themselves monks and of religious orders, though they assume both titles
very unjustly: for as to the last, they have very little religion in
them; and as to the former, the etymology of the word monk implies a
solitariness, or being alone; whereas they are so thick abroad that
we cannot pass any street or alley without meeting them. Now I cannot
imagine what one degree of men would be more hopelessly wretched, if
I did not stand their friend, and buoy them up in that lake of misery,
which by the engagements of a holy vow they have voluntarily immerged
themselves in. But when these sort of men are so unwelcome to others, as
that the very sight of them is thought ominous, I yet make them highly
in love with themselves, and fond admirers of their own happiness. The
first step whereunto they esteem a profound ignorance, thinking carnal
knowledge a great enemy to their spiritual welfare, and seem confident
of becoming greater proficients in divine mysteries the less they are
poisoned with any human learning. They imagine that they bear a sweet
consort with the heavenly choir, when they tone out their daily tally
of psalms, which they rehearse only by rote, without permitting their
understanding or affections to go along with their voice. Among these
some make a good profitable trade of beggary, going about from house to
house, not like the apostles, to break, but to beg, their bread; nay,
thrust into all public-houses, come aboard the passage-boats, get into
the travelling waggons, and omit no opportunity of time or place for the
craving people's charity; doing a great deal of injury to common highway
beggars by interloping in their traffic of alms. And when they are thus
voluntarily poor, destitute, not provided with two coats, nor with
any money in their purse, they have the impudence to pretend that they
imitate the first disciples, whom their master expressly sent out in
such an equipage. It is pretty to observe how they regulate all their
actions as it were by weight and measure to so exact a proportion, as if
the whole loss of their religion depended upon the omission of the least
punctilio. Thus they must be very critical in the precise number of
knots to the tying on of their sandals; what distinct colours their
respective habits, and what stuff made of; how broad and long their
girdles; how big, and in what fashion, their hoods; whether their bald
crowns be to a hair's-breadth of the right cut; how many hours they must
sleep, at what minute rise to prayers, &c. And these several customs are
altered according to the humours of different persons and places. While
they are sworn to the superstitious observance of these trifles, they do
not only despise all others, but are very inclinable to fall out among
themselves; for though they make profession of an apostolic charity,
yet they will pick a quarrel, and be implacably passionate for such poor
provocations, as the girting on a coat the wrong way, for the wearing of
clothes a little too darkish coloured, or any such nicety not worth the
speaking of.
[Illustration: 288]
Some are so obstinately superstitious that they will wear their upper
garment of some coarse dog's hair stuff, and that next their skin
as soft as silk: but others on the contrary will have linen frocks
outermost, and their shirts of wool, or hair. Some again will not touch
a piece of money, though they make no scruple of the sin of drunkenness,
and the lust of the flesh. All their several orders are mindful of
nothing more than of their being distinguished from each other by
their different customs and habits. They seem indeed not so careful of
becoming like Christ, and of being known to be his disciples, as the
being unlike to one another, and distinguishable for followers of their
several founders. A great part of their religion consists in their
title: some will be called cordeliers, and these subdivided into
capuchines, minors, minims, and mendicants; some again are styled
Benedictines, others of the order of St. Bernard, others of that of
St. Bridget; some are Augustin monks, some Willielmites, and others
Jacobists, as if the common name of Christian were too mean and vulgar.
