_J. D._ But it is not worthy of my labour, nor any part of my intention, to pursue every shadow of a question which he springeth. It shall suffice to gather a posy of flowers (or rather a bundle of weeds) out of his writings, and present them to the reader, who will easily distinguish them from healthful plants by the rankness of their smell. Such are these which follow. _T. H._ As for the following posy of flowers, there wants no more to make them sweet, than to wipe off the venom blown upon some of them by his Lordship’s breath. _J. D._ 1. _To be delighted in the imagination only of being possessed of another man’s goods, servants, or wife, without any intention to take them from him by force or fraud, is no breach of the law which saith: Thou shalt not covet._ _T. H._ What man was there ever, whose imagination of anything he thought would please him, was not some delight? Or what sin is there, where there is not so much as an intention to do injustice? But his Lordship would not distinguish between delight and purpose, nor between a wish and a will. This was venom. I believe that his Lordship himself, even before he was married, took some delight in the thought of it, and yet the woman then was not his own. All love is delight, but all love is not sin. Without this love of that which is not yet a man’s own, the world had not been peopled. _J. D._ 2. _If a man by the terror of present death be compelled to do a fact against the law, he is totally excused, because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation; nature compelleth him to the fact._ The like doctrine he hath elsewhere. _When the actor doth anything against the law of nature by the command of the author, if he be obliged by former covenants to obey him, not he, but the author breaketh the law of nature._ _T. H._ The second flower is both sweet and wholesome. _J. D._ 3. _It is a doctrine repugnant to civil society, that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin._ _T. H._ It is plain, that to do what a man thinks in his own conscience to be sin, is sin; for it is a contempt of the law itself; and from thence ignorant men, out of an erroneous conscience, disobey the law, which is pernicious to all government. _J. D._ 4. _The kingdom of God is not shut but to them that sin, that is, to them who have not performed due obedience to the laws of God; nor to them, if they believe the necessary articles of the Christian faith._ 5. _We must know that the true acknowledging of sin is repentance itself._ 6. _An opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy; nor the sovereign princes that authorized the same, heretics._ _T. H._ The fourth, fifth, and sixth smell well. But to say, that the sovereign prince in England is a heretic, or that an act of parliament is heretical, stinks abominably; as it was thought _primo Elizabethæ_.