A divine herbal together with a forrest of thorns In five sermons. ... By…A divine herball together with a forrest of thornes In five sermons. ... By…

4 Corrupted Officers, who are also sharp and sharking brambles. Their office is a bush of thorns at their backs, and they all to rent the country, with bribery and extortion. These men seek after authority, and commanding-places, not with any intent of good to the common-wealth, but to fill their own purses, to satisfy their own lusts. ⟨p. 133⟩As some love to be poring in the fire, not that they care to mend it, but only to warm their own fingers.

4 Corrupted Officers, who are also sharpe and sharking brambles. Their office is a bush of thorns at their backes, and they all to rent the countrey, with briberie and extortion. These men seeke after authority, and commanding-places, not with any intent of good to the common-wealth, but to fill their owne purses, to satisfie their owne lusts. ⟨p. 133⟩As some loue to bee poring in the fire, not that they care to mend it, but onely to warme their owne fingers.

5 We have Papists amongst us; look to them, they are rankling thorns, and renting briers. False Gibeonites they are; and howsoever they pretend their old shoes, the antiquity of their Church, we have ever found them thorns; ready to put out our eyes, and (if they could) the eye of the Gospel. They exclaim against us for persecution; and cry themselves (louder then oyster-women in the streets) for patient Catholics, Saints, Martyrs. But match the peace they enjoy under us, with the tyranny they exercised over us; the burning our Fathers at stakes, the butchering our Princes, their conspiracy against our whole Realm, their continual bending their weapons against Sovereigns and subjects throats; and you will say, they are thorns. I have read of a bird, that when men are devout at their sacrifice, takes fire from the Altar, and burns their houses. All their black treasons, and bloody intendments, they derive from the Altar; and plead the warrant of Religion, to set our whole Land in combustion. O that these brambles were stocked up: that Ishmael were cast out of doors, that Sarah and her son Isaac might live in quiet.