the bounds and objects of laughter and vehement reproof, as he hath known hitherto how to deserve them both. But lest some may haply think, or thus expostulate with me after this debatement, who made you the busy almoner to deal about this dole of laughter and reprehension, which no man thanks your bounty for? To the urbanity of that man I should answer much after this sort that I, friend objector, having read of heathen philosophers, some to have taught, that whosoever would but use his ear to listen, might hear the voice of his guiding genius ever before him, calling, and as it were pointing to that way which is his part to follow; others, as the stoics, to account reason, which they call the Hegemonicon, to be the common Mercury conducting without error those that give themselves obediently to be led accordingly having read this, I could not esteem so poorly of the faith which I profess, that God had left nothing to those who had forsaken all other doctrines for his, to be an inward witness and warrant of what they have to do, as that they should need to measure themselves by other men's measures, how to give scope or limit to their proper actions; for that were to make us the most at a stand, the most uncertain and accidental wanderers in our doings, of all religions in the world. So that the question ere while moved, who is he that spends thus the benevolence of laughter and reproof so liberally upon such men as the prelates, may return with a more just demand, who he is not of place and knowledge never so mean, under whose contempt and jerk these men are not deservedly fallen? Neither can religion receive any wound by disgrace thrown upon the prelates, since religion and they surely were never in such amity. They rather are the men who have wounded religion, and their stripes must heal her. I might also tell them what Electra in Sophocles, a wise virgin, answered her wicked mother, who thought herself too violently reproved by her the daughter: 'Tis you that say it, not I; you do the deeds, If therefore the Remonstrant complain of libels, it is because he feels them to be right aimed. For I ask again, as before in the Animadversions, how long is it since he hath disrelished libels? We never heard the least 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 Lysimachus Nicanor, and "that he misliked and censured." No more but of one can the Remonstrant remember? What if I put him in mind of one more? What if of one more whereof the Remonstrant in many likelihoods may be thought the author? Did he never see a pamphlet intitled after his own fashion, "A Survey of that foolish, seditious, scandalous profane Libel, the Protestation protested?" The child doth not more expressly refigure the visage of his father, than that book resembles the style of the Remonstrant, in those idioms of speech, wherein he seems most to delight and in the seventeenth page, three lines together are taken out of the Remonstrance word for word, not as a citation, but as an author borrows from himself. Whoever it be, he may as justly be said to have libelled, as he against whom he writes: there ye shall find another man than is here made show of; there he bites as fast as this whines. "Vinegar in the ink" is there "the antidote of vipers." Laughing in a religious controversy is there "a thrifty physic to expel his melancholy." In the mean time the testimony of Sir Francis Bacon was not misalleged, complaining that libels on the bishops' part 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 assoil him here, more than a Vol. I. 18 M 2 little before, where I know not how, by entangling himself, he leaves an aspersion upon Job, which by any else I never heard laid to his charge? For having affirmed that "there is no greater confusion than the confounding of jest and earnest," presently he brings the example of Job, "glancing at conceits of mirth, when he sat among the people with the gravity of a judge upon him." If jest and earnest be such a confusion, then were the people much wiser than Job, for "he smiled, and they believed him not." To defend libels, which is that whereof I am next accused, was far from my purpose. I had not so little share in good name, as to give another that advantage against myself. The sum of what I said was, that more free permission of writing at some times might be profitable, in such a question especially wherein the magistrates are not fully resolved; and both sides. have equal liberty to write, as now they have. Not as when the prelates. bore sway, in whose time the books of some men were confuted, when they who should have answered were in close prison, denied the use of pen or paper. And the divine right of episcopacy was then valiantly asserted, when he who would have been respondent must have bethought himself withal how he could refute the Clink or the Gatehouse. If now therefore they be pursued with bad words, who persecuted others with bad deeds, it is a way to lessen tumult rather than to increase it; whenas anger thus freely vented, spends itself ere it break out into action, though Machiavel, whom he cites, or any other Machiavelian priest, think the contrary. SECTION III. Now, readers, I bring ye to his third section; wherein very cautiously and no more than needs, lest I should take him for some chaplain at hand, some squire of the