Paul himselfe, they will make him a Prophet like Caiaphas to speak the word of the Lord not thinking, nay denying to think; though he disavow to have receav'd it from the Lord, his word shall not be tak'n, though an Apostle, he shall be born down in his own Epistle, by a race of expositors who presume to know from whom he spake, better than he himselfe. Paul deposes that the Lord speaks not this, they, that the Lord speaks it: can this be less then to brave him with a full fac't contradiction? Certainly to such a violence as this, for I cannot call it an expounding, what a man should answer I know not, unless that if it be their pleasure next to put a gag into the Apostles mouth, they are already furnisht with a commodious audacity toward the attempt. Beza would seem to shun the contradictory, by telling us that the Lord spake it not in person, as he did the former precept. But how many other doctrines doth St. Paul deliver which the Lord spake not in person, and yet never uses this preamble but in things indifferent? So long as we receave him for a messenger of God, for him to stand sorting sentences what the Lord spake in person, and what he, not the Lord in person, would be but a chill trifling, and his readers might catch an ague the while. But if we shall supply the grammatical Ellipsis regularly, and as we must in the sam tense, all will be then cleer, for we cannot supply it thus, to the rest I speak; the Lord spake not, but I speak, the Lord speaks not. If then the Lord neither spake in person, nor speakes it now, the Apostle testifying both, it follows duely, that this can be no command. Forsooth the fear is, least this not being a command, would prove an evangelic counsel, & so make way for supererogations. As if the Apostle could not speak his mind in things indifferent, as he doth in fowr or five several places of this chapter with the like preface of not commanding, but that the doubted inconvenience of supererogating must needs rush in. And how adds it to the word of the Lord, (for this also they object) when as the Apostle by his christian prudence guids us in the liberty which God hath left us to, without command? could not the spirit of God instruct us by him what was free, as well as what was not? But what need I more, when Cameron an ingenuous writer, and in high esteem, solidly confutes the surmise of a command heer, and among other words hath these. That when Paul speaks as an Apostle, he uses this forme, The Lord saith, not I, v. 10. but as a privat man he saith, I speak, not the Lord. And thus also all the prime fathers Austin, Jerom, and the rest understood this place.
Fiftly, The very stating of the question declares this to be no com-
