THE CONCLUSION. The mischief that prelaty does in the state. I ADD one thing more to thofe great ones that are fo fond of prelaty: this is certain, that the gospel being the hidden might of Chrift, as hath been heard, that ever a victorious power joined with it, like him in the Revelation that went forth on the white horse with his bow and his crown conquering and to conquer. If we let the angel of the gofpel ride on his own way, he does his proper bufinefs, conquering the high thoughts, and the proud reasonings of the flesh, and brings them under to give obedience to Chrift with the falvation of many fouls. But if ye turn him out of his road, and in a manner force him to exprefs his irrefiftible power by a doctrine of carnal might, as prelaty is, he will ufe that flefhly ftrength, which ye put into his hands, to fubdue your fpirits by a fervile and blind fuperftition; and that again fhall hold fuch dominion over your captive minds, as returning with an infatiate greedinefs and force upon your worldly wealth and power, wherewith to deck and magnify herfelf, and her falfe worships, he shall spoil and havoc your eftates, difturb your cafe, diminish your honour, enthral your liberty unde rthe fwelling mood of a proud clergy, who will not ferve or feed your fouls with fpiritual food; look not for it, they have not wherewithal, or if they had, it is not in their purpose. But when they have glutted their ungrateful bodies, at leaft, if it be poffible that thofe open fepulchres fhould ever be glutted, and when they have ftuffed their idolish temples with the wafteful pillage of your eftates, will they yet have any compaffion upon you, and that poor pittance which they have left you; will they be but fo good to you as that ravisher was to his fifter, when he had used her at his pleafure; will they but only hate ye, and fo turn ye loose? No, they will not, lords and commons, they will not favour ye fo much. What will they do then in the name of God and faints, what will these manhaters yet with more despite despite and mischief do? I will tell ye, or at least remember ye, (for most of ye know it already,) that they may want nothing to make them true merchants of Babylon, as hey have done to your fouls, they will fell your bodies, your wives, your children, your liberties, your parliaments, all these things; and if there be aught elfe dearer than these, they will fell at an outcry in their pulpits to the arbitrary and illegal difpofe of any one that may hereafter be called a king, whose mind shall serve him to liften to their bargain. And by their corrupt and fervile doctrines boring our ears to an everlafting flavery, as they have done hitherto, so will they yet do their best to repeal and erafe every line and clause of both our great charters. Nor is this only what they will do, but what they hold as the main reafon and mystery of their advancement that they must do; be the prince never fo juft and equal to his fubjects, yet fuch are their malicious and depraved eyes, that they fo look on him, and fo understand him, as if he required no other gratitude or piece of fervice from them than this. And indeed they ftand fo opportunely for the difturbing or the deftroying of a state, being a knot of creatures, whofe dignities, means, and preferments have no foundation in the gofpel, as they themselves acknowledge, but only in the prince's favour, and to continue fo long to them, as by pleafing him they fhall deferve: whence it must needs be they should bend all their intentions and fervices to no other ends but to his, that if it should happen that a tyrant (God turn such a fcourge from us to our enemies) fhould come to grafp the fceptre, here were his fpearmen and his lances, here were his firelocks ready, he fhould need no other pretorian band nor penfionary than thefe, if they could once with their perfidious preachments awe the people. For although the prelates in time of popery were fometimes friendly enough to Magna Charta, it was because they ftood upon their own bottom, without their main dependance on the royal nod: but now being well acquainted that the proteftant religion, if fhe will reform herself rightly by the fcriptures, muft undrefs them of all their gilded vanities, and reduce them as they were at first, to the lowly and equal order of prefbyters, they know it VOL. I. L concern concerns them nearly to ftudy the times more than the text, and to lift up their eyes to the hills of the court, from whence only comes their help; but if their pride grow weary of this crouching and obfervance, as ere long it would, and that yet their minds climb still to a higher afcent of worldly honour, this only refuge can remain to them, that they muft of neceffity contrive to bring themselves and us back again to the pope's fupremacy; and this we sce they had by fair degrees of late been doing. These be the two fair fupporters between which the ftrength of prelaty is borne up, either of inducing tyranny, or of reducing popery. Hence alfo we may judge that prelaty is mere falfehood. For the property of truth is, where fhe is publicly taught to unyoke and fet free the minds and fpirits of a nation firft from the thraldom of fin and fuperftition, after which all honest and legal freedom of civil life cannot be long abfent; but prelaty, whom the tyrant custom begot, a natural tyrant in religion, and in ftate the agent and minifter of tyranny, feems to have had this fatal gift in her nativity, like another Midas, that whatsoever fhe fhould touch or come near either in ecclefial or political government, it should turn, not to gold, though the for her part