I wrote my Confession, and Disputes of Justifica∣tion, as an Exposition of it; and that I Retracted, or Suspended, or Revoked, not the Doctrine, but the Book, till I had Corrected it, and did disown it as too unmeet an Expression of my Mind, which I had more fully exprest in other Books.
And is not this plain English? Doth this war∣rant a Wise and Righteous Man, to intimate that I accuse him of writing against that Doctrine of Justification which I Recanted, and to call for the What, and Where, and When? Yea, and tell me, that I [refer you to a small Book] when instead of referring you to it, I only blame you for referring to that alone, when I had said as before?
When many Divines have published the first Edition of their Works imperfectly, and greatly corrected and enlarged them in a Second (as Beza his Annotations, Polanus his Syntagma, and many such) all Men take it for an Injury for a Neighbour twenty years after, to select the first Edition to confute as the Author's Judgment: Much more might I, when I published to the World, that I Suspended the whole Book, and have ••h••se twenty four years hindred the Printing of it; professing that I have in many larger Books, more intelligibly and fully opened the same things.
Yea, you fear not pag. 23. to say, That I tell you of about 60 Books of Retractations, in part at least which I have Written]; when never such a word fell from me. If I say, Th•••• one that hath published his Suspension of a small Book written in Youth, not for the Doctrine of it, but some unfit Expressions, and hath since in al-most thirty Years time, written about sixty Books, in many or