[369]: Témoignage de Clarendon.
[370]: Voyez dans J. Taylor (Liberty of prophesying) les mêmes doctrines, 1647.
[371]: «I have learned from the ancient fathers of the Church that nothing is more against religion than to force religion.... If protestants did offer violence to other men's conscience and compell them to embrace their Reformation, I excuse them not.»
[372]: And what can we complain of the weakness of our strength or the pressure of diseases, when we see a poor soldier stand in a breach, almost starved with cold and hunger, and his cold apt to be relieved only by the heats of anger, a fever, or a fired musket, and his hunger slacked by a greater pain and a huge fear? This man shall stand in his arms and wounds, patiens luminis atque solis, pale and faint, weary and watchfull; and at night shall have a bullet pulled out of his flesh, and shivers from his bones, and endure his mouth to be sewed up from a violent rent to its own dimensions; and all this for a man whom he never saw, or, if he did, was not noted by him, but one that shall condemn him to the gallows, if he runs from all this misery. (Holy dying, sect. IV, chap. 3.)
[373]: I have seen the little purls of a spring sweat through the bottom of a bank, and intenerate the stubborn pavement, till it hath made it fit for the impression of a child's foot; and it was despised, like the descending pearls of a misty morning, till it had opened its way and made a stream large enough to carry away the ruins of the undermined strand, and to invade the neighbouring gardens: but then the despised drops were grown into an artificial river, and an intolerable mischief. So are the first entrances of sin, stopped with the antidotes of a hearty prayer, and checked into sobriety by the eye of a reverend man, or the counsels of a single sermon: but when such beginnings are neglected, and our religion hath not in it so much philosophy as to think anything evil as long as we can endure it, they grow up to ulcers and pestilential evils; they destroy the soul by their abode, who at their first entry might have been killed with the pressure of a little finger.
[374]: Apples of Sodom. We have already opened this dung-hill covered with snow, which was indeed on the outside white as the spots of leprosy, but it was not better, etc.
[375]: For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man.
[376]: «Lorsque Jésus-Christ est né, il a pleuré et crié comme un autre enfant. Marie a dû le soigner et veiller sur lui, l'allaiter, lui donner à manger, l'essuyer, le tenir, le porter, le coucher, etc., tout comme une mère fait pour son enfant. Ensuite il a été soumis à ses parents; il leur a souvent porté du pain, de la boisson et autres objets. Marie lui aura dit: «Mon petit Jésus, où as-tu été? Ne peux-tu donc pas rester tranquille?» Et lorsqu'il aura grandi, il aura aidé Joseph dans son état de charpentier.» (Tischreden.)
Paroles à Carlostad: «Tu crois apparemment que l'ivrogne Christ, ayant trop bu à souper, a étourdi ses disciples de paroles superflues.»
[377]: «The unknown country.»