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THE FIRST DEFENCE 29
fast and loose, and—I had almost said—to betray the church,
whose most holy ordinances you seem to have defended with
so much noise for the very purpose of ridiculing and overturning
them with all the deeper ignominy whenever you
5 thought convenient?
Everybody knows that when the Houses of Parliament,
ardently desiring to reform our church after the pattern of
the rest of the churches, had resolved to abolish episcopacy,
first the King vetoed the measure, and next, chiefly for that
10 reason, made war upon us—which at last proved his own
undoing. Go now and brag that you defend a king, you, who,
to do it to the hilt, now openly betray and attack what you
were the very one to support—the cause of the church—and
should undergo her heaviest reprimand.
15 To come back, however, to the constitution of the English
Commonwealth. Forasmuch as you, a tuppenny-thrippenny
outlandish pedant, neglect those desks and portfolios of yours,
stuffed as they are with trumpery that you would do better to
put in order,—since you, I say, choose instead to play the
20 hateful busybody in the public affairs of a nation not your
own,—I give you, then, or, preferably some wiser man than
you, this short answer. Our constitution is what the dissensions
of our time will permit: not such as were to be desired,
but such as the persistent strife of wicked citizens will surfer
25 it to be. But any state soever which in the throes of partisan
strife takes up arms for safety, surely does full justice if it
maintains relations with its sound and uncontaminated part
alone, and expels or removes the rest, whether populace or