Most of them place their greatest stress for salvation on a strict
conformity to their foppish ceremonies, and a belief of their legendary
traditions; wherein they fancy to have acquitted themselves with so much
of supererogation, that one heaven can never be a condign reward for
their meritorious life; little thinking that the Judge of all the earth
at the last day shall put them off, with a who hath required these
things at your hands; and call them to account only for the stewardship
of his legacy, which was the precept of love and charity. It will be
pretty to hear their pleas before the great tribunal: one will brag how
he mortified his carnal appetite by feeding only upon fish: another will
urge that he spent most of his time on earth in the divine exercise
of singing psalms: a third will tell how many days he fasted, and what
severe penance he imposed on himself for the bringing his body into
subjection: another shall produce in his own behalf as many ceremonies
as would load a fleet of merchant-men: a fifth shall plead that in
threescore years he never so much as touched a piece of money, except
he fingered it through a thick pair of gloves: a sixth, to testify his
former humility, shall bring along with him his sacred hood, so old and
nasty, that any seaman had rather stand bare headed on the deck, than
put it on to defend his ears in the sharpest storms: the next that comes
to answer for himself shall plead, that for fifty years together, he had
lived like a sponge upon the same place, and was content never to change
his homely habitation: another shall whisper softly, and tell the judge
he has lost his voice by a continual singing of holy hymns and anthems:
the next shall confess how he fell into a lethargy by a strict,
reserved, and sedentary life: and the last shall intimate that he has
forgot to speak, by having always kept silence, in obedience to the
injunction of taking heed lest he should have offended with his tongue.
But amidst all their fine excuses our Saviour shall interrupt them with
this answer, Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites, verily I
know you not; I left you but one precept, of loving one another, which
I do not hear any one plead he has faithfully discharged: I told you
plainly in my gospel, without any parable, that my father's kingdom was
prepared not for such as should lay claim to it by austerities, prayers,
or fastings, but for those who should render themselves worthy of it by
the exercise of faith, and the offices of charity: I cannot own such as
depend on their own merits without a reliance on my mercy: as many of
you therefore as trust to the broken reeds of your own deserts may even
go search out a new heaven, for you shall never enter into that, which
from the foundations of the world was prepared only for such as are true
of heart. When these monks and friars shall meet with such a shameful
repulse, and see that ploughmen and mechanics are admitted into that
kingdom, from which they themselves are shut out, how sneakingly will
they look, and how pitifully slink away? Yet till this last trial they
had more comfort of a future happiness, because more hopes of it than
any other men. And these persons are not only great in their own eyes,
but highly esteemed and respected by others, especially those of the
order of mendicants, whom none dare to offer any affront to, because
as confessors they are intrusted with all the secrets of particular
intrigues, which they are bound by oath not to discover; yet many times,
when they are almost drunk, they cannot keep their tongue so far within
their head, as not to be babbling out some hints, and shewing themselves
so full, that they are in pain to be delivered. If any person give them
the least provocation they will sure to be revenged of him, and in their
next public harangue give him such shrewd wipes and reflections, that
the whole congregation must needs take notice at whom they are levelled;
nor will they ever desist from this way of declaiming, till their mouth
be stopped with a bribe to hold their tongue. All their preaching is
mere stage-playing, and their delivery the very transports of ridicule
and drollery. Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures? What heights
and falls in their voice? What toning, what bawling, what singing, what
squeaking, what grimaces, making of mouths, apes' faces, and distorting
of their countenance; and this art of oratory as a choice mystery,
they convey down by tradition to one another. The manner of it I may
adventure thus farther to enlarge upon. First, in a kind of mockery
they implore the divine assistance, which they borrowed from the solemn
custom of the poets: then if their text suppose be of charity, they
shall take their exordium as far off as from a description of the river
Nile in Egypt; or if they are to discourse of the mystery of the Cross,
they shall begin with a story of Bell and the Dragon; or perchance if
their subject be of fasting, for an entrance to their sermon they shall
pass through the twelve signs of the zodiac; or lastly, if they are to
preach of faith, they shall address themselves in a long mathematical
account of the quadrature of the circle. I myself once heard a great
fool (a great scholar I would have said) undertaking in a laborious
discourse to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity; in the unfolding
whereof, that he might shew his wit and reading, and together satisfy
itching ears, he proceeded in a new method, as by insisting on the
letters, syllables, and proposition, on the concord of noun and verb,
and that of noun substantive, and noun adjective; the auditors all
wondered, and some mumbled to themselves that hemistitch of Horace,
Why all this needless trash?
