XLVI. AS IT WAS.

SOME alive will be deposed for the truth of this strange accident, though I forbear the naming of place or persons.

A careless maid, which attended a gentleman’s child, fell asleep whilst the rest of the family were at church; an ape, taking the child out of the cradle, carried it to the roof of the house, and there (according to his rude manner) fell a dancing and dandling thereof, down head, up heels, as it happened.

The father of the child, returning with his family from the church, commented with his own eyes on his child’s sad condition. Bemoan he might, help it he could not. Dangerous to shoot the ape where the bullet might hit the babe; all fall to their prayers as their last and best refuge, that the innocent child (whose precipice they suspected) might be preserved.

But when the ape was well wearied with its own activity, he fairly went down, and formally laid the child where he found it, in the cradle.

Fanatics have pleased their fancies these late years with turning and tossing and tumbling of religion, upward and downward, and backward and forward; they have cast and contrived it into a hundred antic postures of their own imagining. However, it is now to be hoped, that, after they have tired themselves out with doing of nothing, but only trying and tampering this and that way to no purpose, they may at last return, and leave religion in the same condition wherein they found it.