t
does now, or may hereafter, concern us; namely, that in his last sad
sermon on the scaffold at his death, he having freely pardoned all his
enemies, and humbly begged of God to pardon them, and besought those
present to pardon and pray for him; yet he seemed to accuse the
magistrates of the City, for suffering a sort of wretched people,
that could not know why he was condemned, to go visibly up and down
to gather hands to a petition, that the Parliament would hasten his
execution. And having declared how unjustly he thought himself to be
condemned, and accused for endeavouring to bring in Popery,--for
that was one of the accusations for which he died,--he declared with
sadness, "That the several sects and divisions then in England,--which
he had laboured to prevent,--were like to bring the Pope a far greater
harvest, than he could ever have expected without them." And said,
"These sects and divisions introduce profaneness under the cloak of an
imaginary Religion; and that we have lost the substance of Religion by
changing it into opinion: and that by these means this Church, which
all the Jesuits' machinations could not ruin, was fallen into apparent
danger by those which were his accusers." To this purpose he spoke at
his death: for this, and more of which, the Reader may view his last
sad sermon on the scaffold. And it is here mentioned, because his dear
friend, Dr. Sanderson, seems to demonstrate the same in his two large
and remarkable Prefaces before his two volumes of Sermons; and he
seems also with much sorrow to say the same again in his last Will,
made when he apprehended himself to be very near his death. And these
Covenanters ought to take notice of it, and to remember, that, by the
late wicked war begun by them, Dr. Sanderson was ejected out of the
Professor's Chair in Oxford; and that if he had continued in it,--for
he lived fourteen years after,--both the learned of this, and other
nations, had been made happy by many remarkable Cases of Conscience,
so rationally stated, and so briefly, so clearly, and so convincingly
determined, that posterity might have joyed and boasted, that Dr.
Sanderson was born in this nation, for the ease and benefit of all the
learned that shall be born after him: but this benefit is so like time
past, that they are both irrecoverably lost.

[Sidenote: Prisoner at Lincoln]

I should now return to Boothby Pannell, where we left Dr. Hammond and
Dr. Sanderson together; but neithe