body to his prelate, one that serves not at the altar only, but at the court cupboard, he will bestow on us a pretty model of himself; and sobs me out of half a dozen phthisical mottoes wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion-fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies. "He has a fortune therefore good, because he is content with it." This is a piece of sapience 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 spirit to use more, and the like. "And therefore content," he says, "because it neither goes before, nor comes behind his merit." Belike then if his fortune should go before his merit, he would not be content, but resign, if we believe him, which I do the less, because he implies, that if it came behind his merit, he would be content as little. Whereas if a wise man's content should depend upon such a therefore, because his fortune came not behind his merit, how many wise men could have content in this world? In his next pithy symbol, I dare not board him, for he passes all the seven wise masters of Greece, attributing to himself that which on my life Solomon durst not: "to have affections so equally tempered, that they neither too hastily adhere to the truth before it be fully examined, nor too lazily afterward." Which, unless he only were exempted out of the corrupt mass of Adam, born without sin original, and living without actual, is impossible. Had Solomon, (for it behoves me to instance in the wisest, dealing with such a transcend to error, AN APOLOGY FOR SMECTYMNUUS. ant sage as this,) had Solomon affections so equally tempered, as "not ad- SECTION IV. AND thus ends this section, or rather dissection, of himself, short ye will say 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 ascribes to himself, "that temper of his affections," which cannot any where be but in Paradise, all the judicious panegyrics in any language extant, are not half so 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 presently to stand upon his own legs without the crutches of his margin, which is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his text, he comes so lazily on in a simile, with his "armful of weeds," and demeans himself in the dull expression so like a dough-kneaded thing, that he has not spirit enough left him so far to look For it must be understood there that to his syntax, as to avoid nonsense. the stranger, and not he who brings the bundle, would be deceived in censuring the field, which this hipshot grammarian cannot set into right frame of construction, neither here in the similitude, nor in the following you reddition thereof; which being to this purpose, that "the faults of the best picked out, and presented in gross, seem monstrous; this," saith he, have done, in pinning on his sleeve 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 same thing. To answer therefore how I have culled out the evil actions of the Remonstrant from his virtues, I am acquitted by the dexterity and conveyance of his nonsense, losing that for which he brought his parable. But what of other men's faults I have pinned upon his sleeve, let him show. For whether he were the man who termed the martyrs Foxian confessors, it matters not; he that shall step up before others to defend a church-government, which wants almost no circumstance, but only a name, to be a plain popedom, a government which changes the fatherly and ever-teaching discipline of Christ into that lordly and uninstructing jurisdiction, which pro perly makes the pope Antichrist, makes himself an accessory to all the evil committed by those, who are armed to do mischief by that undue government; which they, by their wicked deeds, do, with a kind of passive and unwitting obedience to God, destroy; but he, by plausible words and traditions against the Scripture, obstinately seeks to maintain. They, by their own wickedness ruining their own unjust authority, make room for good to succeed; but he, by a show of good upholding the evil which in them undoes itself, hinders the good which they by accident let in. Their manifest crimes serve to bring forth an ensuing good, and hasten a remedy against themselves; and his seeming good tends to reinforce their self-punishing crimes and his own, by doing his best to delay all redress. Shall not all the mischief which other men do be laid to his charge, if they do it by that unchurch-like power which he defends? Christ saith, "he that is not with me, is against me; and he that gathers not with me, scatters." In what degree of enmity to Christ shall we place that man then, who so is with him, as that it makes more against him; and so gathers with him, that it scatters more from him? Shall it avail that man to say he honours the martyrs' memory, and treads in their steps? No; the pharisees confessed as much of the holy prophets. Let him, and such as he, when they are in their best actions, even at their prayers, look to hear that which the pharisees heard from John the Baptist when they least expected, when they rather looked for praise from him; "generation of vipers, who hath warned ye to flee from the wrath to coine?" Now that ye have started back from the purity of Scripture, which is the only rule of reformation, to the old vomit of your traditions; now that ye have either troubled or leavened the people of God, and the