tion of able ministers, and were put into a proud, domineering, and licentious capacity: it came to pass that a few separatists and anabaptists, that were at first in the city and army, did grow in two or three years' time to a multitude, and by the policies of Satan and his instruments, did propagate and spread their conceits through the countries, and cast both church and state, and the minds of men into such distempers that they had fuller opportunity to fish when the waters were thus troubled; and the papists secretly fomenting the whole work, and all Satan's heretical agents combining upon their common interest, and upon the libertine account of toleration for them all; at last, by many flagitious and abominable practices, they got so far into the saddle, and to that height and number, and to those advantages for the propagation of their way, which our eyes have seen, and the faithful have lamented, so that now they are upon the Munster principles, many of them seeking after reign and dominion, and think the time is come, or near, when the rebaptised saints must judge the world, and the kingdom must be theirs, and they must rule and break the nations, at least, for a thousand years.

A man would scarcely have believed that saw the first spring of separation and anabaptistry among us, that it would have produced those fearful effects, which we have since beheld. The devil knew better what was contained virtually in that seed, and what an inundation might follow the first breaches of our schisms, than we did or else he would not have so far out-gone us in diligence; somewhat more we should have done to resist him, and less to assist him, than we did. He hath now got such an army of heretics to spit their venom daily in the face of Christ, that we may hear easily, by their voices, whether Satan be for Christ or against him. From separation and anababtistry and antinomianism, they have proceeded to such madness and abominable conceits, and to so great variety of them, as I scarcely read of in any time of the church, except in the days of the Simonians, Nicolaitans, and the rest of the gnosticks in and near the days of the apostles, and in the time of David George and some others, in the reformation.

And here I may well note the seasons that this destroyer takes, for the sending forth his lying spirits, and spreading his heresies it is when and where Christ is doing his greatest works. The apostles and their next successors, that had the most glorious work to do, had also the sharpest assault and

greatest opposition from these heretics. The work of reformation in the days of our fore-fathers had the next part of Satan's malicious opposition. How loth was he that such works as these should have gone on! In England, he saw of late how earnestly men were set upon a full reformation; what resolution there was in rulers, and what desires in many of the people, to have seen a plenty of faithful teachers, and discipline faithfully exercised, and God- purely and seriously worshipped; so that that great work was never half so likely to have been accomplished, if the enemy had not subtlely interposed, and corrupted the heads and hearts of so many, and made them the destroyers that but a little before were forward to build. We could not foresee, in the height of our successful beginnings, that which Paul could then see in theirs. (Acts xx. 29, 30.) What grievous wolves should enter, not sparing the flock, and that of our own selves should men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. But, alas! while we slept, that envious enemy hath sowed these tares; so that I think we may almost compare with the first heretics for vileness and variety.

Some we have that turn Socinians, denying Christ's Godhead and satisfaction, and the Godhead of the Holy Ghost; some turn libertines, and some familists; some seekers, and that of divers strains. Some down-right infidels, under that and other titles; even deriding the holy Scriptures, and Christ himself, as far as they dare speak out for fear of blemishing their reputations. No heaven or hell do they believe but what is now within them, nor any higher felicity than to be epicures, nor any life after this which they shall live. And herein are far worse than almost all the pagans on the earth, yea, than the savage Americans, who commonly believe a life of happiness or misery hereafter. May you not see in these men how Satan befriendeth Christ? Nay, that the devil drives them on is yet more apparent, in that these very men, that believe no life to come, are yet as diligent and busy to make others of their mind, and increase their party, as if they had the greatest motives to impel them. Whereas, rationally, he that thinks man so contemptible a creature as to die like a dog, hath no reason much to regard whether men entertain his opinion or no; though he that believeth an everlasting joy or torment may see reason enough to move him to such endeavours, that men may escape the misery, and be happy.

