far expounds itself ever, as to tell us how little it imports our saving knowledge," etc.

I will not run into a paroxysm of citations again in this point, only instance Athanasius in his forementioned first page. "The knowledge of truth," saith he, "wants no human lore, as being evident in itself and by the preaching of Christ now opens brighter than the sun." If these doctors, who had scarce half the light that we enjoy, who all, except two or three, were ignorant of the Hebrew tongue, and many of the Greek, blundering upon the dangerous and suspectful translations of the apostate Aquila, the heretical Theodotion, the judaized Symmachus, the erroneous Origen-if these could yet find the Bible so easy, why should we doubt, that have all the helps of learning and faithful industry that man in this life can look for, and the assistance of God as near now to us as ever? But let the Scriptures be hard-are they more hard, more crabbed, more abstruse than the Fathers? He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected style of the Scriptures, will be ten times more puzzled with the knotty Africanisms, the pampered metaphors, the intricate and involved sentences of the Fathers, beside the fantastic and declamatory flashes, the cross-jingling periods, which cannot but disturb and come thwart a settled devotion, worse than the din of bells and rattles.

*

Now, sir, for the love of holy reformation, what can be said more against these importunate clients of Antiquity than she herself their patroness hath said? Whether, think ye, would she approve still to dote upon immeasurable, innumerable, and therefore unnecessary and unmerciful volumes, choosing rather to err with the specious name of the Fathers, or to take a sound truth at the hand of a plain upright man, that all his days hath been diligently reading the Holy Scriptures and thereto imploring God's grace, while the admirers of antiquity have been beating their brains about their Ambones, their Diptychs, and Meniaias? Now he that cannot tell of Stations and Indictions, nor has wasted his precious hours in the endless conferring of Councils and Conclaves that demolish one another—although I know many of those

* Alluding to Tertullian, Cyprian, and Austin, who were all natives of Africa.

*

that pretend to be great rabbies in these studies, have scarce saluted them from the strings and the title-page, or, to give them more, have been but the ferrets and mousehunts† of an indexyet what pastor or minister, how learned, religious, or discreet soever, does not now bring both his cheeks full-blown with Oecumenical and Synodical shall be counted a lank, shallow and insufficient man, yea a dunce, and not worthy to speak about church-discipline. But I trust they for whom God hath reserved the honour of reforming this church will easily perceive their adversaries' drift in thus calling for Antiquity. They fear the plain field of the Scriptures; the chase is too hot; they seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest; they would imbosk: they feel themselves struck in the transparent streams of divine truth; they would plunge and tumble and think to lie hid in the foul weeds and muddy waters, where no plummet can reach the bottom. But let them beat themselves like whales, and spend their oil till they be dragged ashore. Though wherefore should the ministers give them so much line for shifts and delays? Wherefore should they not urge only the Gospel§ and hold it ever in their faces, like a mirror of diamond, till it dazzle and pierce their misty eyeballs, maintaining it the honour of its absolute sufficiency and supremacy inviolable? For if the Scripture be for reformation and Antiquity to boot, it is but an advantage to the dozen; it is no winning cast: and though Antiquity be against it, while the Scriptures be for it, the cause is as good as ought to be wished, Antiquity itself sitting judge.

As to the Libertines, no form of discipline would satisfy them. It is only necessary to discover these men ; "for reason they have none, but lust and licentiousness, and therefore answer can have none.' The first book concludes here, and the second is devoted to replying to the Politicians.

* There were frequently at that time strings attached to the edges of the covers of books, to close them.

The mousehunt is an animal of the weasel genus.

i. e. shelter in the wood, imboscare It. He then changes the metaphor to fishing. This change of metaphor is frequent in Horace. § i. e. the Gospel alone.

Having briefly noticed what the objects of the true statesman should be, he adds by way of contrast, “This is the masterpiece of a modern politician, how to qualify and mould the sufferance and subjection of the people to the length of that foot that is to tread on their necks; how rapine may serve itself with the fair and honourable pretence of public good; how the puny* law may be brought under the wardship and control of lust and will: in which attempt if they fall short, then must a superficial colour of reputation by all means, direct or indirect, be gotten to wash over the unsightly bruise of honour."

