Page:The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty - Milton (1641).djvu/36

 and big with mischievous designes, when God comes to visit upon you all this forescore yeares vexation of his Church under your Egyptian tyranny. For certainly of all those blessed soules which you have persecuted, and those miserable ones which you have lost, the just vengeance does not sleepe.

 

S for those many Sects and divisions rumor'd abroad to be amongst us, it is not hard to perceave that they are partly the meere fictions and false alarmes of the Prelates, thereby to cast amazements and panick terrors into the hearts of weaker Christians that they should not venture to change the present deformity of the Church for fear of I know not what worse inconveniencies. With the same objected feares and suspicions, we know that suttle Prelat Gardner sought to divert the first reformation. It may suffice us to be taught by S. Paul that there must be sects for the manifesting of those that are sound hearted. These are but winds and flaws to try the floting vessell of our faith whether it be stanch and sayl well, whether our ballast be just, our anchorage and cable strong. By this is seene who lives by faith and certain knowledge, and who by credulity and the prevailing opinion of the age; whose vertue is of an unchangeable graine, and whose of a slight wash. If God come to trie our constancy we ought not to shrink, or stand the lesse firmly for that, but passe on with more stedfast resolution to establish the truth though it were through a lane of sects and heresies on each side. Other things men do to the glory of God: but sects and errors it seems God suffers to be for the glory of good men, that the world may know and reverence their true fortitude and undaunted constancy in the truth. Let us not therefore make these things an incumbrance, or an excuse of our delay in reforming, which God sends us as an incitement to proceed with more honour and alacrity. For if there were no opposition where were the triall of an unfained goodnesse and magnanimity? vertue that wavers is not  tue,