Besides these, we have had, and yet have, a horrible, hateful

sect of men called ranters, who make it their very religion to swear out the most full-mouthed oaths by multitudes, and openly blaspheme the God of heaven, and so meet, and dance, and roar together; and commit whoredoms and filthiness without shame, owning it, and glorying in it, when they have been punished or examined: so that they seem to match the Simonians and Nicolaitans. They fall into trances, and there lie with their bodies swelled, and strangely acted, and then fall into their raptures and blasphemings. When the law began to restrain these for their wicked practices, the same deceiving spirit raiseth up another sect in their stead, called quakers, who hold many of their doctrines, and take their course in other respects; only, instead of ranting, open wickedness, they pretend to as great mortification of the flesh as the ancient Eremites, and more. They fall into trances, swell, quake, and tremble, and yell, and roar, and after the fit is over, fall a threatening judgments, sometimes against common sins: but the very life and venom of all their speeches and endeavours is against the ministry, to make them odious in the eyes of the people. As I have seen the letters of the ranters so full of the most hideous blasphemies against God, as I thought had never come from any but the damned, so have I had letters from these quakers myself, so full of railing and reviling, from end to end, as I never saw before from the pen of man, either mad or sober, nor ever heard from the mouth of any. Of these two last sorts, divers have run about naked, and some said they were Christ. One ran naked into Whitehall chapel in the time of worship: one eat his own dung, in imitation of Jeremy. To know more of them, see the relation of Richard Gilpin's case. Some of them pretend yet to greater sobriety, and make no great noise in the world; and those are but few, and men of commendable parts, who are deeply possessed with the fancies of Jacob Behmen, the German Paracelsian prophet, and the Rosicrucians, and set themselves mainly to a mortification of bodily desires and delights, and advancing the intellective part above the sensitive, (which is well,) but the doctrine of Christ crucified and justification by him is little minded by them. They do, as the quakers, maintain the popish doctrine of perfection, that they can live without sin, or that some of them can. They aspire after a visible communion with angels, and many of them pretend to have attained it, and fre quently to see them. The rest have that immediate intuition of verities by the spirit within them, or by revelation, that it is

above mere rational apprehension, and therefore they will not dispute, nor be moved by any arguments or Scriptures that you bring, affirming that ratiocination cannot prevail against their intuition. The sum of their doctrines is, that we must be perfect, and for subjecting the flesh to the intellect, we must live in contemplation, lay by all offices in the commonwealth, and own no fleshly relations, as they call them, not the relation of brother or sister, not the relation of a magistrate, or of a master, not the relation of a father or mother, son or daughter, nor love any because of such a relation, but only as justice binds us to requital for what they have done for us. That none should own the relation of husband or wife, nor love each other as so related. That we should endeavour to be perfect, and therefore to forbear all carnal acts of generation, as being of sin and of the devil, and therefore husband and wife should part asunder, or abstain. That all things should be common, and none should own propriety, with abundance more, which are founded on certain vain, unproved fancies of Behmen, that God at first created man a spiritual body, in one sex only, and that containing both sexes virtually, having an angelical power of spiritual generation, and that this gross corporeity, and diversity of sex, marriage, and generation, are all the fruits of sin and Satan, with abundance more such audacious vanities, not worth the reciting.

The truth is, there is a strange combination of the endeavours of the papists and the devil in most of these late heresies. The matter and manner, the strange imposture, and transportations and motions, and wicked, abominable lives of some of them, and railing of others, do show that he is the father of it: so do the intolerable doctrines which they bring, and the opposition that all make to Christ, or the christian faith and communion.

And that the popish priests or jesuits are the leading, busy actors of the whole game, we easily discern, both in that they are frequently discovered in it, and in that the whole frame of the design hath a popish aspect, and the face of their doctrines shows that they came from Rome. Their main business is to bring down the credit of the Scriptures and ministry, and if that were done, the papists would think they had the day. They also directly lead to their monastical and eremetical solitude, and making that rigour to the body, and denying marriage, propriety, and worldly employments, to be for their

righteousness, which they trust in, and in this they must be perfect. But, doubtless, the issue of this (as the powder plot, and all other wicked attempts have done) will cast such a shame on the face of Rome, that it will prove no small wound to their cause, and, I hope, much cross their own expectations. I confess it doth very much to turn my heart from them further than else it would be.

1. To see that their cause is such, and their doctrine such as needeth and owneth such abominable ways to maintain it; and that their most zealous, learned men are such as dare own and practise such wicked courses. Doth Christ's kingdom need such hellish plots and attempts for the sustaining of it? If the Roman kingdom were Christ's, it would not stand on such cursed props, nor would they go to hell for armour to defend it. It appears, that they will rather introduce all the heresies, blasphemies, and infidelity itself, by their secret seductions, than they will neglect to promote their own interests and designs.

2. And it confirms me much against them to see that the devil and the pope are both of a mind, and that Satan doth so notoriously join with them in the design, and show so much of his power and malice in the prosecution of it.

. I have been somewhat long upon this work of the great enemy, to show how he brings up his band of heretics against Christ. I shall be more brief in the rest; though they are such as might hold us long, if we stood upon the application of them to the matter in hand, as the usefulness doth deserve; for they all put it out of doubt, that Satan is the leading enemy of Christ.

Sect. IX.

The sixth way by which the devil hath showed his enmity to Christ, is by open persecution of his subjects, and violence against his Gospel and kingdom; in which, though he could go no further than God in wisdom saw good to permit him, yet so far hath he gone, as that the effects of his hellish rage are the subject of many voluminous histories, which being common in men's hands, I shall say but little of it.

As Satan was a murderer from the beginning, (John viii. 24,) maliciously supplanting our new-created progenitors, and drawing them under the guilt of threatened death, so when the eternal Word did interpose for their redemption, and opened again to man a door of life, the malice of the enemy is so far from being abated, that it is more enraged and engaged against