bly of Divines, then sitting at Westminster,
complained to Parliament of its contents, and Parliament
condemned it to be publicly burnt in four places, the Assembly to
draw up a formal detestation to be read at the burning. In this
document it was admitted that the author had been "of good
estimation for learning and piety"; but the author's logic was
better than his theology, for he attributed all evil to the Cause
of all things, and contended that for wise purposes God not only
permitted sin, but had a hand in its essence, namely, "in the
privity, and ataxy, the anomye, or irregularity of the act" (if
that makes it any clearer). A single passage will convey the
drift of the seventy-six pages devoted to this difficult
problem:--

"Who hinted to God, or gave advice by counsel to Him, to let the
creature sin? Did any necessity, arising upon the creature's
being, enforce it that sin must be? Could not God have hindered
sin, if He would? Might He not have kept man from sinning, as He
did some of the angels? Therefore, it was His device and plot
before the creature was that there should be sin. . . . It is by
sin that most of God's glory in the discovery of His attributes
doth arise. . . . Therefore certainly it limits Him much to bring
in sin by a contingent accident, merely from the creature, and to
deny God a hand and will in its being and bringing forth."

The author thought these positions quite compatible with
orthodoxy; not so, however, the Presbyterian divines, nor
Parliament; and certainly Archer's questions were more easily and
more swiftly answered by fire than in any other way. Had he
lived, one wonders how the divines would have punished him. For
the next two cases prove how dangerous it was becoming to be
convicted or even suspected of heterodoxy. Parliament was
beginning to understand its duty as Defender of the Faith as the
Holy Inquisition has always understood it--namely, by the death
of the luckless assailant.

Thus, on July 24th, 1647, the House of Commons condemned to be
burnt in three different places, on three different days, Paul
Best's pamphlet, of the following curious title: _Mysteries
Discovered, or a Mercurial Picture pointing out the way from
Babylon to the Holy City, For the Good of all such as during that
Night of General Error and Apostacy, II. Thess. ii. 3, Rev. iii.
10, have been so long misled with Rome's Hobgoblin, by me, Paul
Best, prisoner in the Gatehouse, Westminster_. It concl