ed on
title-page--month only, no day.]

The Address to the Parliament deserves particular notice. The
following is the main portion of it, with two phrases Italicised:--

"Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate, this liberty of writing
which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert
the just rights and freedoms both of Church and State, and so far
approved as to have been trusted with the representment and defence
of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean
repute, to whom should I address what I still publish on the same
argument but to you, whose magnanimous counsels first opened and
unbound the age from a double bondage under Prelatical and Regal
tyranny, above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last like
Men and Christians from the slavish dejection wherein from father
to son we were bred up and taught, and thereby deserving of these
nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged,
next under God, _the authors and best patrons of Religious and
Civil Liberty that ever these Islands brought forth?_ The care
and tuition of whose peace and safety, _after a short but
scandalous night of interruption,_ is now again, by a new
dawning of God's miraculous Providence among us, revolved upon your
shoulders. And to whom more appertain these Considerations which I
propound than to yourselves, and the debate before you, though I
trust of no difficulty, yet at present of great expectation, not
whether ye will gratify, were it no more than so, but whether ye
will hearken to the just petition of many thousands best affected
both to Religion and to this your return, or whether ye will
satisfy (which you never can) the covetous pretences and demands of
insatiable Hirelings, whose disaffection ye well know hath to
yourselves and your resolutions? That I, though among many others
in this common concernment, interpose to your deliberations what my
thoughts also are, your own judgment and the success thereof hath
given me the confidence: which requests but this--that, if I have
prosperously, God so favouring me, defended the public cause of
this Commonwealth to foreigners, ye would not think the reason and
ability whereon ye trusted once (and repent not) your whole
reputation to the world either grown less by more maturity and
longer study or less available in English than in another tongue:
but tha