plight spend at
best the remainder of their time with tears and weeping for those their
children, of and from whom they expected, (and, with good reason, should
have obtained and reaped,) in these latter days of theirs, joy and comfort.
Other parents there have been, so impatient of that affront and indignity
put upon them and their families, that, transported with the extremity of
passion, in a mad and frantic mood, through the vehemency of a grievous
fury and raging sorrow, have drowned, hanged, killed, and otherwise put
violent hands on themselves. Others, again, of that parental relation
have, upon the reception of the like injury, been of a more magnanimous and
heroic spirit, who, in imitation and at the example of the children of
Jacob revenging upon the Sichemites the rapt of their sister Dinah, having
found the rascally ruffian in the association of his mystical mole-catcher
closely and in hugger-mugger conferring, parleying, and coming with their
daughters, for the suborning, corrupting, depraving, perverting, and
enticing these innocent unexperienced maids unto filthy lewdnesses, have,
without any further advisement on the matter, cut them instantly into
pieces, and thereupon forthwith thrown out upon the fields their so
dismembered bodies, to serve for food unto the wolves and ravens. Upon the
chivalrous, bold, and courageous achievement of a so valiant, stout, and
manlike act, the other mole-catching symmysts have been so highly incensed,
and have so chafed, fretted, and fumed thereat, that, bills of complaint
and accusations having been in a most odious and detestable manner put in
before the competent judges, the arm of secular authority hath with much
importunity and impetuosity been by them implored and required, they
proudly contending that the servants of God would become contemptible if
exemplary punishment were not speedily taken upon the persons of the
perpetrators of such an enormous, horrid, sacrilegious, crying, heinous,
and execrable crime.

Yet neither by natural equity, by the law of nations, nor by any imperial
law whatsoever, hath there been found so much as one rubric, paragraph,
point, or tittle, by the which any kind of chastisement or correction hath
been adjudged due to be inflicted upon any for their delinquency in that
kind. Reason opposeth, and nature is repugnant. For there is no virtuous
man in the world who both naturally and with good reason will not be more
hugely troubled in