doctrine of the gospel, with scandalous ceremonies and mass-borrowed liturgies, do ye turn the use of that truth which ye profess, to countenance that falsehood which ye gain by? We also reverence the martyrs, but rely only upon the Scriptures. And why we ought not to rely upon the martyrs, I shall be content with such reasons as my confuter himself affords me; who is, I must needs say for him, in that point as officious an adversary as I would wish to any man. For, "first," saith he, "there may be a martyr in a wrong cause, and as courageous in suffering as the best; sometimes in a good cause with a forward ambition displeasing to God. Other whiles they that story of them out of blind zeal or malice, may write many things of them untruly." If this be so, as ye hear his own confession, with what safety can the Remonstrant rely upon the martyrs as "patrons of his cause," whenas any of those who are alleged for the approvers of our liturgy or prelaty, might have been, though not in a wrong cause, martyrs? Yet whether not vainly ambitious of that honour, or whether not misreported or misunderstood in those their opinions, God only knows. The testimony of what we believe in religion must be such as the conscience may rest on to be infallible and incorruptible, which is only the word of God. SECTION V. His fifth section finds itself aggrieved that the Remonstrant should be taxed with the illegal proceeding of the high commission, and oath ex officio and first, "whether they were illegal or no, it is more than he knows." See this malevolent fox! that tyranny which the whole kingdom cried out against as stung with adders and scorpions, that tyranny which the parliament, in compassion of the church and commonwealth, hath dis AN APOLOGY FOR SMECTYMNUUS. solved and fetched up by the roots, for which it hath received the public thanks and blessings of thousands; this obscure thorn-eater of malice and detraction as well as of quodlibets and sophisms, knows not whether it were illegal or not. Evil, evil would be your reward, ye worthies of the parliament, if this sophister and his accomplices had the censuring or the sounding forth of your labours. And that the Remonstrant cannot wash his hands of all the cruelties exercised by the prelates, is past doubting. They scourged the confessors of the gospel, and he held the scourger's garments. They executed their rage; and he, if he did nothing else, defended the government with the oath that did it, and the ceremonies which were the cause of it; does he think to be counted guiltless? SECTION VI. In the following section I must foretell ye, readers, the doings will be rough and dangerous, the baiting of a satire. And if the work seem more trivial or boisterous than for this discourse, let the Remonstrant thank the folly of this confuter, who could not let a private word pass, but he must make all this blaze of it. I had said, that because the Remonstrant was so much offended with those who were tart against the prelates, sure he loved toothless satires, which I took were as improper as a toothed sleekstone. This champion from behind the arras cries out, that those toothless satires were of the Remonstrant's making; and arms himself here tooth and nail, and horn to boot, to supply the want of teeth, or rather of gums in the But does satires. And for an onset tells me, that the simile of a sleekstone "shows I can be as bold with a prelate as familiar with a laundress." it not argue rather the lascivious promptness of his own fancy, who, from the harmless mention of a sleekstone, could neigh out the remembrance of his old conversation among the viraginian trollops? For me, if he move me, I shall claim his own oath, the oath ex officio against any priest or prelate in the kingdom, to have ever as much hated such pranks as the best and chastest of them all. That exception which I made against toothless satires, the confuter hopes I had from the satirist, but is far deceived; neither have I ever read the hobbling distich which he means. good hap I had from a careful education, to be inured and seasoned betimes with the best and elegantest authors of the learned tongues, and thereto brought an ear that could measure a just cadence, and scan without articulating rather nice and humorous in what was tolerable, than patient to read every drawling versifier. Whence lighting upon this title of "toothless satires," I will not conceal ye what I thought, readers, that sure this must be some sucking satire, who might have done better to have used his coral, and made an end of breeding, ere he took upon him to wield a satire's whip. But when I heard him talk of "scowering the rusty swords of elvish knights," do not blame me, if I changed my thought, and concluded him But why "his scornful muse could never abide some desperate cutler. with tragic shoes her ancles for to hide," the pace of the verse told me that her mawkin knuckles were never shapen to that royal buskin. And turning by chance to the sixth satire of his second book, I was confirmed; where having begun loftily "in Heaven's universal alphabet," he falls down to that wretched poorness and frigidity, as to talk of "Bridge street in Heaven, and the Ostler of Heaven," and there wanting other matter to catch him a heat, (for certain he was in the frozen zone miserably benum For this |
