Is't not ridiculous, and nonsense,
A saint should be a slave to conscience?
That ought to be above such fancies,
As far as above ordinances?[1]250
She's of the wicked, as I guess,[2]
B' her looks, her language, and her dress:
And tho', like constables, we search
For false wares one another's church;
Yet all of us hold this for true,255
No faith is to the wicked due.[3]
For truth is precious and divine,
Too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
Quoth Hudibras, All this is true,
Yet 'tis not fit that all men knew260
Those mysteries and revelations:[4]
And therefore topical evasions
Of subtle turns, and shifts of sense.
Serve best with th' wicked for pretence;
Such as the learned Jesuits use,[5]265
And Presbyterians, for excuse
- ↑ Some sectaries, especially the Seekers and Muggletonians, thought themselves so sure of salvation, that they deemed it needless to conform to ordinances, human or divine.
- ↑ Hence it may be concluded that the widow was a royalist.
- ↑ This is the famous popish maxim, Nulla fides servanda hereticis, here attributed to the puritan sectaries. Ralph, suspecting the widow to be a royalist, insinuates that it is not necessary to keep faith with her.
- ↑ Private or esoteric doctrines, which may be called mysterious, mean that what is publicly professed and taught is not what the teachers mean.
- ↑ Mr Foulis tells a good story about Jesuitical evasions; a little before the death of Queen Elizabeth, when the Jesuits were endeavouring to set aside King James, a little book was written, entitled, a Treatise on Equivocation, which was afterwards called by Garnet, Provincial of the Jesuits, a Treatise against Lying and Dissimulation, which contained the following example. In time of the plague a man goes to Coventry; at the gates he is examined upon oath whether he came from London: the traveller, though he directly came from thence, may swear positively that he did not, because he knows himself not infected, and does not endanger Coventry; which he
could not sin, though they committed the same acts which were sins in others; or, in other words, that the condition of the person determined the character of his acts, and made them good or bad, and not the acts which displayed the character of the man; so that one not previously wicked could commit no wickedness.
