subscribe the article, if there can be just cause to do it so often; but as I impose upon no man my sense of the article, but leave my reasons and him to struggle together for the best; so neither will I be bound to any one man, or any company of men but to my lawful superiors, speaking there where they can or ought to oblige. Madam, I take nothing ill from any man, but that he should think I have a less zeal for our church than himself, and I will, by God's assistance, be all my life confuting him; and though I will not contend with him, yet I will die with him in behalf of the church, if God shall call me; but for other little things and trifling arrests and little murmurs, I value none of it. Quid verum atque decens curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum: Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri : Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes ", I could translate these also into bad English verse, as I do the others; but that now I am earnest for my liberty, I will not so much as confine myself to the measures of feet. But in plain English I mean by rehearsing these Latin verses, that although I love every man, and value worthy persons in proportion to their labours and abilities, whereby they can and do serve God and God's church, yet "I inquire for what is fitting, not what is pleasing: I search after ways to advantage souls, not to comply with humours, and sects, and interests; and I am tied to no man's private opinion any more than he is to mine;" if he will bring Scripture and right reason from any topic, he may govern me and persuade me, else I am free, as he is but I hope I am beforehand with him in this question. But one thing more I am willing to add. By the confession of all the schools of learning, it is taught, that baptism hath, infallibly, all that effect upon infants, which God designed and the church intends to them in the ministry of that sacrament: because infants cannot ponere obicem,' they cannot impede the gift of God, and they hinder not the effect of God's Spirit. Now all hinderances of the operation of the sacrament is sin; and if sin, before the ministration, be not morally rescinded, it remains, and remaining is a disposition contrary to the effect of the sacrament. Every inherent sin is the obex,' bars the gates that the grace of the " Hor. Ep. 1. 1. 11. Gesner. sacrament shall not enter. Since, therefore, infants do not bar the gates, do not hinder the effect of the sacrament, it follows, they have no sin inherent in them, but imputed only. If it be replied, that original sin though it be properly a sin, and really inherent, yet it does not hinder the effect of the sacrament;-I answer, then it follows, that original sin is of less malignity than the least actual sin in the world; and if so, then either by it no man is hated by God to eternal damnation, no man is by it an enemy of God, a son of wrath, an heir of perdition; or if he be, then, at the same time, he may be actually hated by God, and yet worthily disposed for receiving the grace and sacrament of baptism; and that sin, which, of all the sins of the world, is supposed to be the greatest, and of most universal and permanent mischief,shall do the least harm, and is less opposed to God's grace, and indisposes a man less than a single wanton thought, or the first consent to a forbidden action; which he that can believe, is very much in love with his own proposition, and is content to believe it upon any terms. I end with the words of Lucretius*. Desine quapropter, novitate exterritus ipsâ, Dede manus; aut, si falsum est, accingere contra *. Fear not to own what's said, because 'tis new, Weigh well and wisely if the thing be true. Truth and not conquest is the best reward; MADAM, I HUMBLY beg you will be pleased to entertain these papers, not only as a testimony of my zeal for truth and peace below, and for the honour of God above; but also of my readiness to seize upon every occasion, whereby I may express myself to be, Your most obliged And most humble Servant In the Religion of the holy Jesus, * Lucretius 2. 1040. Wakefield. JER. TAYLOR. dis YOUR Lordship's letter, dated July 28, I received not till September 11: it seems R. Royston detained it in his hands, supposing it could not come safely to me, while I remain a prisoner now in Chepstow-castle. But I now have that liberty, that I can receive any letters, and send any; for the gentlemen under whose custody I am, as they are careful of their charges, so they are civil to my person. It was necessary, I should tell this to your Lordship, that I may not be under a suspicion of neglecting to give accounts in those particulars, which, with so much prudence and charity, you were pleased to represent in your letter, concerning my course of original sin. My Lord, in all your exceptions, I cannot but observe your candour and your paternal care concerning me. For when there was nothing in the doctrine, but your greater reason did easily see the justice and the truth of it, and I am persuaded could have taught me to have said many more material things in confirmation of what I have taught; yet so careful is your charity