This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal fashion among Protestants. I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our combat with the Romanists. I venture to assert most unequivocally that the New Testament contains not the least proof of the 'linguipotence' of the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary: and I doubt whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles of the first two centuries and their assumed contrast 'in genere' with those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of our Protestant controversies. N.B. These opinions of Middleton and his more cautious followers are no part of our real Church doctrine. This passion for law Court evidence began with Grotius. Ib. p. 246. We conceived there needs no more to be said for justifying the imposition of the ceremonies by law established than what is contained in the beginning--of this Section.... Inasmuch as lawful authority hath already determined the ceremonies in question to be decent and orderly, and to serve to edification: and consequently to be agreeable to the general rules of the Word. To a self-convinced and disinterested lover of the Church of England, it gives an indescribable horror to observe the frequency, with which the Prelatic party after the Restoration appeal to the laws as of equal authority with the express words of Scripture;--as if the laws, by them appealed to, were other than the vindictive determinations of their own furious partizans;--as if the same appeals might not have been made by Bonner and Gardiner under Philip and Mary! Why should I speak of the inhuman sophism that, because it is silly in my neighbour to break his egg at the broad end when the Squire and the Vicar have declared their predilection for the narrow end, therefore it is right for the Squire and the Vicar to hang and quarter him for his silliness:--for it comes to that. Ib. p. 248. To you it is indifferent before your imposition: and therefore you may without any regret of your own consciences forbear the imposition, or persuade the law makers to forbear it. But to many of those that dissent from you, they are sinful, &c.