but the
beginnings of evils, and there is a worse gallimaufry gobber-wise
prepared. It hath been observed of the warring Turks(24) that often they
used this notable deceit--to send a lying rumour and a vain tumult of war
to one place, but, in the meanwhile, to address their true forces to
another place, that so they might surprise those who have been unwarily
led by pernicious credulity. So have we manifest (alas too, too manifest)
reasons to make us conceive, that whilst the chief urgers of the course of
conformity are skirmishing with us about the trifling ceremonies (as some
men count them), they are but labouring to hold our thoughts so bent and
intent upon those smaller quarrels, that we may forget to distinguish
betwixt evils immanent and evils imminent, and that we be not too much
awake to espy their secret sleight in compassing further aims.

VI. Neither let the pretence of peace and unity cool your fervour, or make
you spare to oppose yourselves unto those idle and idolised ceremonies
against which we dispute, for whilst our opposites make a vain show and
pretence of peace, they do like the Romans,(25) who built the Temple of
Concord just in the place where the seditious outrages of the two Gracchi,
Tiberius and Caius, had been acted, which temple,(26) in the subsequent
times, did not restrain, but, by the contrary, gave further scope unto
more bloody seditions, so that they should have built _discord_ a temple
in that place rather than _concord_, as Augustine pleasantly tickleth
them. Do our opposites think that the bane of peace is never in yielding
to the course of the time, but ever in refusing to yield? Or will they not
rather acknowledge, that as a man is said to be made drunk by drinking the
water of Lyncestus, a river of Macedonia,(27) no less than if he had
filled himself with the strongest wine, so one may be inebriate with a
contentious humour in standing stiffly for yielding, as well as in
standing stedfastly for refusing? Peace is violated by the oppugners of
the truth, but established by the possessors of the same, for (as was
rightly said by Georgius Scolarius in the Council of Florence(28)) the
church's peace "can neither stay among men, the truth being unknown,
neither can it but needs return, the truth being known." _Nec veritate
ignorata manere inter homines potest, nec illa agnita necessario non
redire._ We must therefore be mortised together, not by the subscudines of
error, but by the bands