Читать книгу Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century - Various - Страница 49

Table of Contents

Is a gilded pill, composed of two virtuous ingredients, natural dishonesty and artificial dissimulation. Simple fruit, plant, or drug he is none, but a deformed mixture bred betwixt evil nature and false art by a monstrous generation, and may well be put into the reckoning of those creatures that God never made. In Church or commonwealth (for in both these this mongrel weed will shoot) it is hard to say whether he be physic or a disease, for he is both in divers respects.

As he is gilt with an outside of seeming purity, or as he offereth himself to you to be taken down in a cup or taste of golden zeal and simplicity, you may call him physic. Nay, and never let potion give patient good stool if, being truly tasted and relished, he be not as loathsome to the stomach of any honest man.

He is also physic in being as commodious for use as he is odious in taste, if the body of the company into which he is taken can make true use of him. For the malice of his nature makes him so informer-like-dangerous, in taking advantage of anything done or said, yea, even to the ruin of his makers, if he may have benefit, that such a creature in a society makes men as careful of their speeches and actions as the sight of a known cut-purse in a throng makes them watchful over their purses and pockets. He is also in this respect profitable physic, that his conversation being once truly tasted and discovered, the hateful foulness of it will make those that are not fully like him to purge all such diseases as are rank in him out of their own lives, as the sight of some citizens on horseback make a judicious man amend his own faults in horsemanship. If one of these uses can be made of him, let him not long offend the stomach of your company; your best way is to spue him out. That he is a disease in the body where he liveth were as strange a thing to doubt as whether there be knavery in horse-coursers. For if among sheep, the rot; amongst dogs, the mange; amongst horses, the glanders; amongst men and women, the Northern itch and the French ache, be diseases, an hypocrite cannot but be the like in all States and societies that breed him. If he be a clergy hypocrite, then all manner of vice is for the most part so proper to him as he will grudge any man the practice of it but himself; like that grave burgess, who being desired to lend his clothes to represent a part in a comedy, answered: No, by his leave, he would have nobody play the fool in his clothes but himself. Hence are his so austere reprehensions of drinking healths, lascivious talk, usury, and unconscionable dealing; whenas himself, hating the profane mixture of malt and water, will, by his good will, let nothing come within him but the purity of the grape, when he can get it of another's cost. But this must not be done neither without a preface of seeming soothness, turning up the eyes, moving the head, laying hand on the breast, and protesting that he would not do it but to strengthen his body, being even consumed with dissembled zeal, and tedious and thankless babbling to God and his auditors. And for the other vices, do but venture the making yourself private with him or trusting of him, and if you come off without a savour of the air which his soul is infected with you have great fortune. The fardel of all this ware that is in him you shall commonly see carried upon the back of these two beasts that live within him, Ignorance and Imperiousness, and they may well serve to carry other vices, for of themselves they are insupportable. His Ignorance acquits him of all science, human or divine, and of all language but his mother's; holding nothing pure, holy, or sincere but the senseless recollections of his own crazed brain, the zealous fumes of his inflamed spirit, and the endless labours of his eternal tongue, the motions whereof, when matter and words fail (as they often do), must be patched up to accomplish his four hours in a day at the least with long and fervent hums. Anything else, either for language or matter, he cannot abide, but thus censureth: Latin, the language of the beast; Greek, the tongue wherein the heathen poets wrote their fictions; Hebrew, the speech of the Jews that crucified Christ; controversies do not edify; logic and philosophy are the subtilties of Satan to deceive the simple; human stories profane, and not savouring of the Spirit; in a word, all decent and sensible form of speech and persuasion (though in his own tongue) vain ostentation. And all this is the burden of his Ignorance, saving that sometimes idleness will put in also to bear a part of the baggage. His other beast, Imperiousness, is yet more proudly laden; it carrieth a burden that no cords of authority, spiritual nor temporal, should bind if it might have the full swing. No Pilate, no prince should command him, nay, he will command them, and at his pleasure censure them if they will not suffer their ears to be fettered with the long chains of his tedious collations, their purses to be emptied with the inundations of his unsatiable humour, and their judgments to be blinded with the muffler of his zealous ignorance; for this doth he familiarly insult over his maintainer that breeds him, his patron that feeds him, and in time over all them that will suffer him to set a foot within their doors or put a finger in their purses. All this and much more is in him; that abhorring degrees and universities as reliques of superstition, hath leapt from a shop-board or a cloak-bag to a desk or pulpit; and that, like a sea-god in a pageant, hath the rotten laths of his culpable life and palpable ignorance covered over with the painted-cloth of a pure gown and a night-cap, and with a false trumpet of feigned zeal draweth after him some poor nymphs and madmen that delight more to resort to dark caves and secret places than to open and public assemblies. The lay-hypocrite is to the other a champion, disciple, and subject, and will not acknowledge the tithe of the subjection to any mitre, no, not to any sceptre, that he will do to the hook and crook of his zeal-blind shepherd. No Jesuits demand more blind and absolute obedience from their vassals, no magistrates of the canting society more slavish subjection from the members of that travelling State, than the clerk hypocrites expect from these lay pulpits. Nay, they must not only be obeyed, fed, and defended, but admired too; and that their lay-followers do sincerely, as a shirtless fellow with a cudgel under his arm doth a face-wringing ballad-singer, a water-bearer on the floor of a playhouse, a wide-mouthed poet that speaks nothing but blathers and bombast. Otherwise, for life and profession, nature and art, inward and outward, they agree in all; like canters and gypsies, they are all zeal no knowledge, all purity no humanity, all simplicity no honesty, and if you never trust them they will never deceive you.