then to be turn’d off himself, as a property
no more of use to their designes? Their riches
and their strength in which they trusted, and the
Parliament which they even idoliz’d, in sum,
the prey they had contended for at the expence of
so much sin and damnation, seizd upon by those very
instruments, which they had rais’d to serve their
insatiable avarice, and prodigious disloyalty.
For so it pleased God to chastise their implacable
persecution of an excellent Prince, with a slavery
under such a
Tyrant, as not being contented
to butcher even some upon the Scaffold, sold divers
of them for slaves, and others he exild into cruell
banishment, without pretence of Law, or the least commiseration;
that those who before had no mercy on others, might
find none themselves; till upon some hope of their
repentance, and future moderation, it pleased God
to put his hook into the nostrills of that proud
Leviathan,
and send him to his place, after he had thus mortified
the fury of the Presbyterians. For unlesse God
himself should utter his voice from Heaven,
yea,
and that a mighty voice, can there any thing in
the world be more evident, then his indignation at
those wretches and barefac’t Impostors, who,
one after another, usurped upon us, taking them off
at the very point of aspiring, and praecipitating
the glory and ambition of these men, before those that
were, but now, their adorers, and that had prostituted
their consciences to serve their lusts? To call
him the
Moses, the
Man of God, the
Joshua,
the
Saviour of
Israel; and after all
this, to treat the
Thing his son with addresses
no lesse then blasphemous, whose Father (as themselves
confess to be the most infamous Hypocrite and profligate
Atheist of all the Usurpers that ever any age produc’d)
had made them his Vassalls, and would have intaild
them so to his posterity for ever?
But behold the scean is again changed, not by the
Royall party, the Common Enemy, or a forreign power;
but by the despicable Rumpe of a Parliament,
which that Mountebanke had formerly serv’d
himself of, and had rais’d him to that pitch,
and investiture: But see withall, how soon these
triflers and puppets of policy are blown away, with
all their pack of modells and childish Chimaeras,
nothing remaining of them but their Coffine, guarded
by the Souldiers at Westminster; but which is yet lesse
empty then the heads of those Polititians, which so
lately seemed to fill it.
For the rest, I despise to blot paper with a recitall
of those wretched Interludes, Farces and Fantasms,
which appear’d in the severall intervalls; because
they were nothing but the effects of an extream gyddiness,
and unparallel’d levity. Yet these are those
various despensations and providences in your journey
to that holy land of purchases and profits,
to which you have from time to time appeal’d
for the justification of your proceedings, whilst
they were, indeed, no other then the manifest judgments
of God upon your rebellion and your ambition:
I say nothing of your hypocriticall fasts, and pretended
humiliations, previous to the succeeding plots, and
supposititious Revelations, that the godly might
fall into the hands of your Captains, because they
were bugbears, and became ridiculous even to the common
people.