tempt and jerk these men are not defervedly fallen? Neither can religion receive any wound by difgrace thrown upon the prelates, fince religion and they furely were never in fuch amity. They rather are the men who have wounded religion, and their ftripes muft heal her. I might also tell them, what Electra in Sophocles, a wife virgin, answered her wicked mother, who thought herself too violently reproved by her the daughter: "Tis you that fay it, not I; you do the deeds, If therefore the Remonftrant complain of libels, it is because he feels them to be right aimed. For I afk again, as before in the animadverfions, how long is it fince he hath difrelifhed libels? We never heard the leaft mutter of his voice against them while they flew abroad without control or check, defaming the Scots and Puritans. And yet he can remember of none but Lyfimachus Nicanor, and "that he mifliked and cenfured." No more but of one can the Remonftrant remember? What if I put him in mind of one more? What if of one more whereof the Remonftrant in many likelihoods may be thought the author? Did he never fee a pamphlet intitled after his own fashion, "A Survey of that foolish, feditious, fcandalous, prophane Libel, the Proteftation protefted ?" The child doth not more exprefsly refigure the vifage of his father, than that book refembles the ftyle of the Remonftrant, in those idioms of fpeech, wherein he feems most to delight: and in the fevententh page three lines together are taken out of the Remonftrance word for word, not as a citation, but as an author borrows from himfelf. Whoever it be, he may as juftly be faid to have libelled, as he against whom he writes: there ye fhall find another man than is here made fhow of, there he bites as faft as this whines. "Vinegar in the ink" is there" the antidote of vipers." Laughing in a religious controverfy is there "a thrifty phyfic to expel his melancholy.' In the mean time the teftimony of fir Francis Bacon was not mifalleged, complaining that libels on the bishops part were were uttered openly; and if he hoped the prelates had, no intelligence with the libellers, he delivers it but as, his favourable opinion. But had he contradicted himself, how could I affoil him here, more than a little before, where I know not how, by entangling himself, he leaves an afperfion upon Job, which by any elfe I never heard laid to his charge? For having affirmed that "there is no greater confufion than the confounding of jeft and earneft," prefently he brings the example of Job, "glancing at conceits of mirth, when he fat among the people. with the gravity of a judge upon him." If jeft and earneft be fuch a confufion, then were the people much wifer than Job, for "he fmiled, and they believed himy not." To defend libels, which is that whereof I am next accufed, was far from my purpose. I had not fo little fhare in good name, as to give another that advantage against myself. The fum of what I faid was, that ar more free permiffion of writing at fome times might be profitable, in fuch a question especially wherein the ma giftrates are not fully refolved; and both fides have equal liberty to write, as now they have. Not as when the prelates bore fway, in whofe time the books of fome men, were confuted, when they who fhould have answered were in close prifon, denied the ufe of pen or paper. And the divine right of epifcopacy was then valiantly afferted, when he who would have been refpondent muft have bethought himself withal how he could refute the Clink or the Gatehouse. If now therefore they be purfued with bad words, who perfecuted others with bad deeds, it is a way to leffen tumult rather than to increase it; whenas anger thus freely vented fpends itself ere it break out into action, though Machiavel, whom he cites, or any other Machiavelian prieft think the contrary, SECT. III. Now readers, I bring ye to his third fection; wherein very cautiously and no more than needs, left I should take him for fome chaplain at hand, fome fquire of the body to his prelate, one that ferves not at the altar only, but at the court cupboard, he will beftow on us a pretty model 1 model of himfelf; and fobs me out half a dozen phthifical' mottoes wherever he had them, hopping fhort in the measure of convulfion-fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, inftead of wellfized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring pofies. "He has a fortune therefore good, because he is content with it." This is a piece of fapience not worth the brain of a fruit trencher; as if content were the measure of what is good or bad in the gift of fortune. For by this rule a bad man may have a good fortune, because he may be ofttimes content with it for many reasons which have no affinity with virtue, as love of ease, want of fpirit to use more, and the like. "And therefore con tent," he fays, "because it neither goes before, nor comes behind his merit." Belike then if his fortune fhould go before his merit, he would not be content, but refign, if we believe him, which I do the lefs, because he implies, that if it came behind his merit, he would be content as little. Whereas if a wife man's content should depend upon fuch a therefore, because his fortune came not behind his merit, how many wife men could have content in this world? In his next pithy symbol I dare not board him, for he paffes all