nt,[55] and her purity consists much in her linnen.
She has heard of the rag of Rome, and thinks it a very sluttish religion,
and rails at the whore of Babylon for a very naughty woman. She has left
her virginity as a relick of popery, and marries in her tribe without a
ring. Her devotion at the church is much in the turning up of her eye; and
turning down the leaf in her book, when she hears named chapter and verse.
When she comes home, she commends the sermon for the scripture, and two
hours. She loves preaching better then praying, and of preachers,
lecturers; and thinks the week day's exercise far more edifying than the
Sunday's. Her oftest gossipings are sabbath-day's journeys, where, (though
an enemy to superstition,) she will go in pilgrimage five mile to a
silenced minister, when there is a better sermon in her own parish. She
doubts of the virgin Mary's salvation, and dares not saint her, but knows
her own place in heaven as perfectly as the pew she has a key to. She is
so taken up with faith she has no room for charity, and understands no
good works but what are wrought on the sampler. She accounts nothing vices
but superstition and an oath, and thinks adultery a less sin than to swear
_by my truly_. She rails at other women by the names of Jezebel and
Dalilah; and calls her own daughters Rebecca and Abigail, and not Ann but
Hannah. She suffers them not to learn on the virginals,[56] because of
their affinity with organs, but is reconciled to the bells for the chimes
sake, since they were reformed to the tune of a psalm. She overflows so
with the bible, that she spills it upon every occasion, and will not
cudgel her maids without scripture. It is a question whether she is more
troubled with the Devil, or the Devil with her: She is always challenging
and daring him, and her weapon [[57]_is the Practice of Piety_.] Nothing
angers her so much as that women cannot preach, and in this point only
thinks the Brownist erroneous; but what she cannot at the church she does
at the table, where she prattles more than any against sense and
Antichrist, 'till a capon's wing silence her. She expounds the priests of
Baal, reading ministers, and thinks the salvation of that parish as
desperate as the Turks. She is a main derider to her capacity of those
that are not her preachers, and censures all sermons but bad ones. If her
husband be a tradesman, she helps him to customers, howsoever to good
cheer, and they are a most faithful