_Direct._ XXXVI. Distinguish between the making of new laws or articles of belief, and the punishing of men for the laws already made. And think not that we must have new laws or canons, every time the old ones are broken; or that any law can be made which can keep itself from being broken. Perverseness in this error hath brought the church to the misery which it endureth. God hath made a universal law sufficient for the universal church, in matters of faith and holy practice; leaving it to men to determine of necessary circumstances which were unfit for a universal law: and if the sufficiency of God's law were acknowledged in men's practices, the churches would have had more peace: but when particular countries have their particular volumes of articles, confessions, liturgies, and I know not what else to be subscribed to, and none must preach that will not say, or write, or swear, That he believeth all this to be true and good, and nothing in it to be against the word of God, this engine racks the limbs of the churches all to pieces. And then what is the pretence for this epidemical calamity? Why no better than this, Every heretic will subscribe to the Scriptures, and take it in his own sense. And what followeth? Must we needs therefore have new laws which heretics will not subscribe to, or which they cannot break? It is the commendation of God's law, as fit to be the means of unity, that all are so easily agreed to it in terms, and therefore would agree in the sense if they understood it. But they will not do so by the laws of men: all or many heretics in the primitive times, would profess assent to the church's creed; no doubt in a corrupt and private sense; but the churches therefore did not make new creeds; till about three hundred years after Christ, they began to put in some particular words to obviate heretics, which Hilary complained of as the cause of all their divisions! And what if heretics will subscribe to all you bid them, and take it in their own corrupted sense? Must you therefore be still making new laws and articles, till you meet with some which they cannot misunderstand, or dare not thus abuse? What if men will misinterpret and break the laws of the land? Must they be made new till none can mis-expound or violate them? Sure there is a wiser way than this: God's word containeth in sufficient expressions, all that is necessary to be subscribed to: require none therefore to subscribe to any more (in matters of faith or holy practice); but if you think any articles need a special interpretation, let the church give her sense of those articles; and if any man preach against that sense, and corrupt the word of God which he hath subscribed, let his fault be proved, and let him be admonished and censured as it deserves: censured, I say, not for not subscribing more than Scripture, but for corrupting the Scriptures to which he hath subscribed, or breaking God's laws which he promised to observe.