_Direct._ XX. In controversies which depend on the experience of particular christians or of the church, regard most the judgment of the most experienced, and prefer the judgment of the later ages of the church before the judgment of less experienced ages (except the apostolical age, that had the greater help of the Spirit). An ancient, experienced christian or divine is more to be regarded in many points, which require experience, than many of the younger sort, that are yet more zealous and of quicker understanding and expression than the elder. So those that we call the fathers or ancients were indeed in the younger ages of the church, and we that are fallen into the later and more experienced age, have all the helps of the wisdom and experience of the ages that were before us: and therefore God will require at our hands an account of these greater talents which we have received! As it were unexcusable now in a physician that hath the help of such voluminous institutions, observations, and experiments of former ages, to know no more than those former times that had no such helps; so would it be as unexcusable for this present age of the church to be no wiser than those former ages. When Aquinas, Scotus, Ariminensis, and other schoolmen, delivered the doctrine of christianity to the church in a dress so far different from Ignatius, Irenæus, Tertullian, Cyprian, or any of those former ages, they certainly thought that they had attained to a far greater excellency and accurateness in the knowledge of divinity than those their ancestors had attained: and whatever they swear in the Trent oath, of not expounding any Scripture otherwise than the fathers do, I doubt not but Suarez, and Vasquez, and others of their modern schoolmen, thought so too, and would have been loth to be accounted wise in the measure only of those ancients.[133] The later and elder ages of the church have had abundant experience, e. g. of the tendency of ambition and papal aspirings and usurpations; of the mischiefs of composing and imposing the popish missals and numerous ceremonies, and of their implicit faith, and their concealment of the Scriptures from the vulgar, and many such points; and if we are never the wiser for all this experience, we are the more unexcusable; and may be judged as the neglecters of our greater helps.