A vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat lux

Your next attempt p. 72. is upon my story of the progress and Corruption of Christian Religion in the world, with respect unto that of your own. Yours, you tell ⟨p. 424⟩us, is serious, temperate, and sober; every way as excellent as Suffenus thought his verses. Mine, you say, is wrought with defamation and wrath against all Ages and People; very good. I doubt not but you thought it was fit you should say so, though you knew no reason why, nor could fix on any thing in it for your warrant in these intemperate reproaches. Do I say any thing but what the stories of all Ages, and the Experience of Christendom do proclaim? Is it now a defamation to report what the learned men of those days have recorded, what good men bewailed, and the sad effects whereof the world long groaned under, and was at length ruined by? What wrath is in all this? may not men be warned to take heed of falling into the like evils by the miscarriages of them that went before them without wrath and defamation? Are the books of the Kings, Chronicles, and Prophets fraught with wrath and defamation because they report, complain of, and reprove the sad Apostasies of the Church in those days, with the wickedness of the Kings, Priests and People that it was composed of, and declare the abomination of those ways of false worship, licentiousness of life, violence and oppression, whereby they provoked God against them to their ruin? If my story be not true, why do you not disprove it? if it be, why do you exclaim against it? Do I not direct you unto Authors of unquestionable credit complaining of the things which I report from them? And if you know not that many others may be added unto these by me named, testifying the same things, you know very little of the matter you undertake to treat about. But we need go no further then your self to discover how devoid of all pretence your reproaches are, and that by considering the exceptions ⟨p. 425⟩which you put in to my story, which may rationally be supposed to be the most plausible you could invent, and directed against those parts of it which you imagined were most obnoxious to your charge. I shall therefore consider them in the order wherein they are proposed, and discover whether the keenness of your assault answer the noise of your out-cry at its entrance.

Your next attempt p. 72. is upon my story of the progress and Corruption of Christian Religion in the world, with respect unto that of your own. Yours, you tell