Although their own late arguments and defences against the prelates
might remember them, that this obstructing violence meets for the most
part with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at:
instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and invests
them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhances their authority,
saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbidden writing is thought to be
a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seek
to tread it out. This Order, therefore, may prove a nursing-mother to
sects, but I shall easily show how it will be a step-dame to Truth: and
first by disenabling us to the maintenance of what is known already.
Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives
by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in
Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual
progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.
A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only
because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without
knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he
holds becomes his heresy.
There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off to another
than the charge and care of their religion. There be--who knows not that
there be?--of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant
an implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto.
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