Ib.

And whereas you speak of opening a gap to Sectaries for private conventicles, and the evil consequents to the state, we only desire you to avoid also the cherishing of ignorance and profaneness, and suppress all Sectaries, and spare not, in a way that will not suppress the means of knowledge and godliness.

The present company, that is, our own dear selves, always excepted.

Ib. p. 250.

  Otherwise the poor undone Churches of Christ will no more believe you
  in such professions than we believed that those men intended the
  King’s just power and greatness, who took away his life.

Or who, like Baxter, joined the armies that were showering cannon balls and bullets around his inviolable person!  Whenever by reading the Prelatical writings and histories, I have had an over dose of anti-Prelatism in my feelings, I then correct it by dipping into the works of the Presbyterians, and their fellows, and so bring myself to more charitable thoughts respecting the Prelatists, and fully subscribe to Milton’s assertion, that “Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large.”

Ib. p. 254.

  The apocryphal matter of your lessons in Tobit, Judith, Bel and the
  Dragon, &c., is scarce agreeable to the word of God.

Does not Jude refer to an apocryphal book?

Ib.

Our experience unresistibly convinceth us that a continued prayer doth more to help most of the people, and carry on their desires, than turning almost every petition into a distinct prayer; and making prefaces and conclusions to be near half the prayers.

This now is the very point I most admire in our excellent Liturgy.  To any particular petition offered to the Omniscient, there may be a sinking of faith, a sense of its superfluity; but to the lifting up of the soul to the Invisible and there fixing it on his attributes, there can be no scruple.

Ib. p. 257.

The not abating of the impositions is the carting off of many hundreds of your brethren out of the ministry, and of many thousand Christians out of your communion; but the abating of the impositions will so offend you as to silence or excommunicate none of you at all.  For example, we think it a sin to subscribe, or swear canonical obedience, or use the transient image of the Cross in Baptism, and therefore these must cast us out, &c.

As long as independent single Churches, or voluntarily synodical were forbidden and punishable by penal law, this argument remained irrefragable.  The imposition of such trifles under such fearful threats was the very bitterness of spiritual pride and vindictiveness;—­after the law passed by which things became as they now are, it was a mere question of expediency for the National Church to determine in relation to its own comparative interests.  If the Church chose unluckily, the injury has been to itself alone.