A PREFACE TO THE READER. 45
SO shall we of any presbyters not instituted and appointed by the authority of Jesus Christ in the church, " Let them go to the place from whence they came."
2. I desire the doctor to inform me in what sense he would have me to understand him, Dissert, ii. cap. xxix. sect. 21, 22, where he disputes that these words of Jerome, " Antequam studia in religionc fierent, et dicere- tur in populis, ego sum Pauli, ego Cephse, communi presbyterorum con- sensu ecclesise gubernabantur," are to be understood of the times of the apostles, when the first schism was in the church of Corintli, when it seems that neither then nor a good while after was there any such tiling as presbyters in the church of Corinth, nor in any other church as we can hear of; as also, to tell us whether all those presbyters were bishops properly so called, distinct from elders who are only so, out of whom one man is chosen to be a bishop properly so called. To these inquiries I shall only add, —
3. That whereas in the Scripture we find clearly but two sorts of church- officers mentioned, as also in this epistle of Clemens, the third, that was afterward introduced, be it what it will, or fall on whom it will, that we oppose. This, saitli the doctor, is that of presbytery. Give us churches instituted according to the word of Christ ; give us in every church bishops and deacons (rather than we will quarrel, give us a bishop and deacons) ; let those bishops attend the particular flock over which they are appointed, preaching the word and administering the holy ordinances of the gospel in and to their own flock, — and I dare undertake for all the contenders for presbytery in this nation, and much more for the Indepen- dents, that there shall be an end of this quarrel ; that they will not strive with the doctor, nor any living, for the introduction of any third sort of persons (though they should be called presbyters) into church office and government. Only this I must add, that the Scripture more frequently terms this second sort of men elders and presbyters than it doth bishops ; and that word having been appropriated to a third sort peculiarly, we de- sire leave of the doctor and his associates if we also most frequently call them so, no ways declining the other appellation of bishops, so that it may be applied to signify the second, and not a third, rank of men. But of this whole business, with the nature, constitution, and frame, of the first churches, and the sad mistakes that men have, by their own prejudices, been engaged into in their delineation of them, a fuller opportunity, if God will, may ere long be afforded.
To return, then, to our Ignatius : Even upon this consideration of the difference that is between the epistles ascribed to him and the writings of (me of the same time loith him, or not long before him, as to their language and expression about church order and officers, it is evident that there hath been ill-favoured tampering with them, by them who thought to avail themselves of his authority for the asserting of that which never came into his mind.
As I intimated before, I have not insisted on any of those things, nor do on them altogether, with the like that may be added, as a sufficient foundation for the total rejection of those ei^istles which go under the name of Ignatius. There is in some of them a sweet and gracious spirit of faith, love, holiness, zeal for God, becoming so excellent and holy a witness of Christ as he was, evidently breathing and working. Neither is there any need at all that, for the defence of our hypothesis concerning the non-institution of any church-officer whatever relating to more churches in his office, or any other church, than a single particular congregation,
46 A PREFACE TO THE READER.
we should so reject them ; for although many passages usually insisted on, and carefully collected by Dr Hammond for the proof of such an epis- copacy to have been received by them of old as is now contended for, are exceedingly remote from the way and manner of the expression of those things used by the divine writers, with them also that followed after, both before, as hath been manifested, and some wliile after the days of Ignatius, as might be farther clearly evinced, and are thrust into the series of the discourse with such an incoherent impertinency as proclaims an interpola- tion, being some of them also very ridiculous, and so foolishly hyperbolical that they fall very little short of blasphemies, yet there are expressions in all or most of them that will abundantly manifest that he who was tlieir author (whoever he was) never dreamt of any such fabric of church-order as in after ages was insensibly reared. Men who are full of their own apprehensions, begotten in theni by such representations of things as either their desired presence hath exhibited to their mind or any after-prejudi- cate presumption hath possessed them with, are apt, upon the least appear- ance of any likeness unto that church they fancy, to imagine that they see the face and all the lineaments thereof, when, upon due examination, it will be easily discovered that there is not indeed the least resemblance between ■what they find in, and what they bring to, the authors in and of whom they make their inquiry. The Papists, having hatched and owned by several degrees that monstrous figment of transubstantiation (to instance among many in that abomination), — a folly destructive to whatever is in us as being living creatures, men, or Christians, or wliatever by sense, reason, or religion, wc are furnished withal, ofix^ring violence to us in what we hear, in what wo see witli our eyes and look upon, in what our hands do handle, and our palates taste, breaking in upon our understandings with vagrant, flying forms, self-subsisting accidents, with as many express con- tradictions en sundry accounts as the nature of things is capable of rela- tion unto, attended with more gross idolatry than that of the poor naked Indians who fall down and worship a piece of red cloth, or of tliose who first adore their gods and then correct them, — do yet upon the discovery of any expressions among the ancients which they now make use of quite to another end and purpose than they did who first ventured upon them, having minds filled Avith their own abominations, presently cry out and triumph, as if they had found the whole fardel of the mass in its per- fect dress, and their hreaden god in the midst of it. It is no otherwise in the case of episcopacy. Men of these latter generations, from what they saw in present being, and that usefulness of it to all their desires and in- terests, having entertained thoughts of love to it and delight in it, search- ing antiquity, not to instruct them in tlie truth, but to establish their pre- judicate opinion received by tradition from their fathers, and to consult them with whom they have to do, whatever expressions they find or can hear of that fall in, as to the sound of words, with what is now insisted upon, instantly they cry out, " Vicimus lo Pa;an !" What a simple genera- tion of Presbyters and Independents have we, that are ignorant of all anti- quity, or do not understand what they read and look upon! Hence, if we will not believe that in Ignatius' days there were many parish churches, with their single jiriests, in subordination to a diocesan bishop, either im- mediately or by the interposed power of a chore-cyiscopus, and the like; and those diocesans, again, in the precincts of provinces, laid in a due sub- jection to their metropolitans, who took care of them as they of their parish priests; every individual church having no oificer but a presbyter; every diocesan church having no presbyter, but a bishop; and every metro-