63. Defence of Popery.
Father Parsons has been modest enough to make this comparison, 'expressing the different dealing of Catholics and Protestants about seeking the true church and religion.'
"The difference between us, and him, to wit, between Catholicks and Protestants, is not much unlike to that of the cloth sellers of London; the one a royal merchant, which layeth open his wares clearly, giveth into your hands the whole piece of cloth at mid-day, willeth you to view and behold it in the sun, removeth all veils, pentices, and other stoppings of light that may give obscurity or impediment to the manifest beholding, handling, and discerning thereof; whereas, contrariwise the other, being a crafty broker, or poore pedlar, having no substantial wares indeed to sell, but such as is false made and deceitfully wrought, and taken up also for the most part of the other's leavings, seeketh by all means possible to sell in corners, and to shut out the sun that it be not well seen, or to give you a sight thereof by false lights only: neither will he deliver you the whole piece into your hand to be examined thoroughly by yourself, but sheweth you one end thereof only, different from the rest which he suppresseth"
Mr. Robert Chambers, priest and confessor of the English dames in the city of Bruxelles, also boasts that the miracles of his church are not "wrought in hugger-mugger." Miracles lately wrought by the intercession of the glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigu, nere unto Sichem in Brabant. Gathered out of the public instruments and informations taken thereof.—By authority of the Lord Archbishop of Maclin. Antwarp, 1606.
A boast of singular felicity for the church, which exhibits annually the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood, and which played off images that sweat and bleed, and weep, and nod their heads, and roll their eyes, and say,.. whatever the ventriloquist chuses to say for them! Of the odd expression which he has made use of, I recollect two remarkable examples, one by Sir John Harrington, in his version of Orlando Furioso, where it forms a conspicuous part of one of the oddest, but not the most decent couplets ever introduced into heroic poetry.—The other was by a tailor's wife who went abroad with a lady as nurse maid, and being a pretty woman, as well as a vain one, was easily taught to have a great contempt for her former way of life, and for vulgar notions of duty. On her return to England, she refused to go back to her husband, saying, with a toss of the head, "No, indeed! she had not been abroad for nothing, she knew better now than to go and live hugger-mugger with a tailor again."