men to whom the name of Saints is due and under a pretence of zeal and conscience have made bold to murder Kings and fire Kingdoms And possibly I shall not much mistake if I say that the world is beholden to the notorious hypocrisie of these zelots for very much of that Atheism under which it now groans Men apt to consider so little as you are and not able or else unwilling to see their own faces in these men hid under masks on which something is drawn resembling ours are ready enough to conclude that we shall not dare to disown them aud that all who have a real zeal for the Christian Faith are either as blind or hypocritical as they But good Sir I beseech you know that we are bold enough to pronounce both them and you to be dangerous enemies no less to State than Church as their zeal is only a disguise and trick to pass on undiscovered to their designed villanies so your open defiance to all religion and profession to seek your own pleasure in all things makes us more than suspect that your interest or lust shall at any time take place with you before your King or Countrey What confidence can your Prince have of your Loyalty farther than he shall be pleased to tolerate your vanities or you please to do him the favour to call him Soveraign Whatever obedience you yield unto him he must thank you for it as a courtesie but must not claim it as a duty It is clear as the noon-day's Sun that so long as you fear nothing in another world and thereupon resolve to gratifie your humour whilest you live in this you need not run to the Pope's universal power nor the Sectarie's blind zeal for a dispensation to turn rebel your own pleasure or your profit or any thing else you can esteem a part of your earthly happiness or which can court your humour can make all despensations to do mischief needless Yet still are you angry because we will not call our selves fools for believing that our Souls are something and that they shall not vanish into aire or nothing when we die and why because forsooth we cannot know it and all is still no more but Faith 'T is true the things we do believe are things unseen neither can sense or common reason assure us of the truth of those things which we believe shall be hereafter And yet it is no less true that neither of these can enable you to prove our Faith absurd Nay were you but half so much the masters of reason as you would have us think that very reason would assure you that our Faith is reasonable and your opinions fanciful and that we have much more cause to pity your folly whilest we can truly say your wicked and dangerous courses are all built upon an unreasonable fancy than you can have to laugh at us because our honest and conscientious lives are grounded as you suppose upon an uncertain Faith For let our Faith be certain or uncertain you must needs confess it very serviceable to the world it doth much good and hurt it can do none But your opinions be they true or false are so far from any possibility of producing the least good effect that they cannot chuse but be the parents of innumerable mischiefs Some of you indeed have been so rash as to affirm That religion hath been the cause of all the Wars which have disturbed the world with so impotent an eagerness of mind are you wont to declaim against what you do not love that you can regard neither truth nor modesty in those affected heats I will again confess unto you that some religions have been the cause of many wars but the true Christian religion of none and though it be most true that even the Christian Faith hath been the subject of very hot disputes lamentable divisions and most bloudy wars yet he that shall call it the cause of any of these shall only thereby bewray his malice or his ignorance in imputing that to the Christian Faith which is imputable only either to the hatred of its enemies or the errors imperfections and hypocrisies of its professors and always either to the want or too weak measure of it He that reads the Histories of all ages he that hath any insight into the Cabals and mysteries of States he that understands the rules that Christ hath left us cannot chuse but see that most of these evils do clearly spring from the ambition discontent and wantonness of men not truly Christian that punctilio's of honour priviledge and worldy interest kindle those fires which consume our peace and quiet yea he that is half blind may see that those very wars which have been managed with a pretence to Christian zeal have come from the same forementioned fountains and that religion hath only been made a cloak shamefully abused to cover most irreligious designs and actions For if the Faith we profess bind us to nothing more than peace and love and so severely prohibit all self-seeking malice and revenge that it commands us upon penalty of losing all we hope for and suffering all we can fear in another world to deny our selves and love our enemies and bear the cross with patience to return blessing for cursing and good for evil who sees not that the world is made miserable not by the multitude of those who sincerely profess the Christian Faith but because so few do yet imbrace it and so many of those who in shew only and for some secular advantage make profession of it are indeed and truth such as you are Shew me a rebel shew me an oppressor shew me a factious and seditious zelot in a word shew me the man that wittingly and willingly offers the least injury to his neighbour let him preach and pray yea let him wear for fashions-sake all the faces and formalities of religion I will be bold to return him to you again for none of ours and prove to his face and yours that he had never any more to do than you have with the Christian Faith that is to dishonour and blaspheme it and give occasion to unconsidering men to talk unreasonably of things they will not understand But yet our folly say you is most apparent for we pretend unto a certainty of Faith which you think it is impossible for any man to have But stay Sir our folly is not yet so evident as you would have it Such a certainty of Faith your selves I doubt not will be ready enough to grant in some cases as may make it very reasonable for you to acquiesce therein and not interrupt the satisfaction which you thence receive by any farther disputation or doubt Should any of us be so unmannerly as to call you fool because you do believe you are no bastard nay because you do not doubt but you were born of a woman and give you this reason for it that you rest content with a certainty
