As for calumnies against the persons and actions of those that are assertors of truth, it is well known for an old threadbare design, by which Satan hath gained not a little. Machiavel borrowed the policy from him, and formed it into a maxim; for he found by experience that where strong slanders had set in their teeth, though never so unjustly, the wounds were never thoroughly healed; for some that heard the report of the slander never heard the vindication, and those that did were not always so unprejudiced as to free themselves from all suspicion, but still something remained usually upon their spirits for ever after; and that, like a secret venom, poisons all that could be said or done by the persons that wrongfully fell under their prejudice, and did not a little derogate from the authority and power of the truths which they delivered. The friends of truth have always to their cost found it so. Christ himself escaped not the lies and censures of men when he did the greatest miracles; they raised this calumny against him, that ‘he cast out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils,’ John viii. 48. When he shewed the most compassionate condescensions, they called him ‘a man gluttonous, a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners;’ and at last, upon a misinterpretation of his speeches, ‘I will destroy this temple, and in three days I will build it up,’ Mat. xxvi. 61, they arraigned and condemned him for blasphemy; and his servants have, according to what he foretold, drunk of the same cup: the more eminent in service the greater draught. Paul, a chosen vessel, met with much of this unjust dealing: he was accused, Acts xxi. 28, as speaking against the people, the law, and the temple, and, chap. xxiv. 5, called ‘a pestilent fellow, a mover of sedition, a profaner of the temple.’ Neither can we wonder at this, that the greatest innocency or highest degree of holiness is no armour or proof against the sharp arrows of a lying tongue; when we read this as one of Satan’s great characters, that he is ‘the accuser of the brethren,’ and that his agents are so perfectly instructed in this art that they are also branded with the same mark of ‘false accusers,’ Jude 10. It is well known how the primitive Christians were used: they were accounted ‘the filth and offscouring of all things;’ there could be nothing that could render them odious or ridiculous but they were aspersed with it; as that they ‘sacrificed infants, worshipped the sun, and used promiscuous uncleanness;’ nay, whatever plague or disaster befell their neighbours, they were sure to carry the blame. And we might trace this stratagem down to our own days. Luther in his time was the common butt for all the poisoned arrows of the papists’ calumny; which so exceeded all bounds of sobriety and prudence that they devised a romance of his death, how he was choked of the devil; that before he died he desired his corpse might be carried into the church and adored with divine