Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/70

should engage themselves to write, and speak publickly in her defence, but that I beleeve their honest and ingenuous natures comming to the Universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else, but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastical burre in their throats, as hath stopt and hinderd all true and generous philosophy from entring, crackt their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms, and hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men prelatically addicted, whose unchast'nd and unwrought minds never yet initiated or subdu'd under the true lore of religion or moral vertuee, which two are the best and greatest points ot learning, but either slightly train'd up in a kind of hypocritical and hackny cours of literature to get their living by, and dazle the ignorant, or els fondly overstudied in uselesse controversies, except those which they use with all the specious and delusive suttlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta, having a Gospel and Church-government set before their eyes, as a fair field wherin they might exercise the greatest vertu's, and the greatest deeds of Christian autority in mean fortunes and little furniture of this world, which even the sage heathen writers and those old Fabritii, and Curii well knew to be a manner of working, then which nothing could lik'n a mortal man more to God, who delights most to worke from within himself, and not by the heavy luggage of corporeal instrument, they understand it not, & think no such matter, but admire & dote upon worldly riches, & honours, with an easie & intemperat life, to the bane of Christianity: yea they and their Seminaries shame not to professe, to petition and never lin pealing our eares that unlesse we fat them like boores, and cramme them as they list with wealth, with Deaneries, and pluralities, with Baronies and stately preferments, all learning and religion will goe underfoot. Which is such a shamelesse, such a bestial plea, and of that odious impudence in Church-men, who should be to us a pattern of temperance and frugal mediocrity, who should teach us to contemn this world, and the gaudy things thereof, according to the promise which they themselves require from us in baptisme, that should the Scripture stand by and be mute, there is not that sect of Philosophers among the heathen so dissolute, no not Epicurus, nor Aristippus with all his Cyrenaick rout, but would shut his school dores against such greasy sophisters: not any College of Mountebanks, but would

think