THE VANITY of SCOFFING OR A LETTER TO A WITTY GENTLEMAN Evidently Shewing THE Great Weakness and Vnreasonableness of Scoffing at the Christian's Faith on account of its supposed uncertainty Together with The Madness of the Scoffer's unchristian Choice 2 Pet. III. 3. There shall come in the last days Scoffers walking after their own lusts Deut. XXXII 29. O that they were wise that they understood this that they would consider their latter end LONDON Printed for R. Royston Bookseller to his most Sacred Majesty at the Angel in Amen-Corner 1674. THE VANITY of SCOFFING A LETTER Sir I AM most heartily sorry not for my own sake but your's that any thing from you should create me a trouble of this nature That a person honourably descended of noble and Christian Parents solemnly dedicated at his first appearance in the World to the service of our blessed Iesus adorned richly with the most excellent natural indowments wanting no help to nature which an ingenuous and religious education could administer plentifully enjoying all the opportunities of knowing and all the incouragements to do whatever is truly vertuous and noble things acceptable to God and beneficial to the world that a person so every way accomplished as you are should now begin to entertain with pleasure thoughts bordering upon Atheism and give your self up to a course of life so far unworthy of him that bears the name of Christian that it makes it a flattery to call you a Man is I must needs say so great an astonishment to me that I can hardly believe that this Letter which I am now writing to you can any way concern you Yet some ill-sounding words which with no small grief I heard from you in the last discourse we had together have been so great a disturbance to my mind ever since that I could not possibly give my self any rest till I set pen to paper that I might contribute something though it be but a very little in respect of what others out of their greater stock of reason I will not say of charity would have done towards the shaking off your hasty and dangerous resolutions and blunting the edge of that Scoffing wit which incourageth you to hope for so easie a victory over the Faith of us despised Christians but will certainly at last if not timely wrested from you by the charity of some of those whom you most hate wound your self to the very heart I will not beg your pardon either for this my so confident assertion or for presuming to interrupt your secure slumbers and pleasing dreams with this paper You know my Faith and that I think I have as good assurance of the truths I believe as the most conceited Philosopher of you all thinks he hath of any conclusion grounded on the common principles of natural reason or his so much magnified evidence of sense And you either know as well or I wish you did that we poor silly Christians are taught to love most heartily even you who most despise us and especially that part of you which you seem least to know and therefore cannot love your Soul This invites us to repay your scorn with pity and rather than not attempt to do you good for the evil we receive at your hands run the hazard of being yet more hated by you But yet far more than this the zeal we have for those divine and only beauties we admire I mean those sacred truths which you deride but we believe and own our selves obliged to vindicate with all the skill we have constrains us to be thus importunate though we should be sure thereby to lose not your favour only but even whatsoever in this world we can think most dear unto us With this resolution of contemning all your ready censures of bold troublesome and unmannerly if not fool and knave to boot wherewith you have learn'd to reward the charity of those who seek to do you good I now lay before you my thoughts of what you were pleased to utter in my hearing This Sir as near as I remember it was your language Christians are fools to deny themselves the pleasures of this world in hopes of I know not what in a world to come 'T is good to make much of our selves here for we know not what shall be hereafter I could never yet meet with any man that could bring us any certain tidings from that other world you talk of Who can tell us what shall become of us when we die Why should man be so proud as to hope for an Heaven more than other creatures It is a mere madness to deny our selves the things which delight us and which now we may injoy for the sake of that which is uncertain and which we do not know that any man ever did or shall injoy For my own part I am resolved to live here as long as I can and as merrily as I can and let those fools that dance after the pipe of a company of cheating Priests please themselves with the fond hopes of a new life and a Heaven after they are dead These Sir as I well remember and many others much a-kin to these were your expressions I willingly omit your many and various Oaths the usual graces and ornaments and indeed the only proofs you have of such wild discourses I must confess I could not have believed it if my own ears had not heard it that such words as these could have been wrested from you how great then was my wonder to hear them flow so freely from your mouth as thereby to evidence themselves to come from the great abundance of your heart Good God! Is it possible that a man and one that pretends to be the master of all wit and reason should so easily and with such complacency degrade himself into a beast and even pride himself in being the Author of such conceits as if they have any real truth in them must needs make him of no more worth than the horse he rides upon If you can think so meanly of your self I beseech you henceforward walk on foot and make not the poor dumb creature which by submitting himself so gently to a load that he could as easily throw off and trample under foot seems to know you much better than you are willing to know your self to feel so oft your whip and spur What right have you to rule him more than he hath to govern you if you must both perish alike If you should say that you have reason and he hath none I make no doubt but some of your companions will be ready enough to tell you that you know that no more than you do whether you have an immortal Soul or he have none Indeed you can speak and he cannot and so have you one priviledge more than he hath to abuse your tongue to your own ruine It is not my present purpose to shape an answer to all your questions or resolve all your doubts as these would
