THE

PREFACE.

THE many lewd opinions, especially those of anti-scripturists, which have been published of late years by Spinoza and some others, in Latin, Dutch, and English, have been the occasion of my writing this book. As seeing too well that hereby, not only men of erudition, but the citizens themselves, grown of late more bookish, are very dangerously infected. Insomuch that every apprentice, who can but get a play to his tooth, stuffed with vice and profaneness, formeth all his thoughts, words, and actions by this as his Bible.

Whereupon, though I considered we have as learned a clergy in England as in the world, yet I resolved, with the best skill I had, to contribute towards the antidoting of this city and kingdom against a contagion so dismal in itself, and the consequences of it. Neither Duplessy, a soldier, nor Grotius, a civilian, were ever thought to have misengaged themselves in the like undertaking. And if I had not their examples, nor had ever heard of them, yet the same reasons which prevailed with them are now in being. Nor did I see cause to stay at the reflection which the Lord Verulam makes upon physicians, for employing their pens sometimes on other subjects besides medicine, when himself undertook the improvement of all other sciences and professions more than his own. And though it is not necessary that every one should meddle with Hippocrates or Littleton, yet the Scriptures are a book we are all bound to read and consider. I can truly say too, that the writing, neither of this, nor