I see not what one thing there is of so many as are to be found in the whole world, wherein there is need of a greater courage than to treat of committing treason against a king, and to know that he knows it well, and yet never to go out of his presence. For howsoever it be very true that we are always in the presence of God; yet methinks that they who converse with him in prayer are in his presence after a more particular manner; for they are seeing then that he sees them; whereas others may, perhaps, remain some days in his presence, yet without remembering that he looks upon them.

1. A woman;

1. Of rank, and reared delicately;

1. A Spanish lady;

1. With very pious parents and sisters;

1. Accustomed in early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the Moors;

1. In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superstitious Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to herself.

1. Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates style—and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love;

1. A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and deliquia:

1. Frightened at her Uncle's, by reading to him Dante's books of Hell and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory— and that purgatory here was a cheap expiation for Hell for ever;

1. Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame, often pleasurable approaches to deliquium for divine raptures; and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain?

Here I must add a passage, concerning which I am in doubt whether it reflected more on the sincerity, or on the understanding of the English Ambassador. The breach between the Pope and the Republic was brought very near a crisis, &c.

It is true he never returned and changed his religion himself, but his son came from Spain into Ireland, when Bedell was promoted to the Bishopric of Kilmore there, and told him, that his father commanded him to thank him for the pains he was at in writing it. He said, it was almost always lying open before him, and that he had heard him say, "He was resolved to save one." And it seems he instructed his son in the true religion, for he declared himself a Protestant on his coming over.

Yea, will some man say, "But that which marreth all is the opinion of merit and satisfaction." Indeed that is the School doctrine, but the conscience enlightened to know itself, will easily act that part of the Publican, who smote his breast, and said, God be merciful to me a sinner.

And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false and will-worship of the true God, and rather commended as profitable than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any thing necessary to salvation.

I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:—whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained.

But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame.

1. I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might scape.

1. I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears, &c.

1. To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men's orchards, and stolen their fruit, when I had enough at home, &c.

And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could. * * * It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. * * * And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way. But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest: and there had my labour and delight.

In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with such doubts as I was conscious of.

The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all things.

Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity, is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.

All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.

And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of God.

Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to be willing to. And these said, when you have displeased and provoked him to the utmost, he will be your King still. * * * The more you offend him, the less you can trust him; and when mutual confidence is gone, a war is beginning. * * * And if you conquer him, what the better are you? He will still be King. You can but force him to an agreement; and how quickly will he have power and advantage to violate that which he is forced to, and to be avenged on you all for the displeasure you have done him! He is ignorant of the advantages of a King that cannot foresee this.

And though Parliaments may draw up Bills for repealing laws, yet hath the King his negative voice, and without his consent they cannot do it; which though they acknowledge, yet did they too easily admit of petitions against the Episcopacy and Liturgy, and connived at all the clamors and papers which were against them.

Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing of the dioceses to a narrower compass, or the setting up of a subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently.

But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself in danger, or their grandeur and riches at least, most of them turned against the Parliament.

They said to this;—that as all the courts of justice do execute their sentences in the King's name, and this by his own law, and therefore by his authority, so much more might his Parliament do.

And that the authority and person of the King were inviolable, out of the reach of just accusation, judgment, or execution by law; as having no superior, and so no judge.

For if once legislation, the chief act of government, be denied to any part of government at all, and affirmed to belong to the people as such, who are no governors, all government will hereby be overthrown.