During the great Rebellion, when the wild beasts had trampled down the fences, broken into the vineyard and laid it waste, it is curious to observe the course taken by men who felt for various causes, according to their different characters, the necessity of attaching themselves to some religious communion. Cottington, being in Spain, found it convenient to be reconciled to the Romish church; the dominant religion being to him, as a politician, the best. Weak and plodding men like Father Cressey took the same turn in dull sincerity: Davenant because he could not bear the misery of a state of doubt, and was glad to rest his head upon the pillow of authority; Goring from remorse; Digby (a little later) from ambition, and Lambert, because he was sick of the freaks and follies of the sectaries.
Their “opinions and contests,” says Sir Philip Warwick, “flung all into chaos, and this gave the great advantages to the Romanists, who want not their differences among themselves, but better manage them; for they having retained a great part of primitive truths, and having to plead some antiquity for their many doctrinal errors and their ambitious and lucrative encroachments, and having the policy of flinging coloquintida into our pot, by our dissentions and follies, they have with the motion of the circle of the wheel, brought themselves who were at the Nadir, to be almost at the Zenith of our globe.”
In no other age (except in our own and now from a totally different cause) did the Papists increase their numbers so greatly in this kingdom. And infidelity in all its grades kept pace with popery. “Look but upon many of our Gentry,” says Sanderson, (writing under the Commonwealth,) “what they are already grown to from what they were, within the compass of a few years: and then ex pede Herculem; by that, guess what a few years more may do. Do we not see some, and those not a few, that have strong natural parts, but little sense of religion turned (little better than professed) Atheists. And other some, nor those a few, that have good affections, but weak and unsettled judgements, or (which is still but the same weakness) an overweening opinion of their own understandings, either quite turned, or upon the point of turning Papists? These be sad things, God knoweth, and we all know, not visibly imputable to any thing so much, as to those distractions, confusions and uncertainties that in point of religion have broken in upon us, since the late changes that have happened among us in church affairs.”
The Revolution by which the civil and religious liberties of the British nation were, at great cost, preserved, stopt the growth of popery among us for nearly an hundred years: but infidelity meanwhile was little impeded in its progress by the occasional condemnation of a worthless book; and the excellent works which were written to expose the sophistry, the ignorance, and the misrepresentations of the infidel authors seldom found readers among the persons to whom they might have been most useful. It may be questioned whether any of Jeremy Bentham's misbelieving disciples has ever read Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, or the kindred work of Skelton which a London bookseller published upon Hume's imprimatur.
CHAPTER CCXLIII.
BREVITY BEING THE SOUL OF WIT THE AUTHOR STUDIES CONCISENESS.
You need not fear a surfeit, here is but little, and that light of digestion.
QUARLES.