122 THE FIFTH SUPPOSITION. incapable of such an employment, requiring settlement and constant attendance, who, beside his general apostleship, had a peculiar apostleship of the dispersed Jews committed to him, who, therefore, was much engaged in travel for propagation of the faith, and edify- ing his converts everywhere. (3.) The greater consent [majority] of the most ancient writers making St James not to have been one of the twelve apostles, it is thence accountable why, as we before noted, St James was called by some ancient writers " The bishop of bishops, the prince of bishops," &c., because he was the first bishop of the first see, the mother church, the apostles being excluded from the comparison. Upon these considerations we have great reason to refuse the as- sertion or scandal cast on St Peter, that he took on him to be bishop of Rome, in a strict sense, as it is understood in this controversy. SUPPOSITION V. A FARTHER assertion is this, superstructed by consequence on the former, That the bishops of Rome, according to God's institution, and by original right derived thence, should have an universal supremacy and jurisdiction (containing the privileges and preroga- tives formerly described) over the Christian church. This assertion to be very uncertain, yea, to be most false, I shall by divers considerations evince :- 1. If any of the former suppositionsbe uncertain or false, this as- sertion, standing on those legs, must partake of those defects, and answerably be dubious or false. If either Peter were not monarch of theapostles, or if his privileges were not successive, or if he were not properlybishop of Rome at his decease, then farewell the Romish claim. If any of those things be dubious, it totters; if any of them prove false, then down it falls. But that each of them is false has, I conceive, been sufficiently de- clared; that all of them areuncertain has, at least, been made evident. The structure, therefore, cannot be firm which relies on such props. 2. Even admitting all those suppositions, the inference from them is not assuredlyvalid. For St Peter might have an universaljuris- diction, he might derive it by succession, he might be bishop of Rome; yet no such authority might hence accrue to the Roman bishop, his successor in that see. For, that universal jurisdiction might be derived into another channel, and the bishop of Rome might in other respects be suc- cessor to him, without being so in this.
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