e. It
is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop, and the
removing him from off the presbyterian shoulders, that will make us a
happy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the
rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and
reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and
Calvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be who
perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity
that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride and
ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with
meekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressed which is not
found in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, they are the dividers
of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered
pieces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searching
what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we
find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), this is the
golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the
best harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and
neutral, and inwardly divided minds.

Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are,
and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a
quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy
to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human
capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest
sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of
good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the
school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the
old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius
Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits
of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for
nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from
as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian
wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language
and our theologic arts.

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven,
we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and
propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other,
that out of he