Their oppressing, plundering, ravishing, murdering, not only the bodies, but the souls of men, are large explaining commentaries of such similitudes.
Your Honours have been famous to the end of the world for your unparalleled wisdom, courage, justice, mercy, in the vindicating your civil laws, liberties, &c. Yet let it not be grievous to your Honours’ thoughts to ponder a little, why all the prayers, and tears, and fastings, in this nation, have not pierced the heavens, and quenched these flames; which yet who knows how far they will spread, and when they will out!
Your Honours have broke the jaws of the oppressor, and taken the prey out of his teeth, Job xxix. 17. For which act, I believe, it hath pleased the Most High God to set a guard, not only of trained men, but of mighty angels, to secure your sitting, and the city.
I fear we are not pardoned, though reprieved. Oh! that there may be a lengthening of London’s tranquillity, of the parliament’s safety, by [shewing] mercy to the poor! Dan. iv. [27.]
Right Honourable, soul yoke, soul oppressions, plunderings, ravishings, &c., are of a crimson and deepest dye, and I believe the chief of England’s sins—unstopping the vials of England’s present sorrows.
This glass presents your Honours with arguments from religion, reason, experience: all proving that the greatest yokes yet lying upon English necks, the people’s and your own, are of a spiritual and foul nature.
All former parliaments have changed these yokes according to their consciences, popish or protestant. It is now your Honour’s turn at helm, and as [is] your task so I hope [is] your resolution—not to change: for that is but to turn the wheel, which another parliament, and the very next, may turn again; but to ease the subjects and yourselves from a yoke (as was once spoke in a case not unlike, Acts xv. [10]) which neither you nor your fathers were ever able to bear.
Most noble senators; your fathers, whose seats you fill, are mouldered, and mouldering their brains, their tongues, &c., to ashes in the pit of rottenness: they and you must shortly, together with two worlds of men, appear at the great bar. It shall then be no grief of heart that you have now attended to the cries of souls, thousands oppressed, millions ravished, by the acts and statutes concerning souls not yet repealed—of bodies impoverished, imprisoned, &c., for their souls’ belief: yea, slaughtered on heaps for religious controversies, in the wars of present and former ages.
The famous saying of a late king of Bohemia.
“Notwithstanding the success of later times, wherein sundry opinions have been hatched about the subject of religion, a man may clearly discern with his eye, and as it were touch with his finger, that according to the verity of holy scripture, &c., men’s consciences ought in no sort to be violated, urged, or constrained. And whensoever men have attempted any thing by this violent course, whether openly or by secret means, the issue hath been pernicious, and the cause of great and wonderful innovations in the principallest and mightiest kingdoms and countries,” &c.[83]