Five disputations of church-government and worship

ambition was too predominant. The mentioning of the contentions of those most excellent Bishops, and the first four general Councils, makes Luther break out into so many admiring exclamations, in his Treatise de Conciliis, that ever such men should so ambitiously quarrel about toys and trifles, and childish things, and that even to the disturbing of all the Churches, and setting the Christian world on a flame. Of the two Churches of Rome and Constantinople he saith, Ita hae •uae Ecclesiae ambitiose r••atae sunt, de re nihili, vanissimis & nugacissimis naeniis, done• ••ndem utraque horribiliter vastata & deleta est. pag. 175. This ⟨p. 65⟩caused Nazianzen (who complaineth so much himself of the odium or displeasure of his fellow Bishops) to profess himself to be so affected, that he would avoid all Assemblies of Bishops, because he had never seen a good end of any Synod, and which did not rather increase the evils than remove them; and his reason is not as Bellarmine feigneth, only because they were all Arians; but because, The desire of contending, and of preheminency or principality, and their emulation, did overcome reason, (which Luther mentioning ib. pag. 225. wondereth that for these words he was not excommunicated as an arrant heretic) Who knoweth not, that knoweth any thing of Church history, how the Church hath been torn in pieces in all ages except the first, by the dissension of the Bishops, till the Pope drew part of them to unite in him? And who knoweth not, that knoweth any thing of the present state of the Christian world, into how many fractions it is broken at this day, and almost all through the Division of these Guides? If therefore we shall imagine that the Pastors of the Church could not be tainted with so much ambition as to enlarge their own Dioceses, and gather the new Churches under themselves, when they should have formed them into the same order and freedom as were the first, we shall shut our eyes against the most full experience of the Christian world▪ especially when the change was made by degrees.

ambition was too predominant. The mentioning of the contentions of those most excellent Bishops, and the first four general Councils, makes Luther break out into so many admiring exclamations, in his Treatise de Conciliis, that ever such men should so ambitiously quarrel about toyes and trifles, and childish things, and that even to the disturbing of all the Churches, and setting the Christian world on a flame. Of the two Churches of Rome and Constantinople he saith, Ita hae uae Ecclesiae ambitiose ratae sunt, de re nihili, vanissimis & nugacissimis naeniis, done ndem utraque horribiliter vastata & deleta est. pag. 175. This