“After our liberty thus successfully fought for, gained, and many years possessed (except in those unhappy interruptions which God hath removed), ... to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship, not only argues a strange degenerate corruption suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours.  And what will they say of us but scoffingly as of that foolish builder mentioned by our Saviour, who began to build a tower and was not able to finish it:  ’Where is this goodly Tower of a Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow Kings and be another Rome in the West?  The foundation indeed they laid gallantly; but fell into a worse confusion, not of tongues but of factions, than those at the Tower of Babel, and have left no memorial of their work behind them remaining but in the common laughter of Europe.’  Which must needs redound the more to our shame if we but look on our neighbours THE UNITED PROVINCES, to us inferior in all outward advantages; who, notwithstanding, in the midst of great difficulties, courageously, wisely, constantly, went through with the same work, and are settled in all the happy enjoyments of a potent and flourishing Republic to this day.—­Besides this, if we return to kingship, and soon repent (as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachments coming on by little and little upon our consciences, which must needs proceed from King and Bishop united inseparably in one interest), we may be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never likely to attain, thus far as we are now advanced to the recovery of our freedom, never likely to have it in possession as we now have it,—­never to be vouchsafed hereafter the like mercies and signal assistance from Heaven in our cause, if by our ingrateful backsliding we make these fruitless to ourselves, all His gracious condescensions and answers to our once importuning prayers against the tyranny which we then groaned under to become now of no effect, by returning of our own foolish accord, nay running headlong again with full stream wilfully and obstinately, into the same bondage:  making vain and viler than dirt the blood of so many thousand faithful and valiant Englishmen, who left us in this liberty bought with their lives; losing by a strange after-game of folly all the battles we have won, all the treasure we have spent (not that corruptible treasure only, but that far more precious one of all our late miraculous deliverances), and most pitifully depriving ourselves the instant fruition of that Free Government which we have so dearly purchased,—­a Free Commonwealth:  not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equalest, the justest Government, the most agreeable to all due liberty, and proportioned