The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason,by certain charms compounded of metaphysics,and miracles,and traditions,and abused Scripture,whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them.The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles,and to change them into natural fools,which common people do therefore call elves,and are apt to mischief.
In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment,the old wives have not determined.But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities,that received their discipline from authority pontifical.
When the fairies are displeased with anybody,they are said to send their elves to pinch them.The ecclesiastics,when they are displeased with any civil state,make also their elves,that is,superstitious,enchanted subjects,to pinch their princes,by preaching sedition;or one prince,enchanted with promises,to pinch another.
The fairies marry not;but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood.The priests also marry not.
The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land,by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them,and by tithes:so also it is in the fable of fairies,that they enter into the dairies,and feast upon the cream,which they skim from the milk.
What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story.But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do;though when they are to make any payment,it is in canonizations,indulgences,and masses.
To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this,that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people,rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets:so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion)consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications,upon hearing of false miracles,false traditions,and false interpretations of the Scripture.
It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism;nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers,to cast them out.But who knows that this spirit of Rome,now gone out,and walking by missions through the dry places of China,Japan,and the Indies,that yield him little fruit,may not return;or rather,an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house,and make the end thereof worse than the beginning?For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world,and thereby to have a power therein,distinct from that of the civil state.And this is all I had a design to say,concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS.Which,when I have reviewed,I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.
A REVIEW AND CONCLUSION
FROM the contrariety of some of the natural faculties of the mind,one to another,as also of one passion to another,and from their reference to conversation,there has been an argument taken to infer an impossibility that any one man should be sufficiently disposed to all sorts of civil duty.The severity of judgement,they say,makes men censorious and unapt to pardon the errors and infirmities of other men:and on the other side,celerity of fancy makes the thoughts less steady than is necessary to discern exactly between right and wrong.Again,in all deliberations,and in all pleadings,the faculty of solid reasoning is necessary:for without it,the resolutions of men are rash,and their sentences unjust:and yet if there be not powerful eloquence,which procureth attention and consent,the effect of reason will be little.But these are contrary faculties;the former being grounded upon principles of truth;the other upon opinions already received,true or false;and upon the passions and interests of men,which are different and mutable.
And amongst the passions,courage (by which I mean the contempt of wounds and violent death)inclineth men to private revenges,and sometimes to endeavour the unsettling of the public peace:and timorousness many times disposeth to the desertion of the public defence.Both these,they say,cannot stand together in the same person.
And to consider the contrariety of men's opinions and manners in general,it is,they say,impossible to entertain a constant civil amity with all those with whom the business of the world constrains us to converse:which business consisteth almost in nothing else but a perpetual contention for honour,riches,and authority.