The Courts of Common Law, however they have intrenches on the jurisdiction of the Spiritual Courts, do yet give countenance and protection to all their iniquities, which serve to bring them in business; and this makes the Common Lawyers so loath to see them reformed, and so ready to baffle all attempts of that nature. The judges thereof have stuck to no maxim so constantly as to that scandalous one of St. Edw. Cokes, A Boni judicies est ampliare jurisdictionem curice suce, and have by monstrous fictions, and by the help of numberless querks and pretences swallowed up in a manner all the jurisdiction of other Courts, as the Lord Constable and Marshals, Admiralty, etc. in order to draw all business to themselves. Thus also as often as they please they call by prohibitions (for which they never want pretences) all causes before them from Spiritual Courts and other Ecclesiastical or Visitatorical jurisdictions: and when a cause is once brought into their Courts, where they can invent and start an hundred points and issues to be argued, there is no end of the expense or no hopes of a decision, so that it must drop at last after several years continuance without any determination as the late affair of Dr. Bentley. It is very fit there should be prohibitions in many cases, as there are appels d’abus in France; but it is as fair that those cases should be settled fixed and determinate. There was in the time of K. James I. a judgment given upon this subject by the King in his Privy Council (to whose judicature it properly belongs to decide of the just authority of different Courts when they quarrel about their jurisdiction) and proper bounds were fixed to the authority, as well of Spiritual Courts as of those of Common Law, which were tolerably well observed till the troubles of 1641 threw all government into confusion, and Episcopacy being destroyed and the jurisdiction of Bps. suppressed with their Order, the Common Law carried all before it, swallowed up the Ecclesiastical authority, and has ever since kept a great part of what it then invaded.