shall acknowledge to you that such comedies and tragedies as these may be serviceable; but then for shame abuse not the name of Jesus Christ so impudently as to call yourselves Christians, whose lusts are so strong, that you are forced to use the low shifts of heathens to repel them: to leave their evils not for the love of virtue, but out of fear, shame, or reputation. Is this your love to Jesus, your reverence to the Scriptures, that through faith are able to make the man of God perfect? Is all your prattle about ordinances, prayers, sacraments, Christianity, and the like, come to this; that at last you must betake yourselves to such instructors as were by the sober heathens permitted to reclaim the most vicious of the people that were amongst them? And such remedies too as below which there is nothing but corporal punishment? VIII. This is so far from Christianity, that many of the nobler heathens, men and women, were better taught, and better disposed; they found out more heavenly contemplations, and subjects of an eternal nature to meditate upon. Nay, so far did they outstrip the Christians of these times, that they not only were exemplary by their grave and sober conversation; but for their public benefit the Athenians instituted the Gynæcosmi, or twenty men, who should make it their business to observe the people's apparel and behaviour; that if any were found immodest, and to demean themselves loosely, they had full authority to punish them. But the case is altered; it is punishable to reprove such: yes, it is matter of the greatest contumely and reproach. Nay, so impudent are some grown in their impieties, that they sport themselves with such religious persons: and not only manifest a great neglect of piety, and a severe life by their own looseness, but their extreme contempt of it, by rendering it ridiculous, through comical and abusive jests on public stages. Which, how dangerous it is, and apt to make religion little worth in the people's eyes, besides the demonstration of this age, let us remember that Aristophanes had not a readier way to bring the reputation of Socrates in question with the people, who greatly reverenced him for his grave and virtuous life and doctrine, than by his abusive representations of him in a play: which made the airy, wanton, unstable crowd, rather part with Socrates in earnest, than Socrates in jest. Nor can a better reason be given why the poor Quakers are made so much the scorn of men, than because of their severe reprehensions of sin and vanity, and their self-denying conversation, amidst so great intemperance in all worldly satisfactions: yet can such libertines all this while strut and swell for Christians, and strut it out against precept and example; but we must be whimsical, conceited, morose, melancholy, or else heretics, deceivers, and what not? O blindness! Pharisaical hypocrisy! As if such were fit to be judges of religion; or that it were possible for them to have a sight and sense of