1 Pers. ii. 75. The import of the quotation in the original is, that with an un- blemished character, a man may approach the temples, and make peace with no more costly ofTeiiMg than a handful of flour. Owen intimates that if all the statcniciits were time, which he has supiwsod the Papist to make, small reason for quarrel would be left between Protestant and Papist. — Ed.
ENTITLED FIAT LUX. 1 C)7
desire men would pray for him, that God would convert him and all his other enemies to the truth of the gospel ; and in the meantime to deliver all his from their policy, rage, and fury.
We may eas'dy gather what is to be thought of the other enco- miums given to him by our author by what hath been observed con- cerning those we have passed through; as, that "his whole lii'o and study is to defend innoccncy," etc. It must needs be granted that he hath taken some little time to provide for himself in the world; he had surely never arrived else to that degree of excellency as to tread on the necks of emperors, to have kings hold his stirrup, to kick off their crowns, to exceed the rulers of the earth in worldly pomp, state, and treasures, which came not to him by inheritance from St Peter: and whether he hath been such a defender of inno- cency and innocents, the day wherein God shall make inquisition for blood will manifest. The great work he hath done by his general councils, a summary of which is given us by our author, is next pre- tended:— "All this was done by him; yea, all that good that was ever done by general councils in the world was done by him: for they were all his councils, and that which was not his is none." 1 shall only mind our author of what was said of old unto one talking at that rate that he is pleased here to do: —
" Labore alicno niagno partara gloriam Verbis saepe in se transmovet, qui habet salem, Qui in te est." [Tcr. Eun. iii. 1, 10.]
All the glory and renown of the old ancient councils, all their labours for the extirpation of heresies and errors, and the success that their honest endeavours were blessed withal, with the season- ing of one little word, " his," are turned over to the pope. Tliey were " his councils;" a thing they never once dreamed of, nor any mortal man in the days wherein they were celebrated. Convened they were in the name and upon the institution of Christ, and so were " His" councils; were called together, as to their solemn ex- ternal convention, by the emperors of those days, and so were not their councils, but councils held by their authority, as to all the ex- ternal concernments of them. This the councils themselves did ac- knowledge, and so did the bishops of Rome in those day.s, when they joined their petitions with others unto the emperors for the convening of them; and seldom it was that they could obtain their meetings in any place they desired, though they were many of them wise at an after-game, and turned their remoteness from them into their advan- tage. As they were called by the emperors, so they were composed of bishops and others, with equal suffrages. How they come to be the pope's coimcils he himself only knows, and those to whom he is
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pleased to impart this secret ; of other men not one. Indeed, some of them may be called his councils, if every thing is his wherein he is any way concerned. Such was the first council of Nice, as to his i^retended jurisdiction; such that of Chalcedon, as to his primacy; such Avere sundry famous conventions in Afric, wherein his pretensions unto authority were excluded, and his unseemly frauds discovered. Nay, there is not any thing upon the roll of antiquity of greater and more prodigious scandal than the contests of popes, in some African councils, for authority and jurisdiction. Their claim was such as that the good fathers assembled wrote unto them that they would not introduce secular pride and ambition into the church of Christ. And the manner of managing their pretensions was no other but down- right forgery, and that of no less than canons of the first memorable Council of Nice : which to discover, the honest African bishops were forced to send to Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, for au- thentic copies of those canons, upon the receipt whereof they molli- fied the forgery with much Christian sobriety and prudence unto the bishop of Rome himself, and enacted a decree for the future, to pre- vent his pretensions and claims. Besides, as the good bishops aver, God himself testified against the irregular interposition of the pre- tended power of the bishop of Rome ; for whilst they, being synodi- cally assembled, were detained and hindered in their procedure by the Romanists' contests for stiperiority, Apiarius, the guilty person, being convinced in his conscience of his many notorious evils and crimes, from a just censure whereof the Roman interposition was used to shelter him, of his own accord cast himself at the feet of the assembly, confessing all his wickedness and folly. Of the six first councils, then, there is no more reason to call them the pope's, or to ascribe their achievements unto him, than there is to call them any other bishop's of any city then famous in the world. In that which he calls the " seventh general council," — indeed a conventicle of igno- rant, tumultuous, superstitious iconolaters, condemned afterward by a council held at Frankfort by the authority of Charles the Great, — he stickled to some purpose for images, which then began to be his darlings; and though we can afford that council to be his, for any concernment we have in it, yet the story of it will not allow us to do so, it being neither convened nor ruled by his authority, though the briTtish monks in it were willing to shelter themselves under the splendour and lustre of his see. Aboub those that follow we will not much contend; it matters not whose they were, unless they had been better, — especially such as laid foundations for, and stirred up princes to shed the innocent blood of the martyrs of Christ, to some of their perpetual ignominy, reproach, and ruin. But yet our author knows, or may know, what long contests there have been, even in latter ages,