their adversaries, but eye-sores and stumblingblocks also to their remaining friends: under show of PURGING the world from the infection of all wicked and corrupt BOOKS and passages, which are either against religion or against honesty and good manners, for which two purposes they have their several officers, who indeed do blot out much impiousness and filth, and therein well deserve both to be commended and imitated, (whereto the Venetians add also a third, to let nothing pass that may be justly offensive to princes,) have in truth withal pared and lopped off whatsoever in a manner their watchful eyes could observe, either free in disclosing their abuses and corruptions, or saucy in construing their drifts and practices, or dishonourable to the clergy, or undutiful to the papacy. These editions only authorized, all other are disallowed, called in, consumed; with threats to whosoever shall presume to keep them: that no speech, no writing, no evidence of times past, no discourse of things present, in sum, nothing whatsoever may sound aught but holiness, honour, purity, integrity to the unspotted spouse of Christ, and to his unerring Vicar; to the Mistress of Churches, to the Father of Princes. But as it falleth out now and then, that wisdom and good fortune are to the ruin of them that too much follow them, by drawing men sometimes upon a

presumption of their wit and cunning in contrivements, and of their good success withal in one attempt, to adventure upon another still of yet more subtile invention, and more dangerous execution, which doth break in the end with the very fineness itself, and overwhelm them with the difficulties: so it is to be thought, that their prosperous success in pruning and pluming those later writers, effected with good ease and no very great clamour, as having some reason, and doing really some good, was it that did breed in them a higher conceit, that it was possible to work the like conclusion in writers of elder times, yea in the Fathers themselves, and in all other monuments of reverend antiquity. And the opinion of possibility redoubling their desire brought forth in fine those Indices Expurgatorii, whereof I suppose they are now not a little ashamed, they having by misfortune light into their adversaries' hands, from whom they desired by all means to conceal them; where they remain as a monument to the judgment of the world of their everlasting reproach and ignominy. These purging Indices are of divers sorts: some work not above eight hundred years upwards; other venture much higher, even to the prime of the church. The effect is, that forasmuch as there were so many passages in the Fathers and other antient ecclesiastical writers, which their adver

saries producing in averment of their opinions, they were not able but by tricks and shifts of wit to reply to, to ease themselves henceforth in great part of that wit-labour (a quality indeed perhaps more commendable in some other trade than in divinity, where verity should only sway, where the love of the truth should subject or extinguish wholly all other passions; and the eye of the mind fixed attentively upon that object, should disturn from the regarding of other motives whatsoever); some assemblies of their divines, with consent no doubt of their redoubted superiors and sovereigns, have delivered express order, that in the impressions of those authors which hereafter should be made, the scandalous places there named should be clean left out: which, perhaps, though in this present age would have smally prevailed to the reclaiming of their adversaries, yet would have been great assurance for the retaining of their own, to whom no other books must have been granted. Yea, and perhaps time and industry, which eat even through marbles, extinguishing or getting into their hands all former editions, and for any new to be set out by their adversaries there is no great fear, whose books being discurrent in all Catholic countries, their want of means requisite to utter an impression would dishearten them from the charge the mouth of antiquity should be

thoroughly shut up from uttering any syllable or sound against them. Then lastly, by adding words where opportunity and pretence might serve, and by drawing in the marginal notes and glosses of their friars into the text of the Fathers, as in some of them they have already very handsomely begun, the mouth of antiquity should be also opened for them. There remained then only the rectifying of St. PAUL (whose turn, in all likelihood, if ever, should be the next), and other places of Scripture, whose authority being set beneath the church's already, it were no such great matter to submit it also to her gentle and moderate censures; especially for so good an intent as the weeding out of heresies, and the preserving of the faith Catholic in her purity and glory. But above all other, the second Commandment (as the Protestants, Grecians, and Jews reckon it) were like to abide it; which already in their vulgar Catechisms is discarded, as words superfluous, or at leastwise as unfit or unnecessary for these times. And then, without an angel sent down from heaven, no means to control or gainsay them in anything. But these are but the dreams, perhaps, of some over-passionate desires, at leastwise not likely to take place in our times. But what is it which the opinions of the non-possibility of erring, of the necessary assistance of God's

Spirit in their consistories, of authority unlimited, of power both to dispense with God's law in this world, and to alter his arrests and judgments in the other, (for thereunto do their pardons to them in purgatory extend ;) what is it which these so high and so fertile opinions are not able to engender, and do not powerfully enforce to execute? -carrying men away headlong with this raging conceit, that whatsoever they do by the Pope's they do by God's own commandment, whose Lieutenant he is on earth by a commission of his own penning, that is to say, with absolute and unrestrained jurisdiction; that whatsoever they do for advancement of his see and sceptre, they do it for the upholding of the church of CHRIST, and for the salvation of men's souls, which out of his obedience do undoubtedly perish. perish. And verily it seems no causeless doubt or fear, that these humours and faces, so forward, so adventurous, to alter and chastise with palpable partiality the works of former times in an age which hath so many jealous eyes on their fingers, so many mouths open to publish their shame, such store of copies to restore and repair whatsoever they should presume to maim or deprave; that in former ages, when there were few copies, small difficulties, no enemies; as it is found by certain and irrefragable arguments, that many bastard writings were forged