it had no better an author; let some good man relate the same, and then it should pass.  This counsel was embraced, factum est, and it was registered forthwith, Et sic bona sententia mansit, malus auctor mutatus est.  Thou sayest as much of me, stomachosus as thou art, and grantest, peradventure, this which I have written in physic, not to be amiss, had another done it, a professed physician, or so, but why should I meddle with this tract?  Hear me speak.  There be many other subjects, I do easily grant, both in humanity and divinity, fit to be treated of, of which had I written ad ostentationem only, to show myself, I should have rather chosen, and in which I have been more conversant, I could have more willingly luxuriated, and better satisfied myself and others; but that at this time I was fatally driven upon this rock of melancholy, and carried away by this by-stream, which, as a rillet, is deducted from the main channel of my studies, in which I have pleased and busied myself at idle hours, as a subject most necessary and commodious.  Not that I prefer it before divinity, which I do acknowledge to be the queen of professions, and to which all the rest are as handmaids, but that in divinity I saw no such great need.  For had I written positively, there be so many books in that kind, so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teams of oxen cannot draw them; and had I been as forward and ambitious as some others, I might have haply printed a sermon at Paul’s Cross, a sermon in St. Marie’s Oxon, a sermon in Christ Church, or a sermon before the right honourable, right reverend, a sermon before the right worshipful, a sermon in Latin, in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without, a sermon, a sermon, &c.  But I have been ever as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs.  To have written in controversy had been to cut off an hydra’s head, [157]_Lis litem generat_, one begets another, so many duplications, triplications, and swarms of questions. In sacro bello hoc quod stili mucrone agitur, that having once begun, I should never make an end.  One had much better, as [158]Alexander, the sixth pope, long since observed, provoke a great prince than a begging friar, a Jesuit, or a seminary priest, I will add, for inexpugnabile genus hoc hominum, they are an irrefragable society, they must and will have the last word; and that with such eagerness, impudence, abominable lying, falsifying, and bitterness in their questions they proceed, that as he [159]said, furorne caecus, an rapit vis acrior, an culpa, responsum date?  Blind fury, or error, or rashness, or what it is that eggs them, I know not, I am sure many times, which [160]Austin perceived long since, tempestate contentionis, serenitas charitatis obnubilatur, with this tempest of contention, the serenity of charity is overclouded, and there be too many spirits conjured up already in this kind in all sciences, and more than we can tell how to lay, which do so furiously rage, and keep such a racket, that as [161]Fabius said, “It had been much better for some of them to have been born dumb, and altogether illiterate, than so far to dote to their own destruction.”