cost me more pains than I am now at leisure to bestow upon them so would it be a work of little use to you till you be better prepared to receive it Till that malignant and heaving humour of pride and self-conceit be a little corrected your stomach will be ever boiling with disdain and beloh forth reproach and scorn on every thing that goes against it your palate will remain too bitter to taste the sweetness of the truths commended to you and your brain too much intoxicated and giddy to fix on the study and meditation of things which call for seriousness My present business is to try if I can possibly administer something whereby that humour may be made less predominant and your reason set a little more at liberty then may you perhaps be content to think that some body else besides your self may be able to speak sence and say something that may deserve the consideration of him who calls himself a wit This I shall hope in some measure to effect if I can prevail with you to read over this Letter with patience and therein the weakness of your own reasonings the folly and dangers of your ill grounded resolutions and in both the unreasonableness of your crowing over the simplicity of us Christians That you may be better able to discover the pitiful weakness of your reasonings and how whilest you labour to make us Christians seem fools you unawares argue your selves into mere brutes have but as much patience to read your own words from my pen as you expressed delight and pleasure in uttering them with your own tongue and it may be that the same things which you then thought witty when they proceeded immediately from your own dear self you may now think very foolish and ridiculous when they are though most faithfully represented to you by another Your words I have already set down but to make them look a little more with the faces of arguments and to let you see with what art and strength you reason I will once more give you them as had we been in dispute when you spake them I suppose I should have heard them from your self Christians deny themselves the pleasures of this world you mean they dare not commit all sin with greediness in hopes of an uncertain happiness in a world to come therefore Christians are very fools We know not what shall be hereafter therefore It is good to make much of our selves that is to live as we list and pamper up our lusts whilest we are here We could never yet receive any certain tidings out of that other world which Christians talk of therefore they are fools for believing there is any such thing None can tell what shall become of us when we die therefore it is folly to live as if we expected a life to come Man hath no more assurance of an Heaven than other creatures therefore it is pride only that makes him hope for Heaven All these things which Christians hope to enjoy after death are ancertain therefore it is prudence to live as long and as merrily that is loosely and lasciviously as we can in this world Now Sir do you not think you have cause enough to clap your wings and crow over us poor vanquished Christians Who is able to stand before all this mighty strength How can we chuse but confess we have been fools all this while and miserably bewitched into vain hopes by the charming voices of a company of crafty Priests and fall down and embrace the feet of you our deliverers out of this slavery But alas we must yet be fools still for all this so blind are we that we cannot see the way that you have made us to escape and what 's more than all we are so much in love with our present thraldome that we prize it above that noble freedom which you would make us In good earnest Sir If we be certain as we think we are of all those things whereof you would make us to doubt I dare say you will pronounce us in a much better condition than your selves can ever hope to be till you become such fools as we are And if we can have no certainty of them as you say and I am willing at this time for your sake to suppose then both you and we must remain uncertain still and who hath made the wisest choice can then only if you say true be determined when this life is at an end Wit changeth fashions almost as oft as cloaths and one main strain of that wit which is now most modish is with shameless impudence and in bluntest terms to declaim against those things as idle dreams and lying fables which all the world hath hitherto received as the most undoubted truths Men cannot now seem witty to themselves till they have pronounced all fools that were before them To say as much without all proof as patience of being contradicted tha the Prophet is a fool and the Spiritual man is mad and none so great a fool as he who told us so long ago that the fool hath said in his heart there is no God this is wit I do not envy the men who think it so and use it that great applause they hereby gain amongst such as had rather lose an Heaven than live soberly but I much pity the weakness of the men of this age who rather chuse to venture their whole happiness in imitation of their vices than provide for their own safety by examining their dictates The bravery of such men is to set their faces against the Heavens and bid defiance to him that made them and lest the world become so wise as to taunt them with the Proverb None so bold as blind Bayard they are resolved to teach it if they can to believe blindly what themselves cannot believe that there is no God no Heaven no Hell no life after death no Soul to be saved or damned neither punishment nor reward to be expected in a future world Now if any man may be so unmannerly as to require some proof of all this some probable reasons at least why he should believe things so repugnant to the common opinions of the world they will swear it stoutly swagger it out bravely call all men fools talk all hear nothing scrible something ask questions propound some possibilities and when this is done and some Satyrical strains of wit to close all lavished out on those who dare believe the things which these men are most afraid of if we will calmly stand like tame fools to their verdict we must all turn Atheists and Epicures but if any of us poor credulous fools have yet so much courage left us as not to be jeared and Hector'd not to be scar'd out of all our wits at once with this uncouth noise nor affrighted out of our old Faith with some dazling flashes of this new-fashioned wit and a thunder-clap of oaths in the rear thereof if we shall yet
