Ib. p. 368.
We must needs believe that when your Majesty took our consent to a Liturgy to be a foundation that would infer our concord, you meant not that we should have no concord but by consenting to this Liturgy without any considerable alteration.
This is forcible reasoning, but which the Bishops could fairly leave for the King to answer;—the contract tacit or expressed, being between him and the anti-Prelatic Presbytero-Episcopalian party, to which neither the Bishops nor the Legislature had acceded or assented. If Baxter and Calamy were so little imbued with the spirit of the Constitution as to consider Charles II. as the breath of their nostrils, and this dread sovereign Breath in its passage gave a snort or a snuffle, or having led them to expect a snuffle surprised them with a snort, let the reproach be shared between the Breath's fetid conscience and the nostrils' nasoductility. The traitors to the liberty of their country who were swarming and intriguing for favor at Breda when they should have been at their post in Parliament or in the Lobby preparing terms and conditions!—Had all the ministers that were afterwards ejected and the Presbyterian party generally exerted themselves, heart and soul, with Monk's soldiers, and in collecting those whom Monk had displaced, and, instead of carrying on treasons against the Government
de facto
by mendicant negociations with Charles, had taken open measures to confer the sceptre on him as the Scotch did,—whose stern and truly loyal conduct has been most unjustly condemned,—the schism in the Church might have been prevented and the Revolution of 1688 superseded.
N. B. In the above I speak of the Bishops as men interested in a litigated estate. God forbid, I should seek to justify them as Christians.
Ib. p. 369.
Quære. Whether in the 20th Article these words are not inserted;—Habet Ecclesia auctoritatem in controversiis fidei.
Strange, that the evident antithesis between power in respect of ceremonies, and authority in points of faith, should have been overlooked!