of me, that you would not omit to represent to my consideration, what might be said by captious and weaker persons; or by the more wise and pious, who are of a different judgment. But, my Lord, first, you are pleased to note, that this discourse runs not in the ordinary channel. True; for if it did, it must nurse the popular error: but when the disease is epidemical, as it is so much the worse, so the extraordinary remedy must be acknowledged to be the better. And if there be in it some things hard to be understood, as it was the fate of St. Paul's Epistles (as your Lordship notes out of St. Peter), yet this difficulty of understanding proceeds not from the thing itself, nor from the manner of handling it, but from the indisposition and prepossession of men's minds to the contrary; who are angry, when they are told, that they have been deceived: for it is usual with men to be more displeased, when they are told they were in error, than to be pleased with them, who offer to lead them out of it. But your Lordship doth with great advantages represent an objection of some captious persons, which relates not to the material part of the question, but to the rules of art. If there be no such thing as original sin transmitted from Adam to his posterity, then all that sixth chapter is a strife about a shadow, a 'non ens.'-Ans. It is true, my Lord, the question, as it is usually handled, is so. For when the Franciscan and Dominican do eternally dispute about the conception of the blessed Virgin, whether it was with, or without original sin, -meaning, by way of grace and special exemption, this is de non ente;' for there was no need of any such exemption; and they supposing, that commonly it was otherwise, troubled themselves about the exception of a rule, which in that sense, which they supposed it, was not true at all: she was born as innocent from any impurity or formal guilt, as Adam was created, and so was her mother, and so were all her family. When the Lutheran and the Roman dispute, whether justice and original righteousness in Adam were natural or by grace, it is 'de non ente;' for it was positively neither, but negatively only; he had original righteousness, till he sinned, that is, he was righteous, till he became unrighteous, When the Calvinist troubles himself and his parishioners with fierce declamations against natural inclinations or concupiscence, and disputes, whether it remains in baptized persons, or whether it be taken off by election, or by the sacrament, whether to all Christians or to some few ;-this is a σKiaμaxía; for it is no sin at all in persons baptized or unbaptized, till it be consented to. My Lord, when I was a young man in Cambridge, I knew a learned professor of divinity, whose ordinary lectures in the Lady Margaret's chair, for many years together, nine as I suppose, or thereabouts, were concerning original sin, and the appendant questions: this indeed could not choose but be 'andabatarum conflictus.' But then my discourse repre, senting that these disputes are useless, and as they discourse, usually to be de non ente,'—is not to be reproved. For I profess to evince, that many of those things, of the sense of which they dispute, are not true a tall in any sense; I declare them to be 'de non ente,' that is, I untie their intricate knots by cutting them in pieces. For when a false proposition is the ground of disputes, the process must needs be infinite, unless you discover the first error. He that tells them, they both fight about a shadow, and with many arguments proves the vanity of their whole process, they (if he says true), not he, is the σkáμaxos. When St. Austin was horribly puzzled about the traduction of original sin, and thought himself forced to say, that either the father begat the soul,—or that he could not transmit sin, which is subjected in the soul,—or at least he could not tell how it was transmitted: he had no way to be relieved but by being told, that original sin was not subjected in the soul, because, properly and formally, it was no real sin of ours at all; but that it was only by imputation, and to certain purposes, not any inherent quality, or corruption and so in effect all his trouble was de non ente.' But now some wits have lately risen in the church of Rome, and they tell us another story. The soul follows the temperature of the body, and so original sin comes to be transmitted by contact because the constitution of the body is the fomes' or nest of the sin, and the soul's concupiscence is derived from the body's lust. But besides that this fancy disappears at the first handling, and there would be so many original sins as there are several constitutions, and the guilt would not be equal,—and they who are born eunuchs, should be less infected by Adam's pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of desires;-and after all, concupiscence itself could not be a sin in the soul, till the body was grown up to strength enough to infect it; and, in the whole process, it must be an impossible thing, because the instrument, which hath all its operations, by the force of the principal agent, cannot, of itself, produce a great change |