Is one in whom good women suffer, and have their truth misinterpreted by
her folly. She is one, she knows not what herself if you ask her, but
she is indeed one that has taken a toy at the fashion of religion, and
is enamoured of the new fangle. She is a nonconformist in a close
stomacher and ruff of Geneva print, [55] and her purity consists much in
her linen. 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 than
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 Delilah; 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 Turk's. 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 couple at these meetings, for they never fail.
Her conscience is like others' lust, never satisfied, and you might
better answer Scotus than her scruples. She is one that thinks she
performs all her duties to God in hearing, and shows the fruits of it in
talking. She is more fiery against the maypole than her husband, and
thinks she might do a Phineas' act to break the pate of the fiddler. She
is an everlasting argument, but I am weary of her.