ESSAY VII. is Diæcion has long ago determined, that bishops must he superior to presbyters ; he has received ordination from episcopal hands: and hopes one day himself to be capable of ordaining others. Thus,while he is growing up towards the mitre, he reads the scriptures only to confirm his own determined opinions. He stretches and torments manyan unwilling text, to make it speak the language of his own thoughts. He neglects the passages that favour all other forms of government and methods of minis- tration ; or else he constrains, them to mean episcopacy too: Every word that he reads, batha diocesan aspect; and the first verse of Genesiscan prove prelacy, for ought I know, as it has been able heretofore to demonstrate papacy, when In principia creavit Deus cesium et terram, decided the controversy, and set the pope above the emperor : For God made all things from one beginning, and not from tivo. Synodias reads the bible with a presbyterian glass, and Fra- trio with acongregational optic : They can find nothing but their own opinions, and both of them wonder that Diæcion should not see them too. Fratrio turns over the scriptures with great dili- gence and meditation, and as often as he finds the word as church" there, he thinks of nothing but a congregation of faithful men ; as the church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, are so many single congregations. When Synodias meets the same word in his bible, he is often in the midst of an assembly of divines ; and especially when any power is attributed to the church, he is sure it must intend a classis of presbyters, or con- sistory of elders. When the same word falls under the eye of Diæcion in his course of reading the New Testament, he cannot imagine any thing is meant short of a diocese : All his churches are or should beas big as counties or shires. And I might add, that when poor Parochianus the mason finds leisure to read a chapter, and lightsupon the mention of a church in it, he thinks immediately of a tall stone-building with a steeple upon it, a bell or two, and a weather-cock. I might give the like instances of many other terms and expressions in scripture, to which men have unalterably fixed their several different ideas, and raised consequences from them, and interpret the word of God by them, without enquiring whether their ideas are conformable to the sense in which the scripture uses those expressions: And then it is no wonder that their schemes of ecclesiastical government are so different: And yet each of these prepossessed opinionators think their own exposition of the text so evident, that they chide the perverseness of all other men, as though they were resolved to wink against the light. It is like a person of a fretful consti- tution, whose eyes are also tinged with the jaundice, he quarrels with every man that he meets,because he will not consent to call all things yellow. Thus by the false light of affection in which
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