a professed physician, or so, but why should I meddle with this tract? Hear
me speak. There be many other subjects, I do easily grant, both in humanity
and divinity, fit to be treated of, of which had I written _ad
ostentationem_ only, to show myself, I should have rather chosen, and in
which I have been more conversant, I could have more willingly luxuriated,
and better satisfied myself and others; but that at this time I was fatally
driven upon this rock of melancholy, and carried away by this by-stream,
which, as a rillet, is deducted from the main channel of my studies, in
which I have pleased and busied myself at idle hours, as a subject most
necessary and commodious. Not that I prefer it before divinity, which I do
acknowledge to be the queen of professions, and to which all the rest are
as handmaids, but that in divinity I saw no such great need. For had I
written positively, there be so many books in that kind, so many
commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teams
of oxen cannot draw them; and had I been as forward and ambitious as some
others, I might have haply printed a sermon at Paul's Cross, a sermon in
St. Marie's Oxon, a sermon in Christ Church, or a sermon before the right
honourable, right reverend, a sermon before the right worshipful, a sermon
in Latin, in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without, a sermon, a
sermon, &c. But I have been ever as desirous to suppress my labours in this
kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs. To have written in
controversy had been to cut off an hydra's head, [157]_Lis litem generat_,
one begets another, so many duplications, triplications, and swarms of
questions. _In sacro bello hoc quod stili mucrone agitur_, that having once
begun, I should never make an end. One had much better, as [158]Alexander,
the sixth pope, long since observed, provoke a great prince than a begging
friar, a Jesuit, or a seminary priest, I will add, for _inexpugnabile genus
hoc hominum_, they are an irrefragable society, they must and will have the
last word; and that with such eagerness, impudence, abominable lying,
falsifying, and bitterness in their questions they proceed, that as he
[159]said, _furorne caecus, an rapit vis acrior, an culpa, responsum date_?
Blind fury, or error, or rashness, or what it is that eggs them, I know
not, I am sure many times, which [160]Austin perceived long since,
_tempestate contentionis, serenitas charitatis ob