But at last he brought it thus far, that he could demonstrate the
whole Trinity to be represented by these first rudiments of grammar,
as clearly and plainly as it was possible for a mathematician to draw a
triangle in the sand: and for the making of this grand discovery, this
subtle divine had plodded so hard for eight months together, that he
studied himself as blind as a beetle, the intenseness of the eye of his
understanding overshadowing and extinguishing that of his body; and yet
he did not at all repent him of his blindness, but thinks the loss of
his sight an easy purchase for the gain of glory and credit.
[Illustration: 294]
I heard at another time a grave divine, of fourscore years of age at
least, so sour and hard-favoured, that one would be apt to mistrust that
it was Scotus Redivivus; he taking upon him to treat of the mysterious
name, JESUS, did very subtly pretend that in the very letters was
contained, whatever could be said of it: for first, its being declined
only with three cases, did expressly point out the trinity of persons,
then that the nominative ended in S, the accusative in M, and the
ablative in U, did imply some unspeakable mystery, viz., that in words
of those initial letters Christ was the _summus_, or beginning, the
_medius_, or middle, and the _ultimus_, or end of all things. There was
yet a more abstruse riddle to be explained, which was by dividing the
word JESUS into two parts, and separating the S in the middle from the
two extreme syllables, making a kind of pentameter, the word consisting
of five letters: and this intermedial S being in the Hebrew alphabet
called sin, which in the English language signifies what the Latins term
_peecatum_, was urged to imply that the holy Jesus should purify us
from all sin and wickedness. Thus did the pulpiteer cant, while all the
congregation, especially the brotherhood of divines, were so surprised
at his odd way of preaching, that wonder served them, as grief did
Niobe, almost turned them into stones. I among the rest (as Horace
describes Priapus viewing the enchantments of the two sorceresses,
Canidia and Sagane) could no longer contain, but let fly a cracking
report of the operation it had upon me. These impertinent introductions
are not without reason condemned; for of old, whenever Demosthenes among
the Greeks, or Tully among the Latins, began their orations with so
great a digression from the matter in hand, it was always looked upon
as improper and unelegant, and indeed, were such a long-fetched exordium
any token of a good invention, shepherds and ploughmen might lay claim
to the title of men of greatest parts, since upon any argument it is
easiest for them to talk what is least to the purpose. These preachers
think their preamble (as we may well term it), to be the most
fashionable, when it is farthest from the subject they propose to treat
of, while each auditor sits and wonders what they drive at, and many
times mutters out the complaint of Virgil:--
_Whither does all this jargon tend?_ In the third place, when they come
to the division of their text, they shall give only a very short touch
at the interpretation of the words, when the fuller explication of their
sense ought to have been their only province. Fourthly, after they are
a little entered, they shall start some theological queries, far enough
off from the matter in hand, and bandy it about pro and con till they
lose it in the heat of scuffle. And here they shall cite their doctors
invincible, subtle, seraphic, cherubic, holy, irrefragable, and such
like great names to confirm their several assertions. Then out they
bring their syllogisms, their majors, their minors, conclusions,
corollaries, suppositions, and distinctions, that will sooner
terrify the congregation into an amazement, than persuade them into
a conviction. Now comes the fifth act, in which they must exert their
utmost skill to come off with applause. Here therefore they fall a
telling some sad lamentable story out of their legend, or some
other fabulous history, and this they descant upon allegorically,
tropologically, and analogically; and so they draw to a conclusion of
their discourse, which is a more brain-sick chimera than ever Horace
could describe in his _De Arte Poetica_, when he began:--
_Humano Capitis &c_. Their praying is altogether as ridiculous as their
preaching; for imagining that in their addresses to heaven they should
set out in a low and tremulous voice, as a token of dread and reverence,
they begin therefore with such a soft whispering as if they were afraid
any one should overhear what they said; but when they are gone a little
way, they clear up their pipes by degrees, and at last bawl out so loud
as if, with Baal's priests, they were resolved to awake a sleeping god;
and then again, being told by rhetoricians that heights and falls, and a
different cadency in pronunciation, is a great advantage to the setting
off any thing that is spoken, they will sometimes as it were mutter
their words inwardly, and then of a sudden hollo them out, and be sure
at last, in such a flat, faltering tone as if their spirits were spent,
and they had run themselves out of breath. Lastly, they have read
that most systems of rhetoric treat of the art of exciting laughter;
therefore for the effecting of this they will sprinkle some jests and
puns that must pass for ingenuity, though they are only the froth and
folly of affectedness. Sometimes they will nibble at the wit of being
satyrical, though their utmost spleen is so toothless, that they suck
rather than bite, tickle rather than scratch or wound: nor do they ever
flatter more than at such times as they pretend to speak with greatest
freedom.
