We have seen it, indeed Sir, we have seen it, and we cannot but acknowledge it the very finger of God, mirabile in oculis nostris; and is that, truly, which even constrains me out of Charity to your Soul, as well as out of a deep sense of your Honour, and the Friendship which I otherwise bear you, to beseech you to re-enter into your self, to abandon those false Principles, to withdraw your self from these Seducers, to repent of what you have done, and save your self from this untoward Generation: There is yet a door of Repentance open, do not provoke the Majesty of the great God any longer, which yet tenders a Reconciliation to you. Remember what was once said over the perishing Jerusalem. How often would I have gathered you together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her winge, and ye would not? Behold, your House_ is left unto you desolate._—For do not think it impossible, that we should become the most abandon’d, and barbarous of all the nations under heaven. You know who has said it: He turneth a fruitfull land into a Wildernesse, for the iniquity of them that inhabit therein. And truly, he that shall seriously consider the sad Catastrophe of the Eastern Empire, so flourishing in piety, policy, knowledg, literature, and all the excellencies of a happy and blessed people; would almost think it impossible, that in so few years, and a midst so glorious a light of learning and Religion, so suddain, and palpable a darknesse, so strange and horrid a barbarity should over-spread them, as now we behold in all that goodly tract of the Turkish dominions: And what was the cause of all this, but the giddinesse of a wanton people, the Schisms and the Heresies in the church, and the prosperous successes of a rebellious Impostor, whose steps we have pursued in so many pregnant instances; giving countenance to those unheard of impieties, and delusions, as if God be not infinitely merciful, must needs involve us under the same disasters? For, whilst there is no order in the Church, no body of Religion agreed upon, no government established, and that every man is abandoned to his own deceitfull heart: whilst learning is decried, and honesty discountenanc’d, rapine defended, and vertue finds no advocate; what can we in reason expect, but the most direfull expressions of the wrath of God, a universall desolation, when by the industry of Sathan and his crafty Emissaries, some desperate enthusiasme, compounded (like that of Mohomet,) of Arian, Socinian, Jew, Anabaptist, and the impurer Gnostick, something I say made up of all these heresies, shall diffuse it self over the Nation, in a universall contagion, and nothing lesse appear then the Christian which we have ingratefully renounced?
For this plague is already beginning amongst us, and there is none to take the Censer, and to stand between the living and the dead, that we be not consumed as in a moment; for there is wrath gone out from the Lord. Let us then depart from the tents of these wicked men (who have brought all this upon us) and touch nothing of theirs, lest we be consumed in all their sins.