It cannot be denied to be a pious and prudential act for your Honours, according to your conscience, to call for the advice of faithful counsellors in the high debates concerning your own, and the souls of others.
Yet, let it not be imputed as a crime for any suppliant to the God of heaven for you, if, the humble sense of what their souls believe, they pour forth, amongst others, these three requests at the throne of grace:
First. That neither your Honours, nor those excellent and worthy persons whose advice you seek, limit the Holy One of Israel to their apprehensions, debates, conclusions, rejecting or neglecting the humble and faithful suggestions of any, though as base as spittle and clay, with which sometimes Christ Jesus opens the eyes of them that are born blind.
Secondly. That the present and future generations of the sons of men may never have cause to say that such a parliament, as England never enjoyed the like, should model the worship of the living, eternal, and invisible God, after the bias of any earthly interest, though of the highest concernment under the sun. And yet saith the learned Sir Francis Bacon[84] (however otherwise persuaded, yet thus he confesseth), “Such as hold pressure of conscience, are guided therein by some private interests of their own.”
Thirdly. [That] whatever way of worshipping God your own consciences are persuaded to walk in, yet, from any bloody act of violence to the consciences of others, it may never be told at Rome nor Oxford, that the parliament of England hath committed a greater rape than if they had forced or ravished the bodies of all the women in the world.
And that England’s parliament, so famous throughout all Europe and the world, should at last turn papists, prelatists, Presbyterians, Independents, Socinians, Familists, Antinomians, &c., by confirming all these sorts of consciences by civil force and violence to their consciences.[85]
TO EVERY COURTEOUS READER.
While I plead the cause of truth and innocency against the bloody doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience, I judge it not unfit to give alarm to myself, and to [all] men, to prepare to be persecuted or hunted for cause of conscience.