the feven wife mafters of Greece, attributing to himself that which on my life Solomon durft not: "to have affections fo equally tempered, that they neither too haftily adhere to the truth before it be fully examined, nor too lazily afterward." Which, unless he only were exempted out of the corrupt mafs of Adam, born without fin original, and living without actual, is impoffible. Had Solomon (for it behoves me to instance in the wifeft, dealing with fuch a tranfcendant fage as this) had Solomon affections fo equally tempered, as "not adhering too lazily to the truth," when God warned him of his halting in idolatry? do we read that he repented haftily? did not his affections lead him haftily from an examined truth, how much more would they lead him flowly to it? Yet this man, beyond a ftoic apathy, fees truth as in a rapture, and cleaves to it; not as through the dim glafs of his affections, which, in this frail manfion of flesh, are ever unequally tempered, pushing forward to errour, and keeping back from truth ofttimes ofttimes the best of men. But how far this boafter is from knowing himself, let his preface fpeak. Something I thought it was that made him fo quickfighted to gather fuch ftrange things out of the animadverfions, whereof the leaft conception could not be drawn from thence, of "fuburb-finks," fometimes "out of wit and clothes," fometimes "in new ferge, drinking fack, and fwearing;" now I know it was this equal temper of his affections, that gave him to fee clearer than any fennelrubbed ferpent. Laftly, he has refolved "that neither perfon nor caufe fhall improper him." I may mistake his meaning, for the word ye hear is "improper." But whether if not a perfon, yet a good parfonage or impropriation bought out for him, would not " improper" him, because there may be a quirk in the word, I leave it for a canonift to refolve. SECT. IV. And thus ends this section, or rather diffection, of himself, fhort ye will fay both in breadth and extent, as in our own praises it ought to be, unless wherein a good name hath been wrongfully attainted. Right; but if ye look at what he afcribes to himself, " that temper of his affec-` tions," which cannot any where be but in Paradise, all the judicious panegyrics in any language extant are not half fo prolix. And that well appears in his next removal. For what with putting his fancy to the tiptoe in this description of himself, and what with adventuring prefently to ftand upon his own legs without the crutches of his margin, which is the fluice moft commonly that feeds the drought of his text, he comes fo lazily on in a fimile, with his "armfull of weeds," and demeans himfelf in the dull expreffion fo like a dough-kneaded thing, that he has not spirit enough left him fo far to look to his fyntax, as to avoid nonfenfe. For it must be understood there that the ftranger, and not he who brings the bundle, would be deceived in cenfuring the field, which this hipfhot grammarian cannot fet into right frame of conftruction, neither here in the fimilitude, nor in the following reddition thereof; which being to this purpose, purpose, that "the faults of the best picked out, and prefented in grofs, feem monftrous, this," faith he, "you have done, in pinning on his fleeve the faults of others;' as if to pick out his own faults, and to pin the faults of others upon him, were to do the fame thing. To anfwer therefore how I have culled out the evil actions of the Remonftrant from his virtues, I am acquitted by the dexterity and conveyance of his nonfenfe, lofing that for which he brought his parable. But what of other men's faults I have pinned upon his fleeve, let him show. For whether he were the man who termed the martyrs Foxian confeffors, it matters not; he that fhall ftep up before others to defend a church-government, which wants almoft no circumftance, but only a name, to be a plain popedom, a government which changes the fatherly and ever-teaching difcipline of Chrift into that lordly and uninftructing jurifdiction, which properly makes the pope Antichrift, makes himself an acceffory to all the evil committed by thofe, who are armed to do mischief by that undue government; which they, by their wicked deeds, do, with a kind of paffive and unwitting obedience to God, destroy; but he, by plaufible words and traditions against the scripture, obftinately feeks to maintain. They, by their own wickedness ruining their own unjust authority, make room for good to fucceed; but he, by a fhow of good upholding the evil which in them undoes itfelf, hinders the good which they by accident let in. Their manifeft crimes ferve to bring forth an enfuing! good, and haften a remedy against themselves; and his feeming good tends to reinforce their felf-punishing crimes and his own, by doing his best to delay all redrefs. Shall not all the mifchief which other men do be laid to his charge, if they do it by that unchurchlike power which he defends? Chrift faith, "he that' is not with me, is against me; and he that gathers not with me, fcatters." In what degree of enmity to Chrift fhall we place that man then, who fo is with him, as that' it makes more against him; and fo gathers with him, that' it scatters more from him? Shall it avail that man to fay he honours the martyrs memory, and treads in their steps? No; the pharifees confeffed as much of the holy prophets. |