A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ...…

5. You may see also that whatsoever Religiousness, Obedience, or Endeavours subject Christ to the flesh and world, and make him give place to them and come behind, do not deserve the name of Godliness. You are not Godly, how far soever else you go, if God and your Salvation take not place before all the honours, profits and pleasures of the world. As he is not God that hath any Greater, Wiser or Better then himself; so that is not Godliness which giveth the precedency practically to any thing but God: that pretendeth never so highly to Honour him, and yet more esteemeth their own Honour with the world: or that professeth Love and Obedience to him, and yet Loveth and obeyeth a Lust before him, and sets more by Love and Obedience to themselves, then by their own or other mens Love or Obedience to God. All these are the cheating counterfeits of Godliness.

5. You may see also that whatsoever Religiousness, Obedience, or Endeavours subject Christ to the flesh and world, and make him give place to them and come behind, do not deserve the name of Godliness. You are not Godly, how far soever else you goe, if God and your Salvation take not place before all the honours, profits and pleasures of the world. As he is not God that hath any Greater, Wiser or Better then himself; so that is not Godliness which giveth the precedency practically to any thing but God: that pretendeth never so highly to Honour him, and yet more esteemeth their own Honour with the world: or that professeth Love and Obedience to him, and yet Loveth and obeyeth a Lust before him, and sets more by Love and Obedience to themselves, then by their own or other mens Love or Obedience to God. All these are the cheating counterfeits of Godliness.

6. And if none of these be Godliness, much less doth it consist in any sin: in superstition, Idolatry, or in cruelty, blood and persecution through a carnal zeal: in a bringing all others by violence to our proud impious wills: in murmuring, sedition, rebellion, or resisting lawful Powers, under pretence of propagating religion: Godliness consisteth not ⟨p. 11⟩in Jesuitical contrivances, and undermining others, and equivocations and pious frauds: in disturbing Kingdoms, killing Kings, blowing up Parliaments: absolving subjects from allegiance, and giving away the Dominions of Temporal Lords if they will not obey the Pope in exterminating their Heretics, (as is Decreed to be done in the Approved General Council at the Lateran under Innocent 3. Can. 3.) nor doth it consist in murdering thirty thousand or forty thousand treacherously in a few weeks, as in France, or much above twice as many in Ireland; nor in butchering Christians by hundreds or thousands as they did long ago by the Waldenses and Albigenses, and Bohemians: Nor in racking and tormenting them by Inquisition, nor in frying them in the flames of fagots, as in Queen Marics days, and frequently elsewhere: This is the Religion of the father of malice, that thirsts for blood, and not of the Merciful Prince of Peace. Godliness is not the running to arms, and pulling down Governments, to set up the proud self-conceited actors under pretence of setting up Christ and preparing for his Kingdom: snatching in their dream at Crowns and Kingdoms, and finding when they awake that they have catched a gallows. When the Fryers had spawned the turbulent people among us in England, that thought they must do any thing and overturn the Governments of the world to make Christ the fifth Monarch, and bring him from heaven to Reign visibly on earth before he is willing to come, I must confess loft thought that their cunning was much more wonderful to keep these people from being undeceived, then at first to deceive them. To keep them (in despite of all our discoveries and warnings) in such furious blindness, as to go on and do their fathers work, and rage against these that told them their original, and whither they were going. The poor seduced people never read such Books as Fryar Campanella's de Regno Dei, & sacerdotio Christi, &c.