Section 9

Yet still, you will needs beat the air very furiously, and fight pitifully with yourselves; Alas, brethren, why will you take so much pains to go willfully out of your way, and to mislead the reader with you? Who ever challenged (in that sense which you feign to yourselves) a sole jurisdiction? Why will you with some show of learning confute that, which you yield us to confess? We confess this [sole] cried down by store of antiquity; we do willingly grant that Presbyters have, and ought to have, and exercise a jurisdiction within their own charge, in foro conscientiae; we grant that in all the great affairs of the Church, the Presbyters, whether in synods, or otherwise, ought to be consulted with; we grant that the Bishops had of old their ecclesiastical Council of Presbyters, with whose advice they were wont to manage the greatest matters, and we still have so; for to that purpose serve the Deans and chapters; and the laws of our Church frequently make that use of them; we grant, that Presbyters have their votes in provincial synods: But we justly say that the superiority of jurisdiction is so in the Bishop, as that Presbyters neither did, nor may exercise it without him; and that the exercise of external jurisdiction is derived, from, by, under him to those which execute it within his diocese. Thus, it is to Timothy that Saint Paul gives the charge concerning the rebuke of an Elder, or not receiving an accusation against him; it is to Titus that Saint Paul leaves the ([〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉]) correction of his Cretians; thus, the Canons of the Apostles; [〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉], &c. Thus the blessed Martyr Ignatius in his undoubted Epistle to those of Smyrna, [〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉], &c. Let no man do anything, in matters belonging to the Church, without the Bishop. Thus the Council of Antioch orders, that whatever belongs to the Church, is to be governed, managed, and disposed, by the judgment and authority of the Bishop, who has [〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉], the power of those things which belong to the Church.

It were easy to surfeit the reader's eyes, with the clear testimonies of Fathers, and Councils, to this purpose. Our learned Bishop Downam has given a world of instances of the several acts of jurisdiction, appropriated to Bishops by antiquity, exercised upon both laity, and clergy: to him I remit my reader; so as, you may easily set antiquity together by the ears, in this point, if you please; but surely, the advantage will be so far on our side, that if you have not ten for one against you, I will yield my cause.

There is great difference of times, and in them of fashions: in those persecuted times, when the Church was backed with no Christian Magistrate, it was no use to bid the guides of the Church to combine their Councils, and to give strength to their mutual actions: when a general peace once blessed them, and they had the concurrence both of sovereign and subordinate authority with them, they began so much to slacken this care of conjoining their forces, as they supposed to find less need of it. From here grew a devolution of all less weighty affairs to the wielding of single hands. For my part, I persuade myself, that the more frequent communicating of all the important business of the Church, whether censures or determinations, with those grave assistants, which in the eye of the law are designed to this purpose, were a thing not only unprejudicial to the honor of our function, but very beneficial to the happy administration of the Church.

In the meantime, see brethren, how you have with Simon fished all night, and caught nothing. My word was, that ours were the same with the Apostles' Bishops, in this, that they challenge no other spiritual power than was by Apostolic authority delegated to Timothy and Titus: you run out upon the following times of the Church, and have with some vast quotations labored to prove, that in after ages, Bishops called in Presbyters to the assistance of their jurisdiction; which is as much to me, as Baculus stat in angulo.