Ib. s. xiv. ib. But the Common Prayer Book had the fate of St. Paul; for when it had scaped the storms of the Roman See, yet a viper sprung out of Queen Mary's fires, &c. As Knox and his friends confined themselves to the inspired word, whether vipers or no, they were not adders at all events. Ib. xxvi. p. 296. For, if we deny to the people a liberty of reading the Scriptures, may they not complain, as Isaac did against the inhabitants of the land, that the Philistines had spoiled his well and the fountains of living water? If a free use to all of them and of all Scriptures were permitted, should not the Church herself have more cause to complain of the infinite licentiousness and looseness of interpretations, and of the commencement of ten thousand errors, which would certainly be consequent to such permission? Reason and religion will chide us in the first, reason and experience in the latter ... The Church with great wisdom hath first held this torch out; and though for great reasons intervening and hindering, it cannot be reduced to practice, yet the Church hath shewn her desire to avoid the evil that is on both hands, and she hath shewn the way also, if it could have been insisted in. If there were not, at the time this Preface, or this paragraph at least, was written or published, some design on foot or 'sub lingua' of making advances to the continental catholicism for the purpose of conciliating the courts of Austria, France and Spain, in favor of the Cavalier and Royalist party at home and abroad, this must be considered as a useless and worse than useless avowal. The Papacy at the height of its influence never asserted a higher or more anti-Protestant right than this of dividing the Scriptures into permitted and forbidden portions. If there be a functionary of divine institution, synodical or unipersonal, who with the name of the 'Church' has the right, under circumstances of its own determination, to forbid all but such and such parts of the Bible, it must possess potentially, and under other circumstances, a right of withdrawing the whole book from the unlearned, who yet cannot be altogether unlearned; for the very prohibition supposes them able to do what, a few centuries before, the majority of the clergy themselves were not qualified to do, that is, read their Bible throughout. Surely it would have been politic in the writer to have left out this sentence, which his Puritan adversaries could not fail to translate into the Church shewing her teeth though she dared not bite. I bitterly regret these passages; neither our incomparable Liturgy, nor this full, masterly, and unanswerable defence of it, requiring them. Ib. s. xlv, p. 308.