That then this sort of men would not only be angling in the lesser brooks of our troubled waters, endeavouring to inveigle wandering, loose, and discontented individuals (which hath been their constant employment), but also come with their nets into our open streams, was the thoughts of all men who count themselves concerned to think of such things as these. There is scarce a forward emissary amongst them who cries not, in such a season, "An ego occasionem mihi ostentatam, tantam, tam bonam, tam optatam, tam insperatam, amitterem ?" What baits and tacklings they would principally make use of was also foreknown. But the way and manner which they would fix on for the management of their design, now displayed in this discourse, lay not, I confess, under an ordinary prospect. For, as to what course the wisdom of men will steer them, in various alterations, /n-avrii a.pi(rTD; oa-rn ilxa^u xaXus, [Eurip. Frag. inc. cxxviii.] — " he is no mean prophet that can but indiffer- ently guess." But yet there wanted not some beams of light to guide men in the
6 PREFACE.
exercise of their stochastic' faculty, even as to this also. That accommodation of religion and all its concernments unto the humours, fancies, and conversations of men, wherewith some of late have pleased themselves, and laid snares for the ruin of others, did shrewdly portend what, in this attempt of the same party, we were to expect. Of this nature is that poetical strain of devotion so much applauded and prevailing in our neighbour Idngdom ; whereby men, ignorant of the heavenly power of the gospel, not only to resist but to subdue the strongest lusts and most towering imaginations of the sons of men, do labour, in soft and dehcate rhymes, to attemperate rehgion unto the loose and airy fancies of persons whoUy indulging their minds to vanity and pleasure ; — a fond attempt of men not knowing how to manage the sublime, spiritual, severe truths of the gospel, to the ingenerating of faith and devotion in the souls of sinners ; but yet that which they suppose is the only way left them to prevent the keeping of religion and the most of their party at a perpetual distance! So Mohammed saw it necessary to go to the mountain, when the mountain, for all his calhng, would not come to him. And of the same sort is the greatest part of the casuistical divinity of the Jesuits. A mere accom- modation of the principles of religion to the filthy lusts and v.'icked lives of men, who on no other terms would resign the conduct of their souls unto them, seems to be their main design in it. On these defects of others, he that would have pondered what a wise and observing person of the same interest with them might apprehend of the present tempers, distempers, humours, interests, pi-ovocations, fancies, lives of them with whom he intends to deal, could not have failed of some advantage in his conjectures at the way and manner wherein he would proceed in treating of them. It is of the many of whom we speak, — on whose countenances, and in whose lives, he that runs may read provocations from former miscarriages ; supine negligence of spiritual and eternal concernments ; ignorance of things past, beyond what they can remember in their own days ; sloth in the disquisition of the truth ; willingness to be accommodated with a religion pretended secure and un- concerned in present disputes, that may save them and their sins together without farther trouble ; delight in quaint language and poetical strains of eloquence, where- unto they are accustomed at the stage ; with sundry other inward accoutrements of mind not unlike to these. To this frame and temper of spirit, this composition of humours, it was not improbable but that those who should first enter into the lists in this design would accommodate their style and manner of procedure, — " Nee spem fefellit expectatio." The treatise under consideration hath fully answered whatever was of conjecture in this kind. Frequent repetitions of late provocations, with the crimes of the provokers ; confident and undue assertions of things past in the days of old ; large promises of security, temporal and eternal, to nations and all individuals in them, — of facility in coming to perfection in religion without more pains of teaching, learning, or fear of opposition; all interwoven with tart sarcasms, pleasant diversions, pretty stories of himself and others, flourished over with a smooth and handsome strain of rhetoric, do apparently make up the bulk of our author's discourse. Nor is the romance of his conversion, much in- fluenced by the tinkling of hells and sweeping of churches, suited unto any other principles : a matter, I confess, so much the more admirable, because, as I suppose it, in the way mentioned, to have been his singular lot and good hap, so it was utterly impossible that for five hundred, I may say a tliousand years after Christ, any man should on these motives be turned to any religion, most of them being not in those days " in rerum natura." A way of handling religion he hath fixed on which, as I suppose, he will himself acknowledge that the first planters of it were ignorant of; so I will promise him, that if he can, for a thousand years after they began their work, instance in any one book of an approved Catholic 1 Conjectural, skilful in framing conjectures.— Ed.