r hidden treasures early and late, that another
order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute? When a man hath
been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge,
hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage: drawn forth
his reasons as it were a battle ranged: scattered and defeated all
objections in his way; calls out his adversary into the plain, offers
him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try
the matter by dint of argument: for his opponents then to skulk, to lay
ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger
should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness
and cowardice in the wars of Truth.

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs
no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious;
those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power.
Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she
speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he
was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes,
except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as
Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet
is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else
is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this
side or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a vain
shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that hand-writing
nailed to the cross? What great purchase is this Christian liberty which
Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not,
regards a day or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. How many
other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we
but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be
ever judging one another?

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish
print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us.
We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing of one visible
congregation from another, though it be not in fundamentals; and
through our forwardness to suppress, and our backwardness to recover
any enthralled piece of truth out of the gripe of custom, we care not to
keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion
of all. We do not see that, while we st