abominable wars—bellaque matribus detestata, [299]where in less than ten years, ten thousand men were consumed, saith Collignius, twenty thousand churches overthrown; nay, the whole kingdom subverted (as [300]Richard Dinoth adds). So many myriads of the commons were butchered up, with sword, famine, war, tanto odio utrinque ut barbari ad abhorrendam lanienam obstupescerent, with such feral hatred, the world was amazed at it: or at our late Pharsalian fields in the time of Henry the Sixth, betwixt the houses of Lancaster and York, a hundred thousand men slain, [301]one writes; [302]another, ten thousand families were rooted out, that no man can but marvel, saith Comineus, at that barbarous immanity, feral madness, committed betwixt men of the same nation, language, and religion. [303]Quis furor, O cives? Why do the Gentiles so furiously rage, saith the Prophet David, Psal. ii. 1. But we may ask, why do the Christians so furiously rage? [304]Arma volunt, quare poscunt, rapiuntque juventus? Unfit for Gentiles, much less for us so to tyrannise, as the Spaniard in the West Indies, that killed up in 42 years (if we may believe [305]Bartholomeus a Casa, their own bishop) 12 millions of men, with stupend and exquisite torments; neither should I lie (said he) if I said 50 millions. I omit those French massacres, Sicilian evensongs, [306]the Duke of Alva's tyrannies, our gunpowder machinations, and that fourth fury, as [307]one calls it, the Spanish inquisition, which quite obscures those ten persecutions, [308]———saevit toto Mars impius orbe. Is not this [309]mundus furiosus, a mad world, as he terms it, insanum bellum? are not these mad men, as [310]Scaliger concludes, qui in praelio acerba morte, insaniae, suae memoriam pro perpetuo teste relinquunt posteritati; which leave so frequent battles, as perpetual memorials of their madness to all succeeding ages? Would this, think you, have enforced our Democritus to laughter, or rather made him turn his tune, alter his tone, and weep with [311]Heraclitus, or rather howl, [312]roar, and tear his hair in commiseration, stand amazed; or as the poets feign, that Niobe was for grief quite stupefied, and turned to a stone? I have not yet said the worst, that which is more absurd and [313]mad, in their tumults, seditions, civil and unjust wars, [314]quod stulte sucipitur, impie geritur, misere finitur. Such wars I mean; for all are not to be condemned, as those fantastical Anabaptists vainly conceive. Our Christian tactics are all out as necessary as the Roman acies, or Grecian phalanx, to be a soldier is a most noble and honourable profession (as the world is), not to be spared, they are our best walls and bulwarks, and I do therefore acknowledge that of [315]Tully to be most true, All our civil affairs, all our studies, all our pleading, industry, and commendation lies under the protection of warlike virtues, and whensoever there is any suspicion of tumult, all