with having preached the sermon, Dr. Griffith resolved to publish it, in an ostentatious manner and with certain accompaniments. “The Fear of God and the King.  Press’d in a Sermon preach’d at Mercers Chappell on the 25th of March, 1660.  Together with a brief Historical Account of the Causes of our unhappy distractions and the onely way to heal them.  By Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King.  London, Printed for Tho.  Johnson at the Golden Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, 1660”:  such was the name of a duodecimo out in London in the first days of April.[1] The volume consists of three parts,—­first, a dedicatory epistle “To His Excellency George Monck, Captain-General of all the Land Forces of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and one of the Generals of all the Naval Forces”; then the sermon itself in fifty-eight pages; and then an addition, in the shape of a directly political pamphlet, headed “The Samaritan Revived.”  The gem is the dedication to Monk.  The substance of that is as follows:—­

[Footnote 1:  “April” only, without day, is the date in the Thomason copy; but it was registered at Stationers’ Hall, March 31, and there is proof that the publication was immediate.]

“My Lord,—­If you will be pleased to allow me to be a physician in the same sense that all moral divines do acknowledge the body-politic (consisting of Church and State) to be a patient, then I will now give your Highness a just account both how far and how faithfully I have practised upon it by virtue of my profession.  When I first observed things to be somewhat out of order, by reason of a high distemper, which then appeared by some infallible indications, I thought it my duty to prescribe an wholesome electuary (out of the 122nd Psalm at the 6th verse, in a sermon which I was called to preach in the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul’s, anno 1642, and soon after published by command under this title:  A Pathetical Persuasion to pray for the Public Peace), to be duly and devoutly taken every morning next our hearts:  hoping that, by God’s blessing on the means, I should have prevented that distemper from growing into a formed disease.  Yet, finding that my preventing physic did not work so kindly and take so good an effect as I earnestly desired, but rather that this my so tenderly beloved patient grew worse and worse, as not only being in process of time fallen into a fever and that pestilential, but also as having received divers dangerous wounds, which, rankling and festering inwardly, brought it into a spiritual atrophy and deep consumption, and the parts ill-affected (for want of Christian care and skill in such mountebanks as were trusted with the cure, while myself and most of the ancient orthodox clergy were sequestered and silent) began to gangrene:  and, when some of us became sensible thereof, we took the confidence (being partly emboldened by the connivance of the higher powers that then were) to fall to the exercise of our ministerial functions