here
is proof that the publication was immediate.]

"My Lord,--If you will be pleased to allow me to be a physician in
the same sense that all moral divines do acknowledge the
body-politic (consisting of Church and State) to be a patient,
then I will now give your Highness a just account both how far and
how faithfully I have practised upon it by virtue of my profession.
When I first observed things to be somewhat out of order, by reason
of a high distemper, which then appeared by some infallible
indications, I thought it my duty to prescribe an wholesome
electuary (out of the 122nd Psalm at the 6th verse, in a sermon
which I was called to preach in the Cathedral Church of Saint
Paul's, anno 1642, and soon after published by command under this
title: _A Pathetical Persuasion to pray for the Public
Peace_), to be duly and devoutly taken every morning next our
hearts: hoping that, by God's blessing on the means, I should have
prevented that distemper from growing into a formed disease. Yet,
finding that my preventing physic did not work so kindly and take
so good an effect as I earnestly desired, but rather that this my
so tenderly beloved patient grew worse and worse, as not only being
in process of time fallen into a fever and that pestilential, but
also as having received divers dangerous wounds, which, rankling
and festering inwardly, brought it into a spiritual atrophy and
deep consumption, and the parts ill-affected (for want of
Christian care and skill in such mountebanks as were trusted with
the cure, while myself and most of the ancient orthodox clergy were
sequestered and silent) began to gangrene: and, when some of us
became sensible thereof, we took the confidence (being partly
emboldened by the connivance of the higher powers that then were)
to fall to the exercise of our ministerial functions again in such
poor parishes as would admit us: Then I saw it was high time not
only to prescribe strong purgative medicines in the pulpit
(contempered of the myrrh of mortification, the aloes of confession
and contrition, the rhubarb of restitution and satisfaction, with
divers other safe roots, seeds, and flowers, fit and necessary to
help to carry away by degrees the incredible confluence of ill
humours and all such malignant matter as offended), but also to put
pen to paper and appear in print (as in this imperfect and
impolished piece, which