substance of the remainder must have been little short of the Apostolic age.  But so is one at least of the writings of Clement.  The great question is:  Was this the Baptismal Symbol, the ‘Regula Fidei’, which it was forbidden to put in writing;—­or was it not the Christian A. B. C. of the ‘Catechumeni’ previously to their Baptismal initiation into the higher mysteries, to the ‘strong meat’ which was not for babes’? [2]

Ib. p. 203.

Not so much for my own sake as others; lest it should offend the Parliament, and open the mouths of our adversaries, that we cannot ourselves agree in fundamentals; and lest it prove an occasion for others to sue for a universal toleration.

That this apprehension so constantly haunted, so powerfully actuated, even the mild and really tolerant Baxter, is a strong proof of my old opinion,—­that the dogma of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to restrain and punish religious avowals by him deemed heretical, universal among the Presbyterians and Parliamentary Churchmen, joined with the persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians,—­was the main cause of Cromwell’s despair and consequent unfaithfulness concerning a Parliamentary Commonwealth.

Ib. p. 222.

I tried, when I was last with you, to revive your reason by proposing to you the infallibility of the common senses of all the world; and I could not prevail though you had nothing to answer that was not against common sense.  And it is impossible any thing controverted can be brought nearer you, or made plainer than to be brought to your eyes and taste and feeling; and not yours only, but all men’s else.  Sense goes before faith.  Faith is no faith but upon supposition of sense and understanding:  if therefore common sense be fallible, faith must needs be so.

This is one of those two-edged arguments, which not indeed began, but began to be fashionable, just before and after the Restoration.  I was half converted to Transubstantiation by Tillotson’s common senses against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds ’totidem verbis et syllabis’ would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of Christianity.  If the Roman Catholics had pretended that the phenomenal bread and wine were changed into the phenomenal flesh and blood, this objection would have been legitimate and irresistible; but as it is, it is mere sensual babble.  The whole of Popery lies in the assumption of a Church, as a numerical unit, infallible in the highest degree, inasmuch as both which is Scripture, and what Scripture teaches, is infallible by derivation only from an infallible decision of the Church.  Fairly undermine or blow up this:  and all the remaining peculiar tenets of Romanism fall with it, or stand by their own right as opinions of individual Doctors.