A vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat lux

Neither have you any better success, in that which in the next place you insist upon, which yet were it not like the most of the rest, destitute of truth, would give more countenance unto your reflection, than them all. It is, that I give you sharp and frequent menaces, that if you write or speak again, you shall hear more, find more, feel more, more to your smart, more than you imagine, more than you would, which relish much of that insulting humour which the Land groaned under. I suppose no man reads this representation of my words, with the addition of your own, which makes up the greatest part of them, but must needs thinks, that you have been sorely threatened with some personal inconveniences, which I would cause to befall you, did you not surcease from writing; or that I would obtain some course to be taken with you to your prejudice. Now ⟨p. 20⟩this must needs savour of the spirit of our late days of trouble and mischief, or at least of the former days of the prevalency of Popery amongst us, when men were not wont in such cases, to take up at bare threats and menaces. If this be so, all men that know the Author of the Animadversions, and his condition, must needs conclude him to be very foolish and wicked; foolish, for threatening any with that, which is as far from his power to execute, as the person threatened can possibly desire it to be; wicked, for designing that evil unto any individual person, which he abhors in hypothesi to be inflicted on any upon the like account. But what if there be nothing of all this in the pretended menaces? What if the worst that is in them, be only part of a desire, that you would abstain from insisting on the personal miscarriages, of some that profess the Protestant Religion, lest he should be necessitated to make a diversion of your Charge, or to show the insufficiency of it to your purpose, by recounting the more notorious failings of the Guides, Heads, and Leaders of your Church? If this be so, as it is in truth the whole intendment of any of those expressions that are used by me, (for the most part of them are your own figments) wherever they occur, what Conclusion can any rational man make from them?

Neither have you any better success, in that which in the next place you insist upon, which yet were it not like the most of the rest, destitute of truth, would give more countenance unto your reflection, than them all. It is, that I give you sharp and frequent menaces, that if you write or speak again, you shall hear more, find more, feel more, more to your smart, more than you imagine, more than you would, which relish much of that insulting humour which the Land groaned under. I suppose no man reads this representation of my words, with the addition of your own, which makes up the greatest part of them, but must needs thinks, that you have been sorely threatned with some personall inconveniencies, which I would cause to befall you, did you not surcease from writing; or that I would obtain some course to be taken with you to your prejudice. Now