into this prophetic speech: 'There is in every one of these considerations most just cause to fear, lest our hastiness to embrace a thing of so perilous consequence,' (meaning the presbyterian discipline,) should cause posterity to feel those evils, which as yet are more easy for us to prevent, than they would be for them to remedy.'

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How fatally this Cassandra has foretold we know too well by sad experience: the seeds were sown in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the bloody harvest ripened in the reign of King Charles the Martyr: and because all the sheaves could not be carried off without shedding some of the loose grains, another crop is too like to follow; nay, I fear it is unavoidable if the conventiclers be permitted still to scatter.

A man may be suffered to quote an adversary to our religion, when he speaks truth: and it is the observation of Maimbourg, in his History of Calvinism, that wherever that discipline was planted and embraced, rebellion, civil war, and misery attended it. And how indeed should it happen otherwise? Reformation of Church and State has always been the ground of our divisions in England. While we were Papists, our holy father rid us, by pretending authority out of the Scriptures to depose princes; when we shook off his authority, the sectaries furnished themselves with the same weapons; and out of the same magazine, the Bible: so that the Scriptures, which are in themselves the greatest security of governors, as commanding express obedience to them, are now turned to their destruction; and never since the Reformation has there wanted a text of their interpreting to authorise a rebel. And it is to be noted by the way, that the doctrines of king-killing and deposing, which have been taken up only by the worst party of the Papists, the most frontless flatterers of the Pope's authority, have been espoused, defended, and are still maintained by the whole body of Nonconformists and republicans. It is but dubbing themselves the people of God, which it is the interest of their preachers to tell them they are, and their own interest to believe; and after that, they cannot dip into the Bible, but one text or another will turn up for their purpose: if they are under persecution, as they call it, then that is a mark of their election; if they flourish,

then God works miracles for their deliverance, and the saints are to possess the earth.

They may think themselves to be too roughly handled in this paper; but I, who know best how far I could have gone on this subject, must be bold to tell them they are spared: though at the same time I am not ignorant that they interpret the mildness of a writer to them, as they do the mercy of the government; in the one they think it fear, and conclude it weakness in the other. The best way for them to confute me is, as I before advised the Papists, to disclaim their principles and renounce their practices. We shall all be glad to think them true Englishmen when they obey the king, and true Protestants when they conform to the Church discipline.

It remains that I acquaint the reader, that these verses were written for an ingenious young gentleman, my friend, upon his translation of The Critical History of the Old Testament, composed by the learned father Simon: the verses therefore are addressed to the translator of that work, and the style of them is, what it ought to be, epistolary.

If any one be so lamentable a critic as to require the smoothness, the numbers, and the turn of heroic poetry in this poem, I must tell him, that if he has not read Horace, I have stu died him, and hope the style of his epistles is not ill imitated here. The expression of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic; for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and those three qualities which I have named are proper to the legislative style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul, by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.

RELIGIO LAICI.

DIM as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul: and as on high,

Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear,

10

When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.
Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been

led

From cause to cause, to nature's secret head;
And found that one first principle must be:
But what, or who, that universal He;
Whether some soul encompassing this ball,
Unmade, unmov'd; yet making, moving all;
Or various atoms' interfering dance

Leap'd into form, the noble work of chance;
Or this great all was from eternity;
Not e'en the Stagirite himself could see;
And Epicurus guess'd as well as he :
As blindly grop'd they for a future state;

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20

As rashly judg'd of providence and fate:
But least of all could their endeavours find *
What most concern'd the good of human kind:
For happiness was never to be found;
But vanish'd from 'em like enchanted ground.
One thought Content the good to be enjoy'd:
This every little accident destroy'd:

The wiser madmen did for Virtue toil:

A thorny, or at best a barren soil;

25

30

In Pleasure some their glutton souls would steep;
But found their line too short, the well too deep;
And leaky vessels which no bliss could keep. 35
Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll,
Without a centre where to fix the soul:

In this wild maze their vain endeavours end:
How can the less the greater comprehend?
Or finite reason reach Infinity?

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45

For what could fathom God were more than He.
The Deist thinks he stands on firmer ground;*
Cries upeka, the mighty secret 's found:
God is that spring of good; supreme and best;
We made to serve, and in that service blest;
If so, some rules of worship must be given,
Distributed alike to all by Heaven:
Else God were partial, and to some denied
The means his justice should for all provide.
This general worship is to praise and pray :
One part to borrow blessings, one to pay :

* System of Deism. Marginal Note, orig. ed.
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VOL. II.

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55

And when frail nature slides into offence,
The sacrifice for crimes is penitence.
Yet since the effects of providence, we find,
Are variously dispens'd to human kind;
That vice triumphs, and virtue suffers here,
A brand that sovereign justice cannot bear ;
Our reason prompts us to a future state:
The last appeal from fortune and from fate:
Where God's all-righteous ways will be declar'd;
The bad meet punishment, the good reward.

Thus man by his own strength to heaven would

And would not be oblig'd to God for more.
Vain, wretched creature, how art thou misled
To think thy wit these godlike notions bred! 65
These truths are not the product of thy mind,
But dropp'd from Heaven, and of a nobler kind.
Reveal'd Religion first inform'd thy sight,
And Reason saw not, till Faith sprung the light.
Hence all thy natural worship takes the source:
"Tis revelation what thou think'st discourse.
Else how com'st thou to see these truths so clear
Which so obscure to Heathens did appear?
Not Plato these, nor Aristotle found:
Nor he whose wisdom Oracles renown'd.†
Hast thou a wit so deep, or so sublime,
Or canst thou lower dive, or higher climb?

75

Of revealed religion. Marginal Note, orig. ed † Socrates. Marginal Note, orig. ed.