_Baleus Prolocutor._ If profit may grow, most Christian audience, By knowledge of things which are but transitory, And here for a time, of much more congruence, Advantage might spring, by the search of causes heavenly, As those matters are that the gospel specify. Without whose knowledge no man to the truth can fall, Nor ever attain to the life perpetual, For he that knoweth not the living God eternal The Father, the Son and also the Holy Ghost, And what Christ suffered for redemption of us all, What he commanded, and taught in every coast, And what he forbode, that man must needs be lost, And clean secluded, from the faithful chosen sort, In the Heavens above, to his most high discomfort. You therefore, good friends, I lovingly exhort, To weigh such matters as will be uttered here, Of whom ye may look to have no trifling sport In fantasies feigned, nor such-like gaudy gear, But the things that shall your inward stomach cheer. To rejoice in God for your justification, And alone in Christ to hope for your salvation. Yea first ye shall have the eternal generation Of Christ, like as John in his first chapter write, And consequently of man the first creation The abuse and fall, through his first oversight, And the rise-again through God's high grace and might; By promises first which shall be declared all: Then by his own Son, the worker principal. After that, Adam bewaileth here his fall; God will shew mercy to every generation, And to his kingdom of his great goodness call His elected spouse, or faithful congregation, As shall appear by open protestation, Which from Christ's birth shall to his death conclude: They come, that thereof will shew the certitude. ACT I ADAM THE FIRST MAN