ON THE ROMAN CONTROVERSY TO SIR JOHN JAMES, BART.

CLOYNE, June 7, 1741.
DEAR SIR,
I would not defer writing though I write in no small confusion and distress, my family having many ill of an epidemical fever that rages in these parts, and I being the only physician to them & my poor neighbours. You have my sincere thanks for the freedom and friendship with which you are so good to communicate your thoughts. Your making the unum necessarium your chief business sets you above the world. I heartily beg of God that he would give me grace to do the same, a heart constantly to pursue the truth and abide in it wherever it is found.

No Divine cou'd say, in my opinion, more for the Church of Rome than you have done.--

Si Pergama dextrâ

Defendi possent, etiam hâc defensa fuissent.

The Scriptures and Fathers, I grant, are a much better help to know Christ and his Religion than the cold and dry writings of our modern Divines. Many who are conversant in such books I doubt have no more relish for the things of the Gospel, than those who spend their time in reading the immense and innumerable tomes of Scholastic Divinity with which the Church of Rome abounds. The dry polemical Theology was the growth of Rome, begun from Peter Lombard the Master of the Sentences, and grew and spread among the Monks and Friars under the Pope's eye. The Church of England is not without spiritual writers of her own--Taylor, Ken, Beveridge, Scot, Lucas,

Stanhope, Nelson, the author of the words falsely ascribed to the writer of the Whole Duty of Man, and many more, whom I believe you will find not inferior to those of the Church of Rome. But I freely own to you that most modern writings smell of the age, and that there are no books so fit to make a soul advance in spiritual perfection, as the Scriptures and ancient fathers.

I think you will find no Popery in St. Augustine, or St. Basil or any writers of that antiquity. You may see, indeed, here and there in the fathers a notion borrowed from Philosophy (as they were originally philosophers) for instance, something like a Platonic or Pythagorean Purgatory: But you will see nothing like indulgences or a bank of merits, or a Romish Purgatory whereof the Pope has the Key. It is not simply believing even a Popish tenet or tenets that makes a Papist but believing on the Pope's authority. There is in the fathers a divine strain of piety and much of the spiritual life. This we acknowledge all should aspire after, and I make no doubt is attainable and actually attained in the communion of our Church at least as well as in any other.

You observe very justly that Christ's religion is spiritual, and the Christian life supernatural; and that there is no judge of spiritual things but the spirit of God. We have need, therefore, of aid and light from above. Accordingly we have the Spirit of God to guide us into all truth. If we are sanctified and enlightened by the Holy Ghost & by Christ, this will make up for our defects without the Pope's assistance. And why our Church and her pious members may not hope for this help as well as others I see no reason. The Author of our faith tells us, He that will do the will of God, shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God. I believe this extends to all Saving Truths.

There is an indwelling of Christ and the Holy Spirit, there is an inward light. If there be an ignis fatuus that misleads wild and conceited men, no man can thence infer there is no light of the sun. There must be a proper disposition of the organ, as well as a degree of Daylight to make us see. Where these concur no body doubts of what he sees. And a Christian soul wherein there is faith, humility, and obedience, will not fail to see the right way to salvation by that light which lightens the Gentiles and is a glory to Israel.

There is an invisible Church whereof Christ is the head, the members of which are linked together by faith, hope, & charity. By faith in Christ, not in the Pope. Popes are no unerring rule, for Popes have erred: witness the condemnation and suppression of Sixtus Quintus's bible by his successor. Witness the successions of Anti-popes for a long tract of time.

There is a secret unction an inward light and joy that attends the sincere fervent love of God and his truth, which ennables men to go on with all cheerfulness and hope in the Christian warfare. You ask how I shall discern or know this? I answer much more easily than I can that this particular man or this particular society of men is an unerring rule. Of the former I have an inward feeling jointly with the interior as well as exterior λόγος to inform me. But for the later I have only the Pope's word and that of his followers.

It is dangerous arguing from our notion of the expediency of a thing, to the reality of the thing it self. But I can fairly argue from facts against the being of such an expedient. In the first centurys of the church when heresies abounded, the expedient of a Pope or Roman oracle was unknown, unthought of. There was then a Bishop of Rome, but that was no hindrance or remedy of Divisions. Disputes in the Catholic church were not ended by his Authority. No recourse was had to his infallibility: an evident proof they acknowledged no such thing! The date of his usurpations and how they grew with his secular power, you

may plainly see in Giannoni's History of Naples: I do not refer you to a Protestant writer.

Men travelling in day-light see by one common light, though each with his own eyes. If one man shou'd say to the rest, Shut your eyes and follow me who see better than you all. This wou'd not be well taken. The sincere Christians of our communion are governed or led by the inward light of God's grace, by the outward light of his written word, by the ancient and Catholic traditions of Christ's church, by the ordinances of our National Church which we take to consist all and hang together. But then we see, as all must do, with our own eyes, by a common light but each with his own private eyes. And so must you too or you will not see at all. And not seeing at all how can you chuse a Chur