standing; others to feast the understanding, and tickle the outward ear with essays and flourishes of rhetoric, would quite starve the soul of her true food. "But the principal thing that I hear that reverend lady, that queen of souls, complain of, is, that that seamless garment of unity and love, which our Saviour left her for a legacy, should be torn and rent into so many scissures and sects. I hear her cry out at the monstrous exorbitant liberty, that almost every capricious mechanic takes to himself to shape and form what religion he lists. For the world is come to that pass, that the tailor and shoemaker may cut out what religion they please; the vintner and tapster may broach what religion they please; the dyer may put what colour, the painter may put what face upon her he pleases; the blacksmith may forge what religion he pleases, and so every artisan, according to his profession and fancy, may form her as he pleases. Methinks I hear that venerable matron complain, how her pulpits are become beacons; how, for lights, her churches are full of firebrands; how every caprice of the brain is termed tenderness of conscience, every frantic fancy, or rather frenzy, of some shallow-brained sciolist; and whereas others have been used to go mad from excess of knowledge, men grow mad now-a-days from excess of ignorance. It stands upon record in my story, that when the Norman had got firm footing within my realm, he did demolish many churches and chapels in the New Forest, to make it fitter for his pleasure; but amongst other judgments which fell upon this sacrilege, one was, that tame fowl grew wild: I fear God Almighty is more angry with me now, than then, and that I am guilty of worse crimes; for not my fowl but my folk and people are grown, in many places, half wild; they would not worry one another so in that wolfish belluine manner, else. They would not precipitate themselves else into such a mixed mongrel war; a war which makes strangers cry out, that I am turned into a kind of great bedlam, that Barbary is come into the midst of me, - that my children are grown so savage, so fleshed in slaughter, and become so inhuman and obdurate, that with the same tenderness of sense they can see a man fall, as a horse, or some other brute animal; they have so lost all reverence to the image of their Creator, which was used to be more valued in me than among other nations." |