1. By the ancient heresies that bred it, and that it containeth.

2. By the dotages and self-contradiction of their Alcoran. 3. By the wickedness of it; encouraging them still to blood, allowing them four wives and as many concubines as they please, and promising them a sensual felicity hereafter; and contradicting the word of God in particulars, when they acknowledge the truth of it in general.

4. By the suitableness of it to carnal minds, and the ready reception that it findeth with such; so that the vilest barbarians are quickly made Mahometans; and there is a greater part of the world this day that are Mahometans, than Christians, merely by the force of the sword, and the sensuality of their religion.

5. And they will not suffer it to be disputed, nor reasoned of, but absolutely believe without asking for any evidence of its truth.

6. And the management and issue clearly shows it is but the devil's second army (next to the Pagans), by which he seeks to hold his possession, and to hinder Christ's kingdom, and persecute his subjects. For, by force they have already banished the most of the christian religion from a great part of the world, where once it was glorious; and the rest they are still infesting; and those under their power they keep in much thraldom, and suffering, and disgrace. So that it is most clear, that the setting up of Mahometanism was one of the most successful oppositions that ever the devil made against Christ and the Christian cause; having thereby rooted or kept out Christianity from so great a part of the earth by such silly, palpable dotages.

After Mahometanism, let us consider how he hath yet proceeded to defile, or destroy if it might have been, the remaining church of Christ, by renewing heresies to this day.

When Satan perceived that he could no longer keep up the tyranny and errors of popery undisturbed, but that Christ would send out such a light as should disgrace and dispel his darkness, he reneweth his old attempts again, and setteth upon Christ in his own kingdom, and falls upon the reformation in its own quarters. And as he set out Simon Magus, at first, to follow Simon Peter, and Paul, at the heels, and disturb them in their work, and disgrace Christianity, partly by diversity, and partly by the evil doctrines and lives of such as pretend to be Christians; so did he send out the like sect-masters after Christ's reformers, to stand up against them by the same artifices, and to disturb the labourers, and disgrace the reformation, by the di

versity and evil doctrines and practices of those who pretended to be reformers with them.

Two trained bands doth Satan here send out to encounter the church and truth of Christ. The first are a mixed company that all go under the name of anabaptists; the other are enthusiasts, that go under divers names, but agree in their main design, of whom I shall speak anon.

It was the subtlety of Satan to begin with the point of infant baptism, both because it was not all so expressly mentioned in Scripture, as some greater matters are, and, therefore, would hold more controversy and talk, and he might more easily bring them to a confidence in their mistakes, or at least a suspicion of our doctrine; and also because if he could so far loose them from Christ as to make them repent of their former dedication to him, and disclaim it, he might think to have the more power over them himself. However it were, experience certainly informeth us that this egg did multiply to such a generation of vipers, as threatened to eat out the bowels of the reformed churches. They made the reformation odious to many. They began in a seeming simplicity and harmlessness, as if we had not reformed enough, but they must carry on the work where we left it, and cast out children from the church, as we cast out separation and errors; but when the spirit within them had once vent and field-room for agitation, it soon discovered itself to be of the great deceiver. In Germany, Thomas Muntzer preached the people into a rebellion, and got a numerous army of the seduced ones into the field, and while he promised them victory, they were routed and hewed in pieces, and himself put to a terrible death. In the city of Munster, they made head against the bishop, who was their prince; and expelled him and the magistrates, and put some to death, and made John of Leyden their king, who, after a little barbarous cruelty and domineering for a few weeks, was put to death with many of his new subjects, at the taking of the city. Yet some of them lived, and broke out into various sects: David George headed one party of them, and taught them that he was the Holy Ghost; and as the Father's doctrine saved them till Christ, and the Son's Gospel till now, so the doctrine of this David, who was the Holy Ghost, was as much higher than the doctrine of the Son, as the Son's was higher than the Father's. Thus did he take hands with the second sect, the enthusiasts, and join two into one.

The second sect had many heads, in some things differing one

from another. Some followed Schwenkfeldius, and some lurked and made no great noise with their opinions, as being not able to make any great party. Of these, the chief leader was Paracelsus, a drunken conjurer, who had converse with devils, as Simon Magus, the first master of the heretics, had; by which it is not hard to know whence he had his new doctrines. This is not only testified by Erasmus, in his disputation against him, but by George Wetter, a godly, learned man, that was Paracelsus' companion for two years together, who told him what wages Satan would pay his servants, and asked him why he would follow that course, and he answered him that he would shortly repent, and forsake them. Joannes Oporinus, also, Theodore, Zuingerus, Bullinger, Conrad, Gesnerus, and others, do witness that he used magic, and devils, and would be so frequently drunk that men could scarcely tell when to speak with him. Oporinus had been his amanuensis and companion, and saith, he saw neither learning nor godliness in him, but skill in medicines and that he would sit up till midnight, and then leap down on his bed with his sword by his side, and rising up, would so lay about him on the walls and floor with his naked sword, that Oporinus was oft afraid he would have cut off his head. This Oporinus was the learned, famous printer of Basil. Yet this Paracelsus was the great corrupter of divinity, the father of many new conceits contradictory to Scripture: upon his foundation his successors built, as Menander did on Simon Magus, and Saturninus, and Basilides, and others, on his. John Arndt magnifieth him; Weigelius calls him exceedingly illuminated, and his theology he calls the pure and incorrupt Scripture of the prophets and apostles: this Weigelius was the chief of his followers and successors. Then steps in John Arndt, Julius Sperber, Jesaias Stiefel, and Ezekiel Meth, Paul Felgenhaver, and Jacob Behmen, whose books, much taken out of Paracelsus, and furthered by Kempis, Taulerus, and others, are now translated into English by some admirers of him, possessed by the same conceits. The cloudy nonsense, or wilful obscurity, draws them into admiration of them first, and they think there is sure some admirable mysteries in those enigmatical expressions, and so they are tired on to so long an expense of time in the search, till they are habituated to his arrogancy and folly. What his doctrines are, what new prophecies he produceth, and discoveries of things before and about the creation, angels, the soul, heaven and hell, &c., which the Scripture revealeth not, is too

