The Primitive Practice for Preserving Truth, Section 22
SECT. XXII.
YEt must we not think that Heresie or Heretiques ought so to be indulged, as thereby to be confirmed, and made more pertinacious in their heresies. They ought to be instructed, reproved, and discountenanced, and if they prove irrecoverably obstinate, exiled. Wee see God himself commanded the Jewes to put an Idolater and a blasphemer to death; and though I do not conceive that to be an Evangelicall precept, but onelyonly a judiciall law, proper and peculiar to that people and Church, yet doubtlesse it may thence by the rule of Analogie be concluded, that where Idolatry and Heresie are mixed together, as amongst Papists and Montanists or Altar-adorers, or where blasphemy and heresie meet in one, as amongst the Arrians, Pelagians, or Anabaptists, the followers of Sebastian Castellio, and James Arminius, there a more severe course may be warrantably practised to stop the dispersing of that poyson, then for the suppressing of any other Heretiques, who are not guilty of those two abominations, but onelyonly hold some lesser errours. Incomparable Monsieur de Thou, saith in the Preface before his History, dedicated to Henry the Great of France, that exile or banishment was the first and greatest punishment that ever the ancient Church inflicted upon Heretiques, (which on all sides is acknowledged to have been a true Church) as wee see in the banishment of the Manichees, under those two pious Emperors, Theodosius & Valentinian; and in the exilement of divers kinds of Heretiques under Constantine and Marcianus: But when men have joyned, either open rebellion and treason, or proditorious positions to their Religion, as the Papists, or have maintained Anarchicall Theses as a part of their doctrine, condemning Monarchie, Magistracie, and all civill government, as the Anabaptists: In these cases, although they did absolutely defend dogmaticall and fundamentall errors, yet were their exilement or a greater punishment justly inflicted on them, because the case is now altered from matter of conscience to matter of offence & crime. Had the Protestants been but once guilty of such an unmatched villanie, as the Powder-plot was, in any part of the world where they are tolerated, they had doubtlesse been for ever rooted out from thence; for though some desperate Romanists only were ingaged in the execution, yet in the generall, questionlesse, all the Recusants of England knew, that a great action was in hand, against Church and State; and that their Romish Synagogue was to be erected in Great Britain, upon the ruines of them both: And for the prosperity of it, as Henry Garnet himself confessed, they all prayed. Nay, when divers English Papists, admonished by the guilt of their own conscience, fled upon the discovery thereof into France, and were kindly received there by the Governour of Callis, and he comforting them, in respect they had left their countrey, estates and friends; No, saith one of them to him again, Wee grieve not at all for those losses, but that so brave and excellent an action (meaning the Powder-treason) had no better successe. At which answer, the said Governour was so extremely incensed (as hee often after himself related to the same de Thou, who delivers the Story) that hee verily thought to have precipitated the varlet headlong into the sea. And as for their Romish doctrines, manifestly tending to treason, conspiracy and rebellion, they were so exactly collected together into one bo ly by learned Bishop Morton, and published in the yeere 1605. a little after the discovery of that treason, as wee shall need a great deal of charity to believe they can be good subjects in and under any Protestant Prince or State. Neither do the Anabaptists come much short of the Papists in their dangerous tenets or practices, although they exactly imitate their old master Pelagius in one particular, which Vossius himselfe confesseth of him, teaching many of their desperate doctrines, as he did, privately, which yet they conceale and suppresse in their published Tractates, which have given so many fatall wounds to the true Church of God in this and the last preceding age; for the proofe whereof, wee shall need to produce no other witnesses then those two sincere and impartiall Historians, John Sleidane, and the same Monsieur de Thou, from whom wee may learne, that after Melchior Hofman had broached his wicked Tenets in Germany, about the yeere 1520. and with his disciples, Thomas Muncer, Bernard Rotman, and John Leyden had assumed to themselves the name of Anabaptists, and drawn many of the baser sort after them, whom they perswaded not to suffer any of Noble blood to remain; and that there could be no other lawfull Magistrate, but one of their Sect: they easily drew them to take armes, and possessing themselves of the city of Munster in Westphalia, had like to have proved the utter ruine of it, had it not been delivered by the armes of some of the Germane Princes, after which followed the execution of divers of those rebels. After these men succeeded as chiefe propagators of their errours, John Cerdo, hanged at Brussels, Michael Servetus the Spaniard burnt at Geneva, and Cornelius Apelman executed at Vtrecht in the yeare 1570. all three of them, though guiltie of divers grosse heresies, yet were condemned and put to death for blasphemie, and other notorious crimes. John Williams their successor, finding their treasonable and Anarchicall positions to afford them no safety in any well governed Monarchie or Republique, got him to Ruremund, in the Dutchie of Guelders, and there having drawn to his partie some three hundred varlets and mean sellowes, hee told them no goods could rightly appertain to any man but of their own Sect, and therefore assured them, whatsoever they could get by pillaging and robbery, was a lawfull gain: by which means many horrible and grievous thefts and spoiles were committed in Guelderland, and in the Dutchie of Cleve adjoyning. The said Williams also being taken, was for his many abominable offences and villanies burnt at Buslaken in the Dutchie of Juliers, yet died so courageously, like Servetus his fellow Anabaptist, as that their Sect was exceedingly confirmed and increased thereby; so as had not their other portentous crimes justly necessitated their capitall punishment, it had been much better for the true Church of God, their lives had been spared: For whereas before ignorant men had for the most part presidented their Church and kingdom, (for their chief Prophets commonly governed all the rest after their own wills) these mens sufferings drew on, as may be easily gathered, Theodore Bibliander and Sebastian Castellio, to give up their names to the maintenance of the same blasphemies, who cunningly defended only in their publique writing those points which Pelagius had formerly broached, whom Arminius, Vorstius, and the other Anabaptists of the nether Germany have since followed; but for those dangerous and unsafe doctrines of condemning Magistracy, extirpating Nobility, and permitting robberies, howsoever they may still in private teach and adhere to them, and would, perhaps, if they could once make the stronger partie in any State, soon enough practise them, yet they have most politickly omitted, not onelyonly the maintenance, but the very mention of them also, in the said published Works and Tractates. Thus also the Papists themselves, upon occasion, being pressed with any of their seditious tenets, will deny them; as Peter Cotton the Jesuite did their allowing of the murther of Kings after Henry the fourth of France was stabbed by that wicked Jesuited varlet, Ravaillac; and Henry Garnet, at his execution protested, that he ever abhorred the Gunpowder-plot. The Pelagians, in the time of the ancient Britaines were the undoubted instruments of the ruine of England, then called Britaine, of murthering Constantine the father and Constans the son, both successive Kings there, and of setting the Royall Crown upon the head of Vortigern, Duke of Cornwall, a Pelagianized traytor against his Soveraign, who in lieu thereof to gratifie them, soon filled up, as may be probably collected, the Bishops Seas, to which neither Baronies nor Sericality were then, nor for five hundred yeares after annexed, with hereticall and lazie droanes, who had well-neere ruined the true Church of God in those dayes. All the world may know what warning King James of England, that learned Prince, gave to the united States of the Netherlands, by his published Works upon the death of the Anabaptist Arminius, and succession of that blasphemous Vorstius in his roome and chaire at Layden, that if they did not in time look to the suppression of those blasphemous Heretiques, they would in the end prove the ruine of their Church and State. God of his infinit mercy grant that they may never be able to bring desolation or subversion to them; nor to any other Church, Kingdome, or State of Christendome, where the Gospel and the truth are established, by the increasing of their numbers and powers to an excessive and formidable proportion.