malice towards me, to injure the civil power by which you live. If you were not despised, you would in some places and times, where and when the laws are more severely executed, be shipped away for this your madness to America, I would say, to Anticyra. What luck have I, when this, of the laws being the rules of God’s public worship, was by me said and applied to the vindication of the Church of England from the power of the Roman clergy, it should be followed with such a storm from the ministers, presbyterian and episcopal, of the Church of England? Again, for those other points, namely, that I approve not of incorporeal bodies, nor of other immortality of the soul, than that which the Scripture calleth eternal life, I do but as the Scripture leads me. To the texts whereof by me alleged, you should either have answered, or else forborne to revile me for the conclusions I derived from them. Lastly, what an absurd question is it to ask me whether it be in the power of the magistrate, whether the world be eternal or not? It were fit you knew it is in the power of the supreme magistrate to make a law for the punishment of them that shall pronounce publicly of that question anything contrary to that which the law hath once pronounced. The truth is, you are content that the papal power be cut off, and declaimed against as much as any man will; but the ecclesiastical power, which of late was aimed at by the clergy here, being a part thereof, every violence done to the papal power is sensible to them yet; like that which I have heard say of a man, whose leg being cut off for the prevention of a gangrene that began in his toe, would nevertheless complain of a pain in his toe, when his leg was cut off. Thus much in my defence; which I believe if you had foreseen, this accusation of yours had been left out. I come now to examine (though it be done in part already) what manners those are which I find everywhere in your writings.