Finally, all their actions are so buffoonish and mimical, that any
would judge they had learned all their tricks of mountebanks and
stage-players, who in action it is true may perhaps outdo them, but
in oratory there is so little odds between both, that it is hard to
determine which seems of longest standing in the schools of eloquence.
Yet these preachers, however ridiculous, meet with such hearers, who
admire them as much as the people of Athens did Demosthenes, or the
citizens of Rome could do Cicero: among which admirers are chiefly
shopkeepers, and women, whose approbation and good opinion they only
court; because the first, if they are humoured, give them some snacks
out of unjust gain; and the last come and ease their grief to them upon
all pinching occasions, especially when their husbands are any ways
cross or unkind.
Thus much I suppose may suffice to make you sensible how much these
cell-hermits and recluses are indebted to my bounty; who when they
tyrannize over the consciences of the deluded laity with fopperies,
juggles, and impostures, yet think themselves as eminently pious as St.
Paul, St. Anthony, or any other of the saints; but these stage-divines,
not less ungrateful dis-owners of their obligations to folly, than they
are impudent pretenders to the profession of piety, I willingly take my
leave of, and pass now to kings, princes, and courtiers, who paying me
a devout acknowledgment, may justly challenge back the respect of being
mentioned and taken notice of by me. And first, had they wisdom enough
to make a true judgment of things, they would find their own condition
to be more despicable and slavish than that of the most menial subjects.
For certainly none can esteem perjury or parricide a cheap purchase
for a crown, if he does but seriously reflect on that weight of cares a
princely diadem is loaded with. He that sits at the helm of government
acts in a public capacity, and so must sacrifice all private interest
to the attainment of the common good; he must himself be conformable to
those laws his prerogative exacts, or else he can expect no obedience
paid them from others; he must have a strict eye over all his inferior
magistrates and officers, or otherwise it is to be doubted they will but
carelessly discharge their respective duties. Every king, within his own
territories, is placed for a shining example as it were in the firmament
of his wide-spread dominions, to prove either a glorious star of benign
influence, if his behaviour be remarkably just and innocent, or else
to impend as a threatening comet, if his blazing power be pestilent and
hurtful. Subjects move in a darker sphere, and so their wanderings and
failings are less discernible; whereas princes, being fixed in a more
exalted orb, and encompassed with a brighter dazzling lustre, their
spots are more apparently visible, and their eclipses, or other defects,
influential on all that is inferior to them. Kings are baited with so
many temptations and opportunities to vice and immorality, such as are
high feeding, liberty, flattery, luxury, and the like, that they must
stand perpetually on their guard, to fence off those assaults that are
always ready to be made upon them. In fine, abating from treachery,
hatred, dangers, fear, and a thousand other mischiefs impending on
crowned heads, however uncontrollable they are this side heaven, yet
after their reign here they must appear before a supremer judge, and
there be called to an exact account for the discharge of that great
stewardship which was committed to their trust If princes did but
seriously consider (and consider they would if they were but wise) these
many hardships of a royal life, they would be so perplexed in the result
of their thoughts thereupon, as scarce to eat or sleep in quiet But now
by my assistance they leave all these cares to the gods, and mind only
their own ease and pleasure, and therefore will admit none to their
attendance but who will divert them with sport and mirth, lest they
should otherwise be seized and damped with the surprisal of sober
thoughts. They think they have sufficiently acquitted themselves in the
duty of governing, if they do but ride constantly a hunting, breed up
good race-horses, sell places and offices to those of the courtiers that
will give most for them, and find out new ways for invading of their
people's property, and hooking in a larger revenue to their own
exchequer; for the procurement whereof they will always have some
pretended claim and title; that though it be manifest extortion, yet
it may bear the show of law and justice: and then they daub over their
oppression with a submissive, flattering carriage, that they may so far
insinuate into the affections of the vulgar, as they may not tumult nor
rebel, but patiently crouch to burdens and exactions. Let us feign now a
person ignorant of the laws and constitutions of that realm he lives in,
an enemy to the public good, studious only for his own private interest,
addicted wholly to pleasures and delights, a hater of learning, a
professed enemy to liberty and truth, careless and unmindful of the
common concerns, taking all the measures of justice and honesty from
the false beam of self-interest and advantage, after this hang about his
neck a gold chain, for an intimation that he ought to have all virtues
linked together; then set a crown of gold and jewels on his head, for
a token that he ought to overtop and outshine others in all commendable
qualifications; next, put into his hand a royal sceptre for a symbol
of justice and integrity; lastly, clothe him with purple, for an
hieroglyphic of a tender love and affection to the commonwealth. If a
prince should look upon this portraiture, and draw a comparison between
that and himself, certainly he would be ashamed of his ensigns of
majesty, and be afraid of being laughed out of them.
