Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 1.djvu/180

168 displaced (sic), to the public service, and to the good estate of the sincere professors, both of the commission and of the whole country. For first it shall argue your honour's former action of insufficiency; being indeed in all judgment of those that fear God among us most sincerely, discretely, and fully to all good purposes accomplished, both for the sincere comfort of the faithful professors of the truth, and the rare disparagement of the adversaries thereof in our country. Then it shall not a little nourish in the Earl that humour of careless security in tolerating, and no ways soundly reforming, the notorious backwardness of the whole company in religion, and chief of the chiefest about him. In sum, it shall harden the discontented in their former state of unsoundness; it shall drive the zelous gentlemen from the public service, and settle in the minds of all the true professors an utter despair of any good course of reformation hereafter to be taken in these parts, when they shall se your honour's first acts, and the same of so great importance to their well doing, to receive so speedy and untimely an overthrow; and therby a main wall as it were of corrupt magistrates set up here at home among us, against all good directions of your honours hereafter to be made from above.

These considerations, rt. honorable, have caused me to wish the Earl to want in this matter some part of his desire. Whom yet I honour many ways not unworthily: and so likewise many others, if such there be, that seek to have their private humours of singular sovereignty still nourished with public discommodity. Neither may your honour think that two, or but one more of his lordships counsil added (as it were but Mr. Halsall, or Mr. Farrington) to the commission, or Mr. Rigby of the quorum, shall work no great prejudice; for one bad man among many, not all good, shall be able to do no small hurt Halsall is a lawyer, presented these last assizes as a recusant in some degree. Farrington is as cunning as he: not anything sounder in religion, tho' much more subtil to avoid the public note than he. Rigby is as cunning and unsound as either, and as grossly to be detected therein as Halsal. All three of them as buisy contrivers of dangerous devices against the peace of the ministry, and free course of the Gospel, and direct proceding of justice, in all common opinion, as any that ever bore authority among us. If there were yet room for any more of his lordships counsil, it might rather be wisht that Mr. Tildesly or Mr. Scarsbrick, gentlemen of