court of Rome, than sons of the catholic church. By all which artifices they so strictly inclose all their body, that it is strange that any should break from them, and leave their communion; if the very light of nature, with the assistance of some parts of knowledge, which they can hardly be without, did not sometimes lead men of more exquisite faculties out of that darkness which they affect, and are generally covered with: whereas the church of England conscientiously chuses, not only to permit but to direct her children to understand as well as to profess their religion; to search the scripture, which is the fountain of religion. And it may be, in this latitude to examine, the persons who are entrusted to propagate the truth by seasonable and proper instructions, are not solicitous enough to prepare the understandings, and to season the rawness of youth and ignorance with those wholesome instructions, as might make their other liberty the more useful and beneficial to them; but that is not the defect of the church, which takes all possible care by prescribing sure guides, and setting us good land-marks, that they may neither miss nor go out of the way: it enjoins them to believe all that our Saviour himself or his apostles have required to be believed, but is more strict to instruct them in the practice of Christian virtues, than to perplex and entangle them with dark notions in opinions

which do not contribute to their salvation; so that they who forsake that church, are either guilty of inexcusable negligence, in not requiring the information and instruction that was prepared for them; or they are so well informed, that they could not be prevailed upon but by the levity and inconstancy of their nature, or some depraved affection which seduces them, to comply with particular ends and interests, which is commonly the introduction to those changes; both which aggravate the offence they commit, and makes their case very different from those who have been constantly educated in those errors, without any opportunity to be better instructed; and their guilt being greater, they have no reason to expect their punishment will be the same.

We see then how differently they are qualified to resist temptation. Let us, in the next place, take a view of those ill actions which they must pass through and be actually guilty of, before they can depart from their own church, and unite itself to the other: they must withdraw at least a great part of their allegiance, which they do not only naturally owe, but have actually sworn to pay to their sovereign; which increases their obligation, and adds the sin of perjury to the other of rebellion. Nor can they flatter themselves, or persuade others, that their faith and subjection remains as inviola

ble after they have changed their religion as it was before; which is such a contradiction, that he may as truly say, that he hath not broken his faith to his first wife, when he hath married a second in the life-time of the former. How can he pretend an entire subjection to one sovereign, to whom he hath promised and vowed it, and profess an obedience to the dictates of another sovereign in matters of conscience, whose authority is excluded by the laws of the land, as inconsistent with the other? What rebellions have we seen raised by the dictates of that sovereign over the conscience, against the sovereign to whom their natural allegiance is confessedly due by his own subjects? and therefore the absolute exclusion of it is the only remedy and preservative. In the next place, before they can apostatize from their own church, in which there is nothing wanting or over-abounding that our Saviour prescribed or limited as necessary to a true church, they must formally renounce it, and condemn it as antichristian, in which salvation cannot be attained; and must believe, or profess to believe, that all the souls of their parents, friends, and kindred, who are dead in that faith, are actually in hell, and condemned to everlasting torments: which is such an impudent uncharitableness and presumption as cannot sink into the heart of a Christian, that hath any bowels, or retains the least

reverence for the memory of those relations; and all men who do not believe that the fifth commandment is abolished, must confess that there is an honour due to the memory of our parents, when they are dead, as there was when they were alive; and the honour these men pay to their memory, is to pronounce that they are damned. It is not to be doubted but that many of those apostates will deny that they have done any thing of these particulars, and are too civil men to own and justify most of these outrages; but all the world knows the formal renunciations which are prepared by the church of Rome, and submitted to by these proselytes before they can be received and acknowledged for true members of the catholic church: nor indeed would it be possible to persuade a man that he cannot be saved in the church of which he is, without his believing that they are not saved who have died in it already. That which renders all this the more wonderful and absurd, and, in so serious a subject, even ridiculous, is, that all this mutation is for the most part brought to pass in a very short time, upon very little warning or debate, by some person not half so well known, nor half so knowing, as many of those with whom they have long conversed and been familiar, and would be much fitter to resolve any serious doubts. I speak not of those few scholars, who by the inconstancy

and irresolution of their own nature, the melancholy of their fortune, or the scandal of men's behaviours who pretended to be protestants, which in the late revolutions had an effect upon too many, deserted the church in which they had been educated, with more formality and leisure, after the reading some books which probably they had read before, and entertaining some conferences with men who knew less than themselves, and much less than many of the contrary opinion, with whom they might have conversed; but I speak of the herd of their converts in which they triumph so much, which, for the most part, consists of dying artificers, and old women and young girls, vicious and debauched men and women, who never understood the elements of religion or virtue; who being told somewhat they never heard before, by a man they never saw before, of a way to be saved of which they never thought before, become suddenly new creatures, say all that the priest requires them to say of the living or the dead, and never af, terwards doubt of their going to Heaven. An Eng, lish jesuit once told me in Spain, not without a little vanity, of a good fortune that befel him in London, which he should never forget, and for which he often gave God thanks; that a maid servant in the house where he lodged told him one day that she had an uncle, an old man, a carpenter, who