thereby to cover a multitude of their errors; yet of this party
there were many that were possessed with a high degree of spiritual
wickedness; I mean with an innate restless pride and malice; I do
not mean the visible carnal sins of gluttony and drunkenness, and
the like,--from which, good Lord, deliver us!--but sins of a higher
nature, because they are more unlike God, who is the God of love, and
mercy, and order, and peace: and more like the Devil, who is not
a glutton, nor can be drunk, and yet is a Devil: but I mean those
spiritual wickednesses of malice and revenge, and an opposition to
government: men that joyed to be the authors of misery, which is
properly his work that is the enemy and disturber of mankind; and
thereby greater sinners than the glutton or drunkard, though some will
not believe it. And of this party there were also many, whom prejudice
and a furious zeal had so blinded, as to make them neither to hear
reason, nor adhere to the ways of peace: men that were the very dregs
and pest of mankind; men whom pride and self-conceit had made to
over-value their own pitiful crooked wisdom so much as not to be
ashamed to hold foolish and unmannerly disputes against those men whom
they ought to reverence, and those laws which they ought to obey; men
that laboured and joyed first to find out the faults, and then speak
evil of Government, and to be the authors of confusion; men whom
company, and conversation, and custom had at last so blinded, and made
so insensible that these were sins, that like those that perished
in the gainsaying of Korah, so these died without repenting of these
spiritual wickednesses; of which the practices of Coppinger and
Hacket[15] in their lives, and the death of them and their adherents,
are, God knows, too sad examples, and ought to be cautions to those
men that are inclined to the like spiritual wickednesses.

[Sidenote: Growth of sedition]