rate you think you say that for which the world is bound to return you many thanks and our Churches will now be soon emptied to fill the Tavern and the Alehouse and the jugling Priests be forced either to starve or stand to your courtesie whether they shall be entertain'd at your doors with a hard crust or a harder cudgel But be not angry I beseech you if I be bold to tell you that if these be your thoughts you flatter your self too much and may possibly stay as long for thanks from men that can consider what they do as you would make the poor Priests you so freely abuse stand for an alms at your gates They who rightly understand the meaning of your words and have so much wit as to think on any thing beyond their present lusts would hardly be perswaded to think any thing save that Hell which you deny more dreadful than that other Hell which this your wild inference if once generally assented to would make upon Earth Nay I dare say that could you win all men to be of the same mind of which you at present seem to be your self would be the first that would begin to contradict your self and be ready to cut your own throat to be revenged on your rashness in teaching men this mad lesson Suppose that every Prince should bring his Subjects every Lord his Tenants every Father his Children and every Master his Servants first to be of this opinion that nothing remains either to be feared or hoped for after death and that they should next from this opinion take up the same resolution to live as they list and enjoy their pleasure without all check of conscience I am very confident that if the Subjects should take arms to redeem their liberty the Tenant keep back his rent and not own his Landlord Children deny obedience to their Parents and Servants refuse to labour for their Masters those very same persons who first unadvisedly put this dangerous fancy into their heads would rather work all means to have those heads taken off from their shoulders than it should continue any longer there How unreasonable a thing is it then in you to triumph in derision over the Faith of Christians which you cannot but confess is the main buttress that upholds your own best beloved interests when should this your darling humour on which you now most blindly dote as much bewitch your inferiors as it hath done your selves it would at once make havock of your estates and honours and force you to do penance for your follies in sackcloth and ashes Can you yet hug your selves in your licentious thoughts and dream that wise men will admire and magnifie your wit Though most men do indeed express too great a fondness for their liberty yet I dare say a very few would be content to enjoy it upon those terms as you do promise it Most men do dread the effects of libertinism and licentiousness no less than they love the causes that produce them before they understand the evils they are pregnant with and therefore although too many ears be already set too wide open to your Syren notes yet is it a thing incredible that they should be so unwise when their eyes are opened too to see the rocks and whirlpools into the midst of which this ravishing musick would invite them as wilfully to run upon their own destruction Would it not think you be a very pleasing thing for men to live in perpetual feuds tumults and confusions What a gallant incouragement would it be to the poor husbandman when he durst not go to plough without his guard lest the next that comes should take away his oxen nor could cast the seed into the furrows without very reasonable fears that another should reap the crop when he builds an house to think that his next neighbour will set it on fire or thrust him out of his possession and when he is laid down to rest not to dare to shut his eyes lest his wife or child should cut his throat If all the fears of Hell and endless torments which Religion possesseth men withall are found weak enough to keep them within the bounds of honesty and good-neighbourhood then I must be bold to tell you Sir and all wise men will easily believe me that the reins of religion once cut in pieces by your Sophistry and nothing after this life left for men to fear or long for all the laws of man will be as easily broken as Sampson's Wit hs the Magistrates authority will be set at nought and the greatest power you can imagine in the civil sword will prove too weak to secure the publick peace or restrain the libertine from those outrages and extravagances which would render death a thousand times more eligible than life This is a thing too apparently the consequence of your doctrine for who are the men I pray you that dare despise the gibbet and the halter for any petty prey but those whom you have taught or else have been before-hand with you in believing that as well their misery as their happiness shall end there But your selves know very well the truth of what I now say and are too ready to make ill use of it to our present disturbance and your own future misery You can tell us when you list that Religion hath the greatest power to keep the World in awe and order but then you would perswade us to believe withall that it is no more but a politick invention which necessity set the wit of man on work to find out for that purpose I am not now to disprove any of your assertions being resolved to represent you to your own eyes with all the advantages you can desire you will find when you can but once allow your selves the liberty to consider things that you stand in need of more than all to win you the approbation even of your own judgments For supposing this that you would have are not you the only politick wise men of the world and do not we all owe you abundant thanks for thus opening a wide gap to all confusion and disorder and your own ruine amongst the rest of mankind whilest you endeavour to pull down that fence which you confess was wisely made and not without great cause to secure the peace and comfort of the world If all this be not yet enough to let you see how much you befool your selves whilest you deride our Faith and call your selves wise for living as you list consider but this one thing more how you must needs hereby deprive your selves of that only thing besides your wit wherein you seem to glory I mean the honour of being Loyal to your Prince It is most evident that you thus betray your selves to be the worst of subjects and the most dangerous of all that plead for Toleration in a State or Kingdom I confess indeed there is a sort of people that would be thought the only