could with it, but to the drofs and feum of flavery, breeding and fettling. both in the bodies and the fouls of all fuch as do not in time, with the fovereign treacle of found doctrine, provide to fortify their hearts against her hierarchy. The fervice of God who is truth, her liturgy confeffes to be perfect freedom; but her works and her opinions declare, that the fervice of Prelaty is perfect flavery, and by confequence perfect falfehood. Which makes me wonder much that many of the gentry, ftudious men as I hear, fhould engage themfelves to write, and fpeak. publicly in her defence; but that I believe their honeft and ingenuous natures coming to the univerfities to store themselves with good and folid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else but the fcragged and thorny lectures of monkifh and miferable fophiftry, were fent home again with fuch a fcholaftical bur in their. throats, as hath stopped and hindered all true and generous philofophy from entering, cracked their voices for ever with metaphyfical gargarifms, and hath made them admire a fort of formal outfide men prelatically addicted, whose unchaftened and unwrought minds were never yet initiated or subdued under the true lore of religion or moral virtue, which two are the best and greatest points of learning; but either flightly trained up in a kind of hypocritical and hackney courfe of literature to get their living by, and dazzle the ignorant, or elfe fondly overstudied in useless controverfies, except those which they ufe with all the fpecious and delufive fubtlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta; having a golpel and church-government set before their eyes, as a fair field wherein they might exercise the greatest virtues and the greatest deeds of chriftian authority, in mean fortunes and little furniture of this world; (which even the fage heathen writers, and those old Fabritii and Curii well knew to be a manner of working, than which nothing could liken a mortal man more to God, who delights moft to work from within himself, and not by the heavy luggage of corporeal inftruments ;) they understand it not, and think no fuch matter, but admire and dote upon worldly riches and honours, with an eafy and intemperate life, to the bane of chriftianity: yea, they and their seminaries shame not to profess, to petition, and never leave pealing our ears, that unless we fat them like boars, and cram them as they lift with wealth, with deaneries and pluralities, with baronies and stately preferments, all learning and religion will go under foot. Which is fuch a fhameless, fuch a beftial plea, and of that odious impudence in churchmen, who fhould be to us a pattern of temperance and frugal mediocrity, who should teach us to contemn this world, and the gaudy things thereof, according to the promise which they themfelves require from us in baptifin, that fhould the fcripture stand by and be mute, there is not that fect of philofophers among the heathen so diffolute, no not Epicurus, nor Ariftippus with all his Cyrenaic rout, but would fhut his fchool-doors against fuch greafy fophifters; not any college of mountebanks, but would think fcorn to difcover in themfelves with fuch a brazen forehead the outrageous defire of filthy lucre. Which the prelates make fo little confcience of, that they are ready L 2 ready to fight, and, if it lay in their power, to maffacre all good chriftians under the names of horrible fchifmatics, for only finding fault with their temporal dignities, their unconfcionable wealth and revenues, their cruel authority over their brethren that labour in the word, while they fnore in their luxurious excefs: openly proclaiming themselves now in the fight of all men, to be those which for a while they fought to cover under sheep's clothing, ravenous and favage wolves, threatening inroads and bloody incurfions upon the flock of Chrift, which they took upon them to feed, but now claim to devour as their prey. More like that huge dragon of Egypt, breathing out waste and desolation to the land, unless he were daily fattened with virgin's blood. Him our old patron St. George by his matchlefs valour flew, as the prelate of the garter that reads his collect can tell. And if our princes and knights will imitate the fame of that old champion, as by their order of knighthood folemnly taken they vow, far be it that they fhould uphold and fide with this english dragon; but rather to do as indeed their oath binds them, they should make it their knightly adventure to purfue and vanquish this mighty fail-winged monster, that menaces to swallow up the land, unless her bottomlefs gorge may be fatisfied with the blood of the king's daughter the church; and may, as fhe was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of the faints. Nor will any one have reafon to think this as too incredible or too tragical to be fpoken of prelaty, if he confider well from what a mass of flime and mud the flothful, the covetous and ambitious hopes of church-promotions and fat bifhoprics, fhe is bred up and nuzzled in, like a great Python, from her youth, to prove the general poifon both of doctrine and good difcipline in the land. For certainly fuch hopes and fuch principles of earth as thefe wherein the welters from a young one, are the immediate generation both of a flavifh and tyrannous life to follow, and a peftiferous contagion to the whole kingdom, till like that fen-born ferpent fhe be shot to death with the darts of the fun, the pure and powerful beams of God's word. And this may ferve to defcribe to us in part, what prelaty hath been, and what, if the ftand, |