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42 of the Grisons; wherein it was decreed, that the ministers of the reformed religion should be maintained of the profits and revenues of the church, the religious men nevertheless still remaining in their cloisters and convents, to be by their death suppressed, they being now prohibited to choose any new instead of them which died. By which means, they which professed the new religion, and they who professed the old, were both provided for.’’

The aim of the chapter from which I have extracted the foregoing passage, is to shew, that “it is a most dangerous thing, at one and the same time, to change the form, laws, and customs of a commonwealth.” The scope of the author’s reasonings may he judged of from the concluding paragraph.

“We ought then, in the government of a well ordered estate and commonwealth, to imitate and follow the great God of Nature, who in all things proceedeth easily, and by little and little; who of a little seed causeth to grow a tree for height and greatness, right admirable, and yet for all that insensibly; and still by means conjoining the extremities of nature, as by putting the spring between winter and summer, and autumn betwixt summer and winter, moderating the extremities of the terms and seasons, with the self-same wisdom which it useth in all other things also, and that in such sort, as that no violent force or course therein appeareth.”