[Illustration: His Majesty 302]
Next to kings themselves may come their courtiers, who, though they
are for the most part a base, servile, cringing, low-spirited sort of
flatterers, yet they look big, swell great, and have high thoughts of
their honour and grandeur. Their confidence appears upon all occasions;
yet in this one thing they are very modest, in that they are content to
adorn their bodies with gold, jewels, purple, and other glorious ensigns
of virtue and wisdom, but leave their minds empty and unfraught; and
taking the resemblance of goodness to themselves, turn over the truth
and reality of it to others. They think themselves mighty happy in that
they can call the king master, and be allowed the familiarity of talking
with him; that they can volubly rehearse his several tides of august
highness, supereminent excellence, and most serene majesty, that they
can boldly usher in any discourse, and that they have the complete knack
of insinuation and flattery; for these are the arts that make them truly
genteel and noble. If you make a stricter enquiry after their other
endowments, you shall find them mere sots and dolts. They will sleep
generally till noon, and then their mercenary chaplains shall come to
their bed-side, and entertain them perhaps with a short morning prayer.
As soon as they are drest they must go to breakfast, and when that
is done, immediately to dinner. When the cloth is taken away, then to
cards, dice, tables, or some such like diversion. After this they must
have one or two afternoon banquets, and so in the evening to supper.
When they have supped then begins the game of drinking; the bottles are
marshalled, the glasses ranked, and round go the healths and bumpers
till they are carried to bed. And this is the constant method of passing
away their hours, days, months, years, and ages. I have many times took
great satisfaction by standing in the court, and seeing how the tawdry
butterflies vie upon one another: the ladies shall measure the height of
their humours by the length of their trails, which must be borne up by a
page behind. The nobles justle one another to get nearest to the king's
elbow, and wear gold chains of that weight and bigness as require no
less strength to carry than they do wealth to purchase.
And now for some reflections upon popes, cardinals, and bishops, who in
pomp and splendour have almost equalled if not outgone secular princes.
Now if any one consider that their upper crotchet of white linen is to
signify their unspotted purity and innocence; that their forked mitres,
with both divisions tied together by the same knot, are to denote the
joint knowledge of the Old and New Testament; that their always wearing
gloves, represents their keeping their hands clean and undented from
lucre and covetousness; that the pastoral staff implies the care of
a flock committed to their charge; that the cross carried before them
expresses their victory over all carnal affections; he (I say) that
considers this, and much more of the like nature, must needs conclude
they are entrusted with a very weighty and difficult office. But alas,
they think it sufficient if they can but feed themselves; and as to
their flock, either commend them to the care of Christ himself, or
commit them to the guidance of some inferior vicars and curates; not so
much as remembering what their name of bishop imports, to wit, labour,
pains, and diligence, but by base simoniacal contracts, they are in a
profane sense _Episcopi, i.e_., overseers of their own gain and income.