ing to the full discharge of this office, for which the Church can make no particular provision: and, therefore, that must be left to the industry and diligence of Ministers, in their particular studies and labours. And this requires both a diffused knowledge, and great application; to be able to understand the nature of all God's laws, and the bounds and distinctions betwixt every virtue and vice; to be able to resolve all ordinary cases of conscience, and answer such doubts and scruples as are apt to arise in men's minds; to know the qualifications of particular men, and the nature and degrees and sincerity of their repentance, in order to give them a satisfactory answer to their demands, and grant or refuse them the several sorts of absolution, as they shall think proper, upon an impartial view of their state and condition. He that thinks all this may be done without any great labour and study, and a diligent search of the Holy Scriptures, the rule and record of God's will, seems neither to understand the nature of his office, nor the needs of men; nor what it is to stand in the place of Christ, and judge for Him between God and man. The Priest's lips should preserve knowledge: and a man that considers the large extent of that knowledge, together with the great variety of cases and persons to which he may have occasion to apply it, would rather be tempted to cry out with the Apostle, "Who is sufficient for these things?" And if this be not an argument to engage a man to industry in the office of a spiritual physician, it is hard to say what is so.
Skelton, Presbyter.—Discourse 71.
The next thing the Puritans took offence at, was the Hierarchy of the Church. They looked on the Bishops as the instruments of papal tyranny, and the corrupters of true religion.... They ... were, it seems, so ignorant, as not to know, that the Bishops, of all men, had most reason to oppose the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome, who had made himself the only Bishop, and reduced all the rest to cyphers. Nor did they consider, whether it was in the power of man to abolish, at his discretion, an order of the Church, instituted by God Himself, merely because the men who filled this order had degenerated, together with all the rest of the Church,
