a madness to be sober alone, while the nation continues drank:  but that saying of their father Cres. is still running in my head, that they may be dispensed with in their obedience to an heretic prince, while the necessity of the times shall oblige them to it:  for that, as another of them tells us, is only the effect of Christian prudence; but when once they shall get power to shake him off, an heretic is no lawful king, and consequently to rise against him is no rebellion.  I should be glad, therefore, that they would follow the advice which was charitably given them by a reverend prelate of our church; namely, that they would join in a public act of disowning and detesting those Jesuitic principles; and subscribe to all doctrines which deny the pope’s authority of deposing kings, and releasing subjects from their oath of allegiance:  to which I should think they might easily be induced, if it be true that this present pope has condemned the doctrine of king-killing, a thesis of the Jesuits maintained, amongst others, ex cathedra, as they call it, or in open consistory.

Leaving them, therefore, in so fair a way, if they please themselves, of satisfying all reasonable men of their sincerity and good meaning to the government, I shall make bold to consider that other extreme of our religion—­I mean the Fanatics, or Schismatics, of the English Church.  Since the Bible has been translated into our tongue, they have used it so, as if their business was not to be saved, but to be damned by its contents.  If we consider only them, better had it been for the English nation that it had still remained in the original Greek and Hebrew, or at least in the honest Latin of St Jerome, than that several texts in it should have been prevaricated, to the destruction of that government which put it into so ungrateful hands.

How many heresies the first translation of Tindal produced in few years, let my Lord Herbert’s history of Henry VIII. inform you; insomuch, that for the gross errors in it, and the great mischiefs it occasioned, a sentence passed on the first edition of the Bible, too shameful almost to be repeated.  After the short reign of Edward VI., who had continued to carry on the Reformation on other principles than it was begun, every one knows that not only the chief promoters of that work, but many others, whose consciences would not dispense with Popery, were forced, for fear of persecution, to change climates:  from whence returning at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, many of them who had been in France, and at Geneva, brought back the rigid opinions and imperious discipline of Calvin, to graft upon our Reformation:  which, though they cunningly concealed at first, as well knowing how nauseously that drug would go down in a lawful monarchy, which was prescribed for a rebellious commonwealth, yet they always kept it in reserve; and were never wanting to themselves either in court or parliament, when either they had any prospect of a