SHOWING THE WEAKNESS OF SOME PRETENCES WHICH OUR OPPOSITES USE FOR HOLIDAYS. _Sect._ 1. Since it hath been evinced by unanswerable reasons that holidays, as now urged upon us, take away our Christian liberty, I will now pull off them the coat of some fig leaves wherewith they are trimmed up. And first, I hope it will appear to how small purpose Dr Davenant would conciliate his reader’s mind(204) to allow of the church’s ordinances about holidays (peradventure because he saw all that he had said of that purpose to be too invalid proof), by six cautions, whereby all superstition and abuse which may ensue upon them may be shunned. For whatsoever doth manifestly endanger men’s souls, being a thing not necessary in itself, at which they take occasion of superstitious abuse, should rather be removed altogether out of the way, than be set about with a weak and easily-penetrable hedge of some equivocative cautions, which the ruder sort do always, and the learned do too oft, either not understand or not remember. Now, Bishop Lindsey confesseth,(205) and puts it out of all doubt, that when the set times of these solemnities return, superstitious conceits are most pregnant in the heads of people; therefore it must be the safest course to banish those days out of the church, since there is so great hazard, and no necessity, of retaining them. What they can allege for holidays, from our duty to remember the inestimable benefits of our redemption, and to praise God for the same, hath been already answered.(206) And as touching any expediency which they imagine in holidays, we shall see to that afterward.(207)