manners, and civility was hardly admitted into the nation. We cannot deny that the fresh Christianity of the Normans (for the Normans had not been Christians one hundred years, when William invaded, and was received in England) and the manners they brought over with them, did very much polish the roughness of our native temper; and we only reserved that natural fierceness which made us terrible in battle. In all other agitations we grew possessed of that civility and discretion, that made us fit for commerce and conversation with the other parts of the world, and were not less polished; and towards these perfections every age advanced, and reformed the errors or affected mistakes or humours of the former; so that we may with reason and modesty enough say, that the age wherein the old men who are now alive were born, (for it will be but justice to leave the present age to the censure of those who come after us, since we take upon us to judge of those which were before us) was much superior in piety, in learning, in wisdom, and in good manners, to any that had been before it. I speak of that part only which we are now upon the survey of; though I think it will serve for many other countries, though some indeed seem to have passed their zenith; nor would the testimony we give of that age be impaired, if some enormous crimes be discovered to have been

acted in that time, some men notably wicked to have lived then, some notorious vice to have been practised, and the heirs who then succeeded noble parents exceedingly decayed and shrunk from the virtue of their dead ancestors; which it may be was, and will infallibly be true in all ages whilst the world is inhabited by mortal men; if fewer vices were practised in that age than in the former, if they were more punished, more discountenanced, than in the former, it wrought a very great refor. mation. The weeds can hardly be destroyed where the ground is best cultivated; and since all creatures do degenerate by time and negligence, it will be enough if every age produce some new originals to repair the beauty of decayed copies. A general love of justice, and a general submission to the rigour of it, a diligent prosecution of the Improvement of arts and sciences, the preserving just esteem with neighbour nations, and the enjoying peace and plenty at home, is the best charac racter and description of a happy and a blessed age; and we may justly say, that the age we have appealed to was very plentifully adorned with those blessings, though it might possibly be discredited by some licence and excesses.

We see now how little beauty antiquity (upon which we dote so much) hath in that walk we hitherto have endeavoured to find it; and if we should take

a voyage into the East, where Christianity was first planted, and visit those countries where the primitive fathers both of the Greek and Latin church lived, we should find the age in which they lived, and the people of that age with whom they lived, to be as barbarous as those through which we have passed, and that they themselves had the same infirmities and the same passions with those who succeeded them; and as they of the following were so severe against the most ancient fathers of the church, Origen and Tertullian, that they would scarce acknowledge them to be good Christians, it is no wonder if most of them, as excellent men as they were, did not escape the censures of those who succeeded them; and it is an extraor❤ dinary improvement that divine and human learning hath attained to, since men have looked upon the ancients as fallible writers, and not as upon those ne plus ultra, that could not be exceeded. We retain, as I have said before, a just reverence for them, as great lights which appeared in very dark times; and we read them rather to vindicate them from those impositions which confident men frequently make them liable to, to serve their own corrupt ends, than that we cannot attain to as much clear knowledge by reading later writers in less time than turning over their volumes will require; so that we may modestly enough (which

more men think than say) believe that of the fathers, which one of Tully's orators said of the Latin language, Non tam præclarum est scire Latine, quam turpe est nescire; it is more shame to scholars not to have read the fathers, than profitable to them to have read them. And I do in truth believe (with a very true respect to the writers of the third, fourth, and fifth ages) that there have been many books written and published within these last hundred years, in which much more useful learning is not only communicated to the world, than was known to any of those ancients, but in which the most difficult and important points which have been handled by the fathers, are more clearly stated, and more solidly illustrated, than in the original treatises and discourses of the ancients themselves; besides the vindicating them from many corruptions and unintelligible expressions, which had been admitted in some former editions, and discovering others which had been cast in to serve the turn of the Roman church, If then in truth all kind of learning be in this age in which we live, at least in our own climate, and in some of our neighbours, very much improved beyond what it ever was, and that many errors, and some of no small importance, have been discovered in the writings of the ancients, why should we resort and appeal to antiquity for any other testimony than

for matter of fact, and thereto without restraining our own enquiry or rational conjectures? The time is come which the philosopher foretold in his discourse of comets. Multa sunt quæ esse concedimus, qualia sint ignoramus, veniet tempus quo posteri nostri tam aperta nos nesciisce mirentur: we may indeed well wonder at their gross ignorance in all things belonging to astronomy, in which many of the fathers knew no more than they, and so could not understand many places in the scriptures; and whosoever reads their commentaries upon the several books of scripture, cannot be blamed for want of modesty, if he differs with them very often; which learned men of all opinions always have and always will do. We do not flatter ourselves, if we do believe that we have or may have as much knowledge in religion as they had, and we have much to answer if we have not more; and if our practice of the duties of religion be not as great and as sincere as theirs, (which we have too much reason to suspect) our advantage in knowledge will turn to our reproach and damage. Let us then, in God's name, appeal to and imitate the simplicity, humility, and charity of some primitive Christians, upon whom ambition, nor riches, nor love of life, could prevail to decline the strict path of virtue, or to swerve in any degree from the profession of the truth, (that truth by which they were sure