condemned.


1. Such facetiousness is not absolutely unreasonable or unlawful,
which ministereth harmless divertisement, and delight to
conversation (harmless, I say, that is, not entrenching upon piety,
not infringing charity or justice, not disturbing peace). For
Christianity is not so tetrical, so harsh, so envious, as to bar us
continually from innocent, much less from wholesome and useful
pleasure, such as human life doth need or require. And if jocular
discourse may serve to good purposes of this kind; if it may be apt
to raise our drooping spirits, to allay our irksome cares, to whet
our blunted industry, to recreate our minds being tired and cloyed
with graver occupations; if it may breed alacrity, or maintain good
humour among us; if it may conduce to sweeten conversation and
endear society; then is it not inconvenient, or unprofitable. If
for those ends we may use other recreations, employing on them our
ears and eyes, our hands and feet, our other instruments of sense
and motion, why may we not as well to them accommodate our organs of
speech and interior sense? Why should those games which excite our
wits and fancies be less reasonable than those whereby our grosser
parts and faculties are exercised? Yea, why are not those more
reasonable, since they are performed in a manly way, and have in
them a smack of reason; feeling also they may be so managed, as not
only to divert and please, but to improve and profit the mind,
rousing and quickening it, yea sometimes enlightening and
instructing it, by good sense conveyed in jocular expression?

It would surely be hard that we should be tied ever to knit the
brow, and squeeze the brain (to be always sadly dumpish, or