the right and duty of the civil magistrate
to restrain and punish religious avowals by him deemed heretical,
universal among the Presbyterians and Parliamentary Churchmen, joined
with the persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians,--was the main cause of
Cromwell's despair and consequent unfaithfulness concerning a
Parliamentary Commonwealth.

Ib. p. 222.

I tried, when I was last with you, to revive your reason by proposing
to you the infallibility of the common senses of all the world; and I
could not prevail though you had nothing to answer that was not
against common sense. And it is impossible any thing controverted can
be brought nearer you, or made plainer than to be brought to your eyes
and taste and feeling; and not yours only, but all men's else. Sense
goes before faith. Faith is no faith but upon supposition of sense and
understanding: if therefore common sense be fallible, faith must needs
be so.

This is one of those two-edged arguments, which not indeed began, but
began to be fashionable, just before and after the Restoration. I was
half converted to Transubstantiation by Tillotson's common senses
against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds 'totidem verbis et
syllabis' would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of
Christianity. If the Roman Catholics had pretended that the phenomenal
bread and wine were changed into the phenomenal flesh and blood, this
objection would have been legitimate and irresistible; but as it is, it
is mere sensual babble. The whole of Popery lies in the assumption of a
Church, as a numerical unit, infallible in the highest degree, inasmuch
as both which is Scripture, and what Scripture teaches, is infallible by
derivation only from an infallible decision of the Church. Fairly
undermine or blow up this: and all the remaining peculiar tenets of
Romanism fall with it, or stand by their own right as opinions of
individual Doctors.

An antagonist of a complex bad system,--a system, however,
notwithstanding--and such is Popery,--should take heed above all things
not to disperse himself. Let him keep to the sticking place. But the
majority of our Protestant polemics seem to have taken for granted that
they could not attack Romanism in too many places, or on too many
points;--forgetting that in some they will be less strong than in
others, and that if in any one or two they are repelled from the
assault, the feeling of this will extend itself over the wh