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storation, the title page was changed, and it made its appearance cum Privilegio.

From this falsification of the Apostolical History, it is easy to foresee (and every young reader should be aware of it) how the English History, particularly that of the last century, must have suffered under the hands of the same party; what falsities and forgeries must have been propagated, to conceal the truth, to defame and blacken the best characters, and to justify the worst. Sometimes these bold experiments brought the authors of them into great embarrassment. Mr. Baxter, in two editions of his Saint's Everlasting Rest, printed before the year 1660, instead of the Kingdom of Heaven, as it is in the Scripture, calls it the Parliament of Heaven, (and, if like their own, it must have been a parliament without a King), and into this Parliament he puts some of the regicides, and other like saints, who were then dead. But in the editions after the Restoration, he drops them all out of Heaven again, and restores the kingdom of God to its place, in the language of the Gospel. Lord Brook was one of the saints whom Baxter thus discanonized: of whose remarkable end Lord Clarendon gives an account; vol. 11. chap. vi. p. 114.

But

But to return to the subject of popular Election. I have an author before me, a declaimer against Priestcraft, who finds the right of the people in the History of the Election of Matthias to the Apostleship. "Matthias is elected," says he, "to testify that ordination might be valid by the votes of the people only, without the immediate interposition of Heaven." He calls the Assembly of Apostles and Disciples, who were an hundred and twenty in number, the people; of whom we know that eleven were Apostles; that seventy more were ordained ministers; and nothing appears, but that (the women excepted) all the rest of this assembly were of the ministry likewise. But supposing them to be the people, how does it appear, that ordination was valid by their votes? Where is the account of this voting? The election is referred to God in the determination of a lot.Thou, Lord, shew whither of these two thou hast chosen. Here the immediate interposition of Heaven is applied for; but our orator says, this ordination was from the votes of the people only, without any such interposition of Heaven *. These two examples may be sufficient to shew the wretched shifts, and bold experiments,

* See the Axe laid to the Root of Priestcraft, in four Discourses. Disc. iv. p. 5:

ments, to which men are driven in the handling of the Scripture, to uphold the Anti-christian doctrine of a Church, derived from the authority of the people.

A SHORT

A

SHORT VIEW

OF THE PRESENT STATE

OF THE

ARGUMENT

BETWEEN THE

CHURCH OF ENGLAND

AND THE

DISSENTERS.

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