commonly known in his books, which yet are pretty well locked up, and made more harmless by such ridiculous and yet hideous bombardical words, as Basilides, Valentinus, and the first he retics used. And indeed, never had the world a generation so like them in doctrinals as some of these late enthusiasts. Weigelius' books have a gnostic title; they all pretend to a higher knowledge of mysteries about angels, spirits, and spiritual states, and God himself, than the church knoweth ; and yet they give us neither reasons with Aristotle, nor miracles with Christ and his apostles, to cause us to believe any of their new revelations : as if we must take them on their bare (scarce intelligible) words. They that would see more of these German prophets, and how Behmen had his doctrine from the books of Paracelsus; let them read Beckman's' Exercitations,' (p. 346, 347,) and so forward.

From Germany let us pass a little into England, and see how the same devil in enmity to Christ hath here sent out his false prophets to hinder the reformers, and to have destroyed, if it might be, the work of reformation.

Just such another sect as some of the old gnostics did arise under the name of the family of love, who made one Henry Nichols the leader of their party. They turned almost all the supernatural revelation in Scripture to an allegory, and so denied even Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, and ascension in sense, while they seemed to believe the words that did express it. They very much gloried in the light and spirit within them, and called the written word but the letter, and so would have brought down God's law as a dead letter, and have set up their own conceits, passionate fancies, and dreams, as the Spirit. Abundance of horrible doctrines they added, like those of the old Gnostics, their predecessors. You may see some of them in Mr. Bailye's 'Dissuasive,' and Mr. Rutherford Against Familists,' &c. To these were annexed, in Germany, the Libertines, who denied the immortality of the soul, and made good and evil to lie but in opinion, and many more like them of old (of which see Calvin, against them, and in his 'Psychopanichia'). In England they were called Antinomians, and some of them were much worse in doctrine and life than others. These two sects did here usually mix. The common road of this heretical devil being ordinarily by separation to anabaptistry, from anabaptistry to antinomianism or Pelagianism, for there the way parted, and from antinomianism to libertinism, and so to familism, and so to hell without repentance.

Of this tribe was Hacket, Coppinger, and Arthington, who lived a while as wrapped up in the Spirit, and in antinomian fancies, and a great number of their party called Grundletonians, from a village in Yorkshire, where they lived or met. I had an old, godly friend that lived near them, and went once among them, and they breathed on him as to give him the Holy Ghost; and his family, for three days after, perceived him as a man of another spirit, as half in an ecstacy, and after that he came to himself, and came near to them no more: but the hanging of Hacket, who died blaspheming, which story is so commonly known that I need not mention it, did much mar their matters; and Arthington's recantation, in a book called his 'Seduction,' did stay many: for he and Coppinger were the two witnesses that were to proclaim up and down London that Hacket was the Christ that was come to judge them.

Whilst these heretics assaulted the reformation and the Gospel on one hand, the devil was as busy to stir up the church governors themselves to the disrelish of godliness, to superstition, and tyranny, on the other hand, who, upon the difference about ceremonies and subscription first, and afterwards upon the introduction of more of their forms of worship without law, did suspend, silence, expel, imprison, many learned, godly, sober ministers, that were most diligent in pulling down the kingdom of Satan, and did him the greatest hurt, by rescuing the ungodly out of his hand; besides a multitude of godly people that were troubled, banished, and driven to seek remote habitations, even as far as America. Upon which Satan got a further double and great advantage, besides the grievous breach and ruins that he made in the church. The first was, that he made practical godliness become odious and a scorn among the people, and the godly to be reproached as puritans, and men that were needlessly precise. The second was, that he kindled, on this occasion, a deeper discontent, in the minds of some of the persecuted, against their persecuting governors than was meet, and set them in too keen an opposition against them. By which means the devil prepared us to those factions and animosities which presently broke out into an unhappy war: in which war, as in all wars, the reins being more loose, and soldiers having both provocations to stir up their pride, passion, and dissent from their enemies to the height, and also opportunity to vent their opinions, and to propagate them with less contradiction, because they were removed further from the inspec