Men of this sort allege,-" 1. That the church-go"1. vernment must be conformable to the civil polity; next, that no form of church-government is agreeable to monarchy but that of bishops." The first of these positions he refutes, by showing that the church-government of the Jews never varied during all the numerous changes of that of the state. How much more then must that be the case now, when the Gospel "forbids churchmen to intermeddle with worldly employments."

Seeing that the churchman's office is only to teach men the Christian faith, to exhort all, to encourage the good, to admonish the bad (privately the less offender, publicly the scandalous and stubborn), to censure and separate from the communion of Christ's flock the contagious and incorrigible, to receive with joy and fatherly compassion the penitent. All this must be done; and more than this is beyond any church-authority.

In refutation of the second position, he undertakes to prove that "episcopacy, with that authority which it challenges in England, is not only not agreeable, but tending to the destruction of monarchy." He then goes

* Puisné, i. e. under age.

*

through the history of the Church, showing its gradual encroachments on the temporal power, and coming to his own times, asserts that the bishops weakened the crown of England by alienating the affections of the people, by forcing numbers to seek a refuge from their tyranny in the wilds of America, by disgusting its natural allies the Protestants of the Continent, as the prelates "account them no better than a sort of sacrilegious and puritanical rebels, preferring the Spaniard, our deadly enemy, before them, and set all orthodox writers at nought in comparison of the Jesuits, who are indeed the only corruptors of youth and good learning. And I have heard many wise and learned men in Italy say as much." But this is only a small part of what the prelates have done. "By their seditious practices they have endangered to lose the king one third of his main stock. What have they not done to banish him from his own native country" [Scotland]? Then they seek to render the people effeminate, by instigating them by public edict and pushing them forward "to gaming, jigging, wassailing, and mixed dancing" on the day set apart for meditation and prayer. In this he compares them with Balaam. They also diminish the wealth of the kingdom by their ceremonies and their courts; for the former consume it in the erection of "temples beautified exquisitely to outvie the Papists," and providing of " images, pictures, rich copes, gorgeous altar-cloths;" while the latter absorb still greater sums of money in "sordid fees," in direct opposition to the spirit of the Gospel. Further, they seek to degrade the people by preaching the divine right of kings

* i. e. a set, a crew.

Alluding to the Book of Sports. Mixed dancing is the dancing of the two sexes together.

and the duty of non-resistance, while at the same time all their efforts are directed to setting the episcopate above the monarchy; for "Is not the chief of them [Laud] accused out of his own book and his late canons, to affect a certain unquestionable Patriarchate independent and unsubordinate to the Crown?" Alluding then to their having caused the war with Scotland, he bursts into the following eloquent strain.

But ever blessed be He and ever glorified that from his high watch-tower in the heavens, discerning the crooked ways of perverse and cruel men, hath hitherto maimed and infatuated all their damnable inventions, and deluded their great wizards with a delusion fit for fools and children! Had God been so minded, he could have sent a spirit of mutiny amongst us, as he did between Abimelech and the Sechemites, to have made our funerals and slain heaps more in number than the miserable surviving remnant. But he, when we least deserved, sent out a gentle gale and message of peace from the wings of those his Cherubims that fan his mercy-seat. Nor shall the wisdom, the moderation, the Christian piety, the constancy of our nobility and commons of England be ever forgotten, whose calm and temperate connivance could sit still and smile out the stormy bluster of men more audacious and precipitant than of solid and deep reach, until their own fury had run itself out of breath, assailing by rash and heady approaches the impregnable situation [site] of our liberty and safety, that laughed such weak enginery to scorn, such poor drifts to make a national war of a surplice-brabble, a tippet-scuffle,* and engage the untainted honour of English knighthood to unfurl the streaming red-cross, or to rear the horrid standard of those fatal guly dragons for so unworthy a purpose as to force upon their fellow-subjects that which themselves are weary of, the skeleton of a massbook. Nor must the patience, the fortitude, the firm obedience of the nobles and people of Scotland, striving against manifold provocations, nor must their sincere and moderate proceedings hitherto be unremembered, to the shameful conviction of their detractors.

Go on both, hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited; be

* The attempt to force a Liturgy on Scotland.