factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees:—­thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it.  And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested.

Appendix II. p. 37.

  If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church
  ‘in nudum apertum caput manus imponere’, doth it follow that this is
  essential, and the contrary null?

How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel?  All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms.

Ib.

If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are ordained by a lawful Bishop per ‘manuum impositionem’, then do you egregiously ‘tibi ipsi imponere’.

Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns.  The cause is,—­the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects.  For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters.  “I have indorsed your Bill, Sir,” said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William.—­My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the ‘Hercules furens’ of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher,—­used to translate, ’Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu’,—­first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school,—­“You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;”—­or, “You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head.”

Ib. p. 45.