Chapter 58

OF OUR OPPOSITES’ PLEADING FOR THE INDIFFERENCY OF THE CEREMONIES.

If it seem to any that it is a strange method to speak now of indifferency, in the end of this dispute, which ought rather to have been handled in the beginning of it, they may consider, that the method is not ours, but our opposites’; for they have been fleeing upon Icarus’ wings, and soaring so high that their wings could not but melt from them: so have they, from necessity fallen down to expediency; from it to lawfulness; and from thence to indifferency.

I knew certain of them, who, after reasoning about the ceremonies with some of our side, required, in the end, no more but that they would only acknowledge the indifferency of the things in themselves. And so being wooed and solicitously importuned by our former arguments against the ceremonies, they take them to the weaving of Penelope’s web, thereby to suspend us, and to gain time against us: this indifferency, I mean, which they shall never make out, and which themselves, otherwhiles, unweave again. Always, so long as they think to get any place for higher notions about the ceremonies, they speak not so meanly of them as of things indifferent; but when all their forces of arguments and answers are spent in vain, then are our ears filled with uncouth outcries and declamations, which tend to make themselves appear blameless for receiving, and us blameworthy for refusing matters of rite and indifferency.

Upon this string they harp over and over again, in books, in sermons, in private discourses. Mr G. Powell (in his book _De Adiaphoris_), and Tilen (in the 12th and 17th chapters of his _Paraenesis_), condemn those who make aught ado about the controverted English ceremonies, for so much as they are things indifferent. Paybody, in his Apology for kneeling at the communion, standeth much upon the indifferency of this gesture, both in every worship of God, and in that sacrament namely. The Archbishop of St. Andrews, in his sermon at Perth Assembly, because he could not prove this indifferency, he chose to suppose it. “Of the indifferency of these articles (saith he) I think there is little or no question amongst us.” Whether he spake this of ignorance or of policy, I leave it to be guessed at. Howsoever, if we should thus compose our controversy about the ceremonies, embrace them, and practise them, so being that they be only called things indifferent, this were to cure our church, as L. Sylla cured his country, _durioribus remediis quam pericula erant_, saith Seneca.(1169) Wherefore we will debate this question of indifferency also.