After noticing that God, to mortify us, had sent preachers from the “shop-board and the plough,”
| ———Such as we seem justly to contemn, As making truths abhorred, which come from them; |
he seems, however, inclined to think that these self-taught “Teachers and Prophets” in their darkness might hold a certain light within them:
| ————Children, fools, Women, and madmen, we do often meet Preaching, and threatening judgments in the street, Yea by strange actions, postures, tones, and cries, Themselves they offer to our ears and eyes As signs unto this nation.—— They act as men in ecstacies have done—— Striving their cloudy visions to declare, Till they have lost the notions which they had, And want but few degrees of being mad.[283] |
Such is the picture of the folly and of the wickedness, which, after having been preceded by the piety of a religious age, were succeeded by a dominion of hypocritical sanctity, and then closed in all the horrors of immorality and impiety. The parliament at length issued one of their ordinances for “punishing blasphemous and execrable opinions,” and this was enforced with greater power than the slighted proclamations of James and Charles; but the curious wording is a comment on our present subject. The preamble notices that “men and women had lately discovered monstrous opinions, even such as tended to the dissolution of human society, and have abused, and turned into licentiousness, the liberty given in matters of religion.” It punishes any person not distempered in his brains, who shall maintain any mere creature to be God; or that all acts of unrighteousness are not forbidden in the Scriptures; or that God approves of them; or that there is no real difference between moral good and evil, &c.
To this disordered state was the public mind reduced, for this proclamation was only describing what was passing among the people! The view of this subject embraces more than one point, which I leave for the meditation of the politician, as well as the religionist.
[277] “The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age;” by Samuel Clarke. Folio, 1683. A rare volume, with curious portraits.
[278] Alexander Ross’s laborious “View of all Religions” may also be consulted with advantage by those who would study this subject.
[279] “The Hypocrite Discovered and Cured,” by Sam. Torshall, 4to. 1644.