Transubstantiation Exploded, Part 1 · Paragraph 7
PAR. 7.
Of the Conditions of this Conference, and how they were kept on both sides.
HAving done with your servant for the present, and given him his arrant, I come now to conferre with your selfe, or rather to heare your reference and rehearsall of our Conference, two and twenty yeares agoe, September 4. Whereof I may truly say, as Scaliger doth of Baronius his Annals, (facit annales non scribit) he makes Annals or Chronicles, he writes them not: so verily you rather make a new Conference betwixt me and you, then relate the old. For you devise conditions, cast my arguments into a new mould, piece out your owne answers, invert the order, and fairely dissemble those replies that touched you to the quicke, wherefore I intreat the Reader to take notice that the Protestant relation of the Conference printed 1630. was taken out of the authenticall notes of both parties, and confirmed and subscribed by two that were present at the disputation, and confessed to have beene so by your selfe, p. 9. but this narration of yours is penned by your selfe, and published 2…. yeares after, and hath no attestation at all unto it. Yet because you shall know that I am ready to answer, not onelyonly to all that you did then say, but to all that you can say in the propounded question, I will trace you, foreign and where you stumble helpe you up.
First, you charge me with the breach of I know not what condition, by making the Conference more publike then it should have beene. The two noters make mention but of three conditions or lawes made by the company, and assented unto by us before wee exchanged any word, which were these. 1. That wee should dispute calmely and peaceably. 2. That all impertinent discourses should bee avoided. 3. That M. Featly at this time should onelyonly oppose, and D. Smith onelyonly answer. The fourth law which you mention concerning the private carriage of this Conference was so privately enacted, that I never heard of it till now, the other three I kept punctually through the whole Conference, but you violated, at the first entrance you had scarce spoken three words before you transgressed the third law, whereat I tooke exception and offence, not because I was affrighted at the very sight of your tenets, as your Chaplaine S. E. would scare his simple Reader, though your Transubstantiation be an ougly Monster, nor for that I was netled at the proposall of your objections against our tenet: for they were but blind nettles, as wee terme them, that sting not at all; but partly because I could little hope for any faire proceedings from him, who stumbled at the threshold, and brake his owne promise before he infringed any argument of mine, partly and especially, because you brandished your sword furiously against me, when you knew I was engaged by promise, and bound by the law at that time not to use my Buckler. I saw my condition like his in aFloresta Hispan: l. fac….Floresta, who seeing a dog run at him, and stooping downe to take up a stone to fling at him, and finding it so fast in the ground that hee could not moove it, cryed out, A vengeance on this countrie where dogges are let loose and stones are tied. Your tiphenie wherewith you cover this skarre in your reputation from the custome of Oxford (for the respondent to confirme his Thesis) is too transparent and netlike. For what was the custome of Oxford in this kinde to us in Paris, who had by joynt consent set downe an other order to be held in this disputation? Neither did you (si meminisse jnvat) at that time insist upon any such Oxford custome, nor intimated so much, that you tooke any degrees of Schooles there: for then I should in the first place have charged you with the Articles of Religion you subscribed unto, and the oathes you tooke at your presentation: to all which you bid adew when you w… first bound for Rome.
—Vent is & verba, & vela dedisti
Vola queror reditu verba carere fide.
As for the short warning (where you complaine) to prepare for th… meeting, you alleadge it but for fashion For who knoweth not that you were professour many yeares in Spaine, a… in your written Workes had befo… this elabourately handled this question Besides, for ought I know you we… acquainted with the day of our disputa tion as soone as it was set: this I am sure of, that excepting onelyonly the goodnesse of the cause, you had all advantages of me. First of yeares, for I was but Tyro, you veteranus miles, I the… but a pusney in these studies, you a Doctor in your facultie, of so loud … fame that your name rung before this in England, France and Spaine, insomuch, that as you your selfe reported M. Knevet said of me that I was to young to deale with you. Secondly of bookes, for I brought but a few with me to Paris, nor had accesse (being knowne an opposite to your Religion) to any of your Libraries. Whereas you besides your owne, had the command of the Librarie of Sorbone, and others in the City and University. Thirdly of assistance, for I was alone and had none to advise withall: you conversed daily with the Sorbone Doctors of your society, the acutest disputants of this age. Yet whatsoever garland now your Chaplaine platteth for you, at that time you were farre from triumphing. For you doubted your owne answers, and like beares whelpes often licked them to bring them to some forme, and when at the end of the Conference I had read them all unto you written from your owne mouth; a friend of yours snatched the paper away, and never would … ver it, but in liew thereof you tendered me a paper of answers written with your owne hand, with such additions and limitations, as your after thoughts suggested: in which notwithstanding fairely you yeelded the cause, saying, ego agnosco quod in his verbis, hoc est corpus meum, est figura: that is, I acknowledge that there is a figure in these words, or that these words are to be taken figuratively. If so, then they make no more for the Transubstantiation of Bread into Christs Body, then the like figurative words, I am the doore, I am the vine, I am the way, make for the Transubstantiation of Christs Body or person into a vine doore or way. Wherefore I cannot but commend your ingenuity in choosing that sentence of Saint Austine for your posie in the frontispice of your relation, facile est ut quis que Augustinum vincat, quanto magis ut vicisse videatur, aut si non videatur, vicisse dicatur, it is an easie thing to get the better of Austin, how much more to seeme to get the better, or if not to seeme yet to be so reported, if you neither had the worse, nor seemed to have, nor were reported to have the worst in this Conference, how doth this posie fit your relation, but if either, indeed you were foyled, or in apparance, or at least in report, discordant ultima primis, the first words agree not with the last, that you got the field, and bare away the prize.