CANTO I.]
HUDIBRAS.
271
What makes the breaking of all oaths A holy duty?—Food and clothes. What laws and freedom, persecution?— B'ing out of power, and contribution. What makes a church a den of thieves?— 1285 A dean and chapter, and white sleeves.[1] And what would serve, if those were gone, To make it orthodox?—Our own. What makes morality a crime,[2]The most notorious of the time; 1290 Morality, which both the saints And wicked too cry out against?— 'Cause grace and virtue are within Prohibited degrees of kin; And therefore no true saint allows 1295 They should be suffer'd to espouse: For saints can need no conscience, That with morality dispense; As virtue's impious, when 'tis rooted In nature only, 'nd not imputed: 1300But why the wicked should do so, We neither know, nor care to do. What's liberty of conscience, I th' natural and genuine sense? 'Tis to restore, with more security, 1305 Rebellion to its ancient purity; And Christian liberty reduce To th' elder practice of the Jews; For a large conscience is all one, And signifies the same, with none.[3] 1310 It is enough, quoth he, for once, And has repriev'd thy forfeit bones:
- ↑ That is, a bishop who wears lawn sleeves.
- ↑ Moral goodness was deemed a mean attainment, and much beneath the character of saints, who held grace and inspiration to be all meritorious, and virtue to have no merit; nay, some even thought virtue impious, when it is rooted only in nature, and not imputed; some of the modern sects are supposed to hold tenets not very unlike this. Nash.
- ↑ It is reported of Judge Jefferys, that taking a dislike to a witness who had a long beard, he told him that "if his conscience was as long as his beard, he had a swinging one:" to which the countryman replied, "My Lord, if you measure consciences by beards, you have none at all."
