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat lux

CHAP. 16.

The Power assigned by Papists and Protestants unto Kings in matters Ecclesiastical. Their several Principles discussed and compared.

Your Discourse on this head is not reducible by Logic its self unto any method or rules of Argument. For it is in general, 1. So loose, Ambiguous and Metaphorically expressed: 2. So Sophistical and inclusive; 3. So inconsistent in sundry instances with the Principles and practices of your Church, if you speak intelligibly; 4. So false and untrue in many particulars, that it is scarcely for these excellent qualifications to be paralleled with any thing either in your Fiat or your Epistola. First, It is loose and ambiguous: 1. Not stating what you intend by the Head of the Church, which you discourse about: 2. No• determining whither the King be such an head of Execution in matter of Religion, as may use the Liberty of his own judgement as to what he puts in execution, or whether he be not bound to execute your Popes Determinations on the penalty of the forfeiture of his Christianity; which I doubt we shall find to be your opinion; 3. Not declaring wherein the power which you assign unto him is founded; whether in Gods immediate institution, o• the Concession of the Pope, whereon it should solely depend, unto whom it is in all things to be made subservient. Secondly, Sophistical. (1.) In playing with the ambiguity of that expression Head ⟨p. 399⟩of the Church, and by the advantage thereof imposing on Protestants contradictions between their profession and practice, as though in the one they acknowledged the King to be head of the Church, and not in the other: (whereas there is a perfect consonancy between them in the sense wherein they understand that expression) shrouding your own sense and opinion in the mean time under the same ambiguity. (2.) In supposing an absolute universal Head of the whole Catholic Church, and then giving reasons why no King can be that Head; when you know that the whole Question is whither there by any such head of the Catholic Church on earth or no. (3.) In supposing the Principles and practises of the Primitive Church to have been the same with those of the present Roman, and those of the present Roman to have been all known and allowed of old, which begs all that is in Controversy between us; and sundry other instances of the like nature may be observed in it. Thirdly, Inconsistent with the Principles and Practices of your own Church, both 1. In what you ascribe unto Kings, and 2.