Chapter 23: Popery

Popery. SECT. 30.

Our Author hopes, it seems, that by this time he has brought his Disciples to Popery; that is the title of the last paragraph, to his business, not of his book; for that which follows, being a parcel of the excellent speech of my Lord Chancellor, is about a matter wherein his concernment lies not: This is his close and farewell. They say, there is one, who, when he goes out of any place, leaves a worse favor at his departure, than he gave all the time of his abode; and he seems here to be imitated. The disingenuity of this paragraph, the want of care, of truth, and of common honesty, that appears in it, sends forth a worse favor than most of those, if not than any, or all of them, that went before. The design of it, is to give us a parallel of some Popish and Protestant doctrines, that the beauty of the one may the better be set off by the deformity of the other. To this end he has made no conscience of mangling, defacing, and defiling of the latter. The doctrines, he mentions, he calls the more plausible parts of Popery. Such as he has laboured in his whole discourse to gild and [illegible] up with his rhetoric, nor shall I quarrel with him for his doting on them: only, I cannot but wish, it might suffice him to enjoy and proclaim the beauty of his Church, without open slandering and defaming of ours. This is not handsome, civil, mannerly, nor conscientious. A few instances will manifest, whether he has failed in this kind or no. The first plausible piece of Popery, as he calls it, that he presents us in his Antithesis, is the obligation which all have who believe in Christ to attend to good works, and the merit and benefit of so doing; in opposition whereto he says Protestants teach, that there be no such things as good works pleasing to God; but all be as menstruous rags, filthy odious, and damnable in the sight of Heaven; that, if it were otherwise, yet they are not in our power to perform. Let other men do what they please, or are able; for my part, if this be a good work, to believe, that a man conscientiously handles the things of religion, with a reverence of God, and a regard to the account he is to make at the last day, who can thus openly calumniate, and equivocate; I must confess, I do not find it in my power to perform it. It may be, he thinks it no great sin to calumniate and falsely accuse heretics; or, if it be, but a venial one. Such a one as has no respect to Heaven or Hell, but only Purgatory, which has no great influence on the minds of men to keep them from vice, or provoke them to virtue. Do Protestants teach, there are no such things as good works pleasing to God, or that those that believe, are not obliged to good works? In which of their Confessions do they so say? In what public writing of any of their Churches? What one individual Protestant was ever guilty of thinking or venting this folly? If our Author had told this story in Rome or Italy, he had wronged himself only in point of morality; but telling it in England, if I mistake not, he is utterly gone also as to reputation. But, yet you'll say, that if there be good works, yet it is not in our power to perform them. No more will Papists neither, that know what they say, or are in their right wits, that it is so, without the help of the grace of God; and the Protestant never lived, that I know of, that denied them by that help and assistance to be in our power. But they say, they are all as filthy rags, &c. I am glad he will acknowledge Isaiah, to be a Protestant, whose words they are concerning all our righteousness, that he traduces; we shall have him sometime or other denying some of the Prophets, or Apostles to be Protestants; and, yet it is known, that they all agreed in their doctrine and faith. Those other Protestants whom he labours principally to asperse, will tell him, that although God do indispensably require good works of them that do believe, and they by the assistance of his grace do perform constantly those good works, which both for the matter, and the manner of their performance are acceptable to him, in Jesus Christ, according to the tenor of the Covenant of Grace, and which, as the effect of his grace in us, shall be eternally rewarded; yet, that such is the infinite purity and holiness of the great God with whom we have to do, in whose sight the Heavens are not pure, and who charges his Angels with folly, that, if he should deal with the best of our works, according to the exigence and rigour of his justice, they would appear wanting, defective, yes filthy, in his sight; so, that our works have need of acceptation in Christ no less than our persons; and they add this to their faith in this matter, that they believe, that those who deny this, know little of God or themselves. My pen is dull, and the book that was lent me for a few days is called for. Ex hoc uno; by this instance; we may take a measure of all the rest wherein the same ingenuity and conscientious care of offending is observed, as in this; that is, neither the one, or other, is so. The residue of his discourse is but a commendation of his religion, and the professors of it, whereof I must confess, I begin to grow weary; having had so much of it, and so often repeated, and that from one of themselves, and that on principles which will not endure the trial and examination: Of this sort is the suffering for their religion, which he extols in them. Not what God calls them to, or others impose upon them in any part of the world, wherein they are not to be compared with Protestants, nor have suffered from all the world for their Papal religion, the hundredth part of what Protestants have suffered from themselves alone, for their refusal of it; does he intend; but what of their own accord they undergo. Not considering, that as outward affliction and persecution from the world, have been always the constant lot of the true worshippers of Christ in all ages; so, voluntary self-macerations have attended the ways of false-worship among all sorts of men from the foundation of the world.

FINIS.