Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/71

think scorn to discover in themselves with such a brazen forehead the outrageous desire of filthy lucre. Which the Prelats make so little conscience of, that they are ready to fight, and if it lay in their power, to massacre all good Christians under the names of horrible schismaticks for only finding fault with their temporal dignities, their unconscionable wealth and revenues, their cruell autority over their brethren that labour in the word, while they snore in their luxurious excesse. Openly proclaming themselvs now in the sight of all men to be those which for a while they sought to cover under sheeps cloathing, ravenous and savage wolves threatning inrodes and bloody incursions upon the flock of Christ, which they took upon them to feed, but now clame to devour as their prey. More like that huge dragon of Egypt breathing out wast, and desolation to the land, unlesse he were daily fatn'd with virgins blood. Him our old patron Saint George by his matchlesse valour slew, as the Prelat of the Garter that reads his Collect can tell. And if our Princes and Knights will imitate the fame of that old champion, as by their order of Knighthood solemnly taken, they vow, farre be it that they should uphold and side with this English Dragon; but rather to doe as indeed their oath binds them, they should make it their Knightly adventure to pursue & vanquish this mighty sailewing'd monster that menaces to swallow up the Land, unlesse her bottomlesse gorge may be satisfi'd with the blood of the Kings daughter the Church; and may, as she was wont, fill her dark and infamous den with the bones of the Saints. Nor will any one have reason to think this as too incredible or too tragical to be spok'n of Prelaty, if he consider well from what a masse of slime and mud, the sloathful, the covetous and ambitious hopes of Church-promotions and fat Bishopricks she is bred up and nuzzl'd in, like a great Python from her youth, to prove the general poyson both of doctrine and good discipline in the Land. For certainly such hopes and such principles of earth as these wherein she welters from a yong one, are the immediat generation both of a slavish and tyrannous life to follow, and a pestiferous contagion to the whole Kingdom, till like that fenborn serpent she be shot to death with the darts of the sun, the pure and powerful beams of Gods word. And this may serve to describe to us in part, what Prelaty hath bin and what, if she stand, she is like to be toward the whole body of people in England. Now that it may appeare how she is not such a kind of evil, as hath any good, or use in it, which many evils have, but a

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