XXIX. WOLF IN A LAMB’S SKIN.

BUT where is the Papist all this while? One may make hue and cry after him. He can as soon not be, as not be active. Alas! with the maid in the Gospel, he is not dead, but sleepeth; or rather, he sleepeth not, but only shutteth his eyes in dog-sleep, and doth awake 216when he seeth his advantage, and snappeth up many a lamb out of our flocks.

Where is the Papist? do any say? Yea, where is he not? They multiply as maggots in May, and act in and under the fanatics. What is faced with faction is lined with Popery; Faux’s dark lantern, by a strange inversion, is under our new lights.

Quakers of themselves are a company of dull, blunt, silly souls. But they go down to the Romish Philistines, and from them they whet all the edge-tools of their arguments: a formal syllogism in the mouth of an Anabaptist is plain Jesuitical equivocation.

Meantime we Protestant ministers fish all night and catch nothing; yea, lose many, who in these times fall from our Church as leaves in autumn. God in his due time send us a seasonable spring, that we may repair our losses again.