But I come now to give some account of the true reasons of such divisions of sect and party among christians. There are two great causes of these divisions, and the charge is not to be laid upon the gospel of Christ, nor upon the books that contain it. 1. The first cause is, that the papist does not pretend to derive his religion merely from the bible; but he brings in the Jewish apocryphal writers of ancient ages, and lays them also for a foundation of his faith; and he makes the traditions of the christian church, which he pretends to have been delivered down from age to age, of almost the same authority as the scripture itself: And some of their authors have raised these traditions to equal dignity with the scripture, as being built upon the same foundation, _viz._ the authority of the church. As they have many things in their religion which they cannot find in the word of God; so they think it is sufficient if they can support them by these pretended traditions of the church. Whereas the protestant takes nothing for the ground of his faith but the books of the Old and New Testament; and what he cannot find written there, nor derived thence by most obvious and evident consequences, he does not profess it as any necessary part of his christianity. The religion of the protestant therefore is abundantly more conformable to the gospel of Christ, both in the doctrines and the worship of it, because it derives the whole from the word of God: But it is no wonder at all that there should be such a difference between them and the papists, when they lay such different foundations for their faith and practice.