As a general remark suggested indeed by this section, but applicable to very many parts of Taylor's controversial writings, both against the anti-Prelatic and the Romish divines, especially to those in which our incomparable Church-aspist attempts, not always successfully, to demonstrate the difference between the dogmas and discipline of the ancient Church, and those which the Romish doctors vindicate by them,--I would say once for all, that it was the fashion of the Arminian court divines of Taylor's age, that is, of the High Church party, headed by Archbishop Laud, to extol, and (in my humble judgment) egregiously to overrate, the example and authority of the first four, nay, of the first six centuries; and at all events to take for granted the Evangelical and Apostolical character of the Church to the death of Athanasius. Now so far am I from conceding this, that before the first Council of Nicaea, I believe myself to find the seeds and seedlings of all the worst corruptions of the Latin Church of the thirteenth century, and not a few of these even before the close of the second. One pernicious error of the primitive Church was the conversion of the ethical ideas, indispensable to the science of morals and religion, into fixed practical laws and rules for all Christians, in all stages of spiritual growth, and under all circumstances; and with this the degradation of free and individual acts into corporate Church obligations. Another not less pernicious was the gradual concentration of the Church into a priesthood, and the consequent rendering of the reciprocal functions of love and redemption and counsel between Christian and Christian exclusively official, and between disparates, namely, the priest and the layman. Ib. B. II. s. ii. p. 58. Often have I welcomed, and often have I wrestled with, the thought of writing an essay on the day of judgment. Are the passages in St. Peter's Epistle respecting the circumstances of the last day and the final conflagration, and even St. Paul's, to be regarded as apocalyptic and a part of the revelation by Christ, or are they, like the dogma of a personal Satan, accommodations of the current popular creed which they continued to believe? Ib. s. iii. p. 105. And therefore St. Paul left an excellent precept to the Church to avoid 'profanas vocum novitates', 'the prophane newness of words;' that is, it is fit that the mysteries revealed in Scripture should be preached and taught in the words of the Scripture, and with that simplicity, openness, easiness, and candor, and not with new and unhallowed words, such as that of Transubstantiation. Are not then Trinity, Tri-unity, 'hypostasis, perichoresis, diphysis', and others, excluded? Yet Waterland very ingeniously, nay more, very honestly and sensibly, shews the necessity of these terms 'per accidens'. The 'profanum' fell back on the heretics who had occasioned the necessity. Ib. p. 106.