The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His TimeMasson, David
Religion
The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time
Masson, David
Milton, John, 1608-1674; Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
A well-known personage in London, of humbler pretensions than Featley,
was a certain EPHRAIM PAGET (or PAGIT), commonly called "Old Father
Ephraim," who had been parson of the church of St. Edmund in Lombard
Street since 1601, and might therefore have seen, and been seen by,
Shakespeare. Besides other trifles, he had published, in 1635, a book
called "_Christianographia_" or a descriptive enumeration of the
various sorts of Christians in the world out of the pale of the Roman
Catholic Church. Perhaps because he had thus acquired a fondness for the
statistics of religious denominations, it occurred to him to write, by
way of sequel, a "_Heresiography; or, A Description of the Hereticks
and Sectaries of these latter times_." It was published in 1645, soon
after Featley's book, from which it borrows hints and phrases. There is
an Epistle Dedicatory to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of
London, very senile in its syntax and punctuation, and containing this
touching appeal: "I have lived among you almost a jubilee, and seen your
great care and provision to keep the city free from infection, in the
shutting up the sick and in carrying them to your pest-houses, in setting
warders to keep the whole from the sick, in making of fires and perfuming
the streets, in resorting to your churches, in pouring out your prayers
to Almighty God, with fasting and alms, to be propitious to you. The
plague of Heresy is greater, and you are now in more danger than when you
buried five thousand a week." Then, after an Epistle to the Reader,
signed "Old Ephraim Pagit," there follows the body of the treatise in
about 160 pages. The Anabaptists are taken first, and occupy 55 pages;
but a great many other sects are subsequently described, some in a few
pages, some in a single paragraph. There is an engraved title-page to the
volume, containing small caricatures of six of the chief sorts of
Sectaries--Anabaptism being represented by one plump naked fellow dipping
another, much plumper, who is reluctantly stooping down on all fours. The
book, like Featley's, seems to have sold rapidly. In the third edition of
it, however, published in 1646, there is a postscript in which the poor
old man tells us that it had cost him much trouble. The sectaries among
his own parishioners had quarrelled with him on account of it, and
refused to pay him his tithes; nay, as he walked in the streets, he was
hooted at and reviled, and somebody had actually affirmed "Doctor
Featley's devil to be transmigrated into Old Ephraim Paget." This seems
to have cut him to the quick, though he avows his sense of inferiority in
learning to the great Doctor. In short, we can see Father Ephraim as a
good old silly body, of whom people made fun. [Footnote: Wood's Athenæ,
III. 210 _et seq._; and Paget's own treatise.]
Another writer against the Sectaries was the inexhaustible WILLIAM
PRYNNE,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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