again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you then
must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and
tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts
are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and
expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your own
virtue propagated in us; ye cannot suppress that, unless ye reinforce an
abrogated and merciless law, that fathers may dispatch at will their own
children. And who shall then stick closest to ye, and excite others?
not he who takes up arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of
Danegelt. Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet
love my peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful and so
unequal to suppress opinions for the newness or the unsuitableness to
a customary acceptance, will not be my task to say. I only shall repeat
what I have learned from one of your own honourable number, a right
noble and pious lord, who, had he not sacrificed his life and fortunes
to the Church and Commonwealth, we had not now missed and bewailed a
worthy and undoubted patron of this argument. Ye know him, I am sure;
yet I for honour's sake, and may it be eternal to him, shall name him,
the Lord Brook. He writing of episcopacy, and by the way treating of
sects and schisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of his
dying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regard with
ye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next to his last
testament, who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples, I cannot
call to mind where I have read or heard words more mild and peaceful. He
there exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, however
they be miscalled, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God's
ordinances, as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, and