74. And the vulgar people that have but little sense of religion, (that are not by the aforesaid interest united to the afflicting clergy,) having a reverence to the worth of those that are afflicted, and an experience of the rawness and differing lives of many that possess their rooms, will grow to compassionate the afflicted, and to think that they are injured themselves, and so to think hardly of the causers of all this.
75. Hereupon the powerful clergy will increase their accusations against the party that is against them, and declare to the world in print and from the pulpits, their ignorance, unpeaceableness, unruliness, giddiness, false opinions and conceits about the manner of worship, and how unsufferable a sort of men they are.
76. By this time the devil will have done the radical part of his work; which is to destroy much of christian love to one another, and make them take each other for unlovely, odious persons: the one part, for persecuting enemies of godliness, and hypocrites, and Pharisees; the other for peevish, seditious, turbulent, unruly sectaries. And on these suppositions, all their after characters, affections, and practices towards each other will proceed.
77. By this enmity and opposition against each other, both parties will increase in wrath, and somewhat in numbers. The worldly, afflicting clergy will multiply not only such as are disaffected to them, but downright fanatics, and sectaries that will run as far from them as they can, into contrary extremes. For when they are once brought into a distaste of the old hive, the bees will hardly gather into one new one; but will divide into several swarms and hives. As every man's zeal is more against the afflicting party, so he will go further from them; some to be separatists, some anabaptists, some antinomians, some seekers, some quakers, and some to they know not what themselves.
78. For the women, and apprentices, and novices in christianity, that have more passion than judgment, will abundance of them quite overrun, even their own afflicted teachers, and will forsake them, if they will not overrun their own judgments, in forsaking those that do afflict them.
79. And many hypocrites that have no sound religion; but ignorance, pride, and uncharitableness, will thrust in among them, in these discontents; or spring up in the nurseries of these briers of passion, and will bring in new doctrines, and new ways of worship, and make themselves preachers, and the heads of sects; by reason of whom, the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.
80. And many unstable persons seeing this, will dread and loathe so giddy a sort of men, and will turn papists, upon the persuasions of them that tell them that there is no true unity nor consistency but at Rome; and that all must thus turn giddy at last, that are not fixed in the papal head. And thus they that fly too far from the Common Prayer Book, will drive men to the mass; and the afflicters will make sectaries, and the sectaries will make papists.
81. When the violent clergy, instead of a fatherly government of the flocks, have driven the people into passions, distempers, and uncharitable disaffections to themselves, and have also been the great cause of multiplied heresies and sects by the same means, instead of being humbled and penitent for their sin, they will be hardened, and justify all their violences, by the giddiness and miscarriages of those sectaries, which they themselves have made.
82. And when they publish the faults of such, for the justification of their own violence, they will draw thousands into an approbation of their courses, (to think that such a turbulent people can never be too hardly called or used,) and consequently into a participation of their guilt.
83. By all this, the dissenters will be still more alienated from them; and many will aggravate the crime of the ministers that conform to their impositions, and obey them: and for the sake of a few that afflict them, they will condemn many laudable conforming ministers, that never consented to it, but could heartily wish that it were otherwise.