be your last refuge; Nos discessionem a toto mundo facere coacti sumus: "We are compelled to forsake the communion, or to separate from all the churches of the world."

"These," says our author, "she confesses, were but scruples." According to his mannerly way of arguing with the king, I might ask him, "These" what? Does he mean-these scruples were but scruples? for the word these begins a paragraph. But I am ashamed of playing the pedant, as he has done. I suppose he means-these passages of Heylin only raised some scruples in her, which occasioned her to examine the points in difference by: the holy scripture. "And now," says he, "she was in the right way of satisfaction, provided she madeuse of the best helps and means for understanding it, and took in the assistance of her spiritual guides."

That she did take in those guides, is manifest by her own papers, though both of them (the more the pity) did but help to mislead her into the enemy's country; but then, for our comfort, neither of them were church of England men, though they were both bishops, and one of them no less than primate of all England.

And now, for a relishing bit before we rise, he has kept in store for us the four points, which, about the midst of her paper, the Duchess told us she found so easy in the scripture, that she wondered she had been so long without finding them. He will needs fall into dispute with her about them, though he knows beforehand that she will not dispute with him. This is a kind of petition to her, that she will permit him to make that difficult which she found easy; for every thing becomes hard by chopping logic upon it. I am sure enough, that the wall before me is white, and that I can go

to it; but put me once upon unriddling sophisms, I shall not be satisfied of what colour the wall is, nor how it is possible for me to stir from the place in which I am. Alas! if people would be as much in earnest as she was, and read the scriptures with the same disposition, the same unprejudiced sincerity in their hearts, and docility in their understanding, seeking to bend their judgments to what they find, not what they find to their judgments, more, I believe, would find things as easy as she did, and give the answerer more frequent occasion for his derision of a willing mind.

But not to dilate on that matter, I presume he will not pretend, by his disputing, to make any thing plainly appear against her; if he can, let him do it, and end controversy in a moment; for every one can see plain things, and all Christians must be concluded by the scripture. But he knows well enough there is no such thing to be performed. A mist may be raised, and interposed, through which the eye shall not discern what otherwise it would, if nothing but the due medium were betwixt, and the object before it. And that is all the fruit of this sort of disputation, and all the assistance, for which the answerer was so earnest. Upon the whole, his mortal quarrel to the Duchess is, that she would not become an experiment of the perfection to which the art of learned obscurity is improved in this our age; and the honour he has done to the church of England is, that he has used her name to countenance the defamation of a lady. I suspected whither he would bring it, when I saw that honour pretended in the beginning of his pamphlet. If he thinks his bishops have reflected a scandal on his church by their discourses with the Duchess, he ought to have proceeded a more reasonable way than to insinuate, that she forged

them, without proving it. If she had been living, and he had subscribed his name to so infamous a libel, he knows the English of a scandalum magnatum; for an inuendo is considered in that case; and three indirect insinuations will go as far in law towards the giving a downright lie, as three foils will go towards a fall in wrestling.

To conclude: I leave it to the judgment of the impartial reader what occasion our answerer has had for his song of triumph at the end of his scurrilous saucy pamphlet. I have treated him as one single answerer, though, properly speaking, his name is Legion; * but though the body be possessed with many evil spirits, it is but one of them who talks. Let him disguise his defeat by the ringing of his bells it was an old Dutch policy, when the Duke† had beaten them, to make bonfires; for that kept the populace in heart. Our author knows he has all the common people on his side, and they only read the gazettes of their own writers; so that every thing which is called an answer, is with them a confutation, and the Turk and Pope are their sworn enemies, ever since Robin Wisdom was inspired to join them together in a godly ballad. In the mean time, the spirit of meekness and humble

*The church of England Divines made a common cause at this important crisis. Those who directed the warfare, were Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Tennison, and Patrick; and under their banners, Burnet numbers Sherlock, Williams, Claget, Gee, Aldrich, Atterbury, Whitby, Hooper, and Wake. It is probable, that when a piece of such consequence as the Answer to the Royal Papers was to be brought forward, more than one of these would be employed in revising, at least, and correcting it.

wars.

The Duke of York, who commanded the fleet in the Dutch

Robert Wisdom was a fugitive in the reign of Queen Mary; in that of Elizabeth, he became rector of Stysted in Essex, and of Settrington in Yorkshire, and died in 1568. He was a zealous puritan, and the author of a hymn, printed at the end of Stern

charity would become our author better than his boasts for this imaginary victory, or his reflection upon God's anointed; but it is the less to be admired that he is such a stranger to that spirit, because, among all the volumes of divinity written by the Protestants, there is not one original treatise, at least that I have seen or heard of, which has handled distinctly, and by itself, that Christian virtue of humility. *

hold's psalms, which begins with the passage referred to in the

text:

Preserve us, Lord, by thy dear word;
From Turk and Pope defend us, Lord.

The witty Bishop Corbet thus addresses the ghost of Robert Wisdom:

Thou, once a body, now but aire,
Arch-botcher of a psalme or prayer,
From Carfax come;

And patch me up a zealous lay,
With an old ever and for aye,
Or all and some.

Or such a spirit lend mee,

As may a hymne down send mee,
To purge my braine.

So, Robert, look behind thee,

Least Turk or Pope do find thee,

And goe to bed againe.

* This assertion Stillingfleet denied. See the conclusion of his Answer to the Defence, where he affirms “such a book had been lately published in London." To this Dryden replied, that "the magnified piece of Duncombe on this subject, which his opponent must have meant, was stolen, or translated, without acknowledgment, from the Spanish of Rodriguez;" meaning, probably, the Jesuit Alonso Rodriguez, who wrote " Exercio de perfecion y Virtudes Christianas, Sevilla, 1609." But while Dryden claimed for the Catholic church the merit of this work, he seems to have mistaken the name of the translator; for in the preface to the "Town and Country Mouse," Prior, or Montague, upbraid him with having confounded Allen with Duncombe; names which did not so much as rhyme. In a list of books subjoined to "The Practice of a Holy Life, by Thomas Allen, rector of Kettering, in Northamptonshire," I find The Virtue of Humility, recommended to be printed by the late Reverend and Learned Dr Henry Hammond," which may be the book alluded to by Stillingfleet. See Vol. X. pages 114. 249.

66

AN

ANSWER

TO THE

DEFENCE OF THE THIRD PAPER.

I H

HAVE now done as to matter of reason and argument: the third paper chiefly relates to matter of fact; which, if I were mistaken in, even the brisk defender of it doth me that right to say, the bishop of Winchester did mislead me: For " the whole body of my answer," he saith, "is in effect a transcript from the bishop's preface; that I purloin his arguments without altering sometime so much as the property of his words; that I have quoted him five times only in the margin, and ought to have quoted him in almost every leaf of my pamphlet; in short, if the master had not eaten, the man (saving reverence) could not have vomited." This is a taste of

+ Hitherto Stillingfleet had been encountering the person who defended the two papers which were found in the king's strong box, with which part of the controversy Dryden had nothing to do.