A Practical Commentary on the Epistle of Jude

What hath been our late experience, we all know, and have cause to bewail, as soon as we were freed from our hard task-masters, and a door of hope began to be opened to us, • swarm of libertines have arisen among us, and do every day increase in number, power and malice, and under various forms oppugn the unquestionable interests of Jesus Christ, to the great scandal of reformation and the saddening of the hearts of the godly. We seem to be ripe for a judgment, but from what corner the storm shall blow we cannot tell; some fear a return of Popery, and that a second deluge of Antichristianism shall overwhelm the Western Churches; the Papists (I confess▪ are dangerous, but the great and next fear I think to be from libertines and a yokeless generation of men who are most reproachful to religion and most troublesome.

What hath been our late experience, we all know, and have cause to bewail, assoon as wee were freed from our hard task-masters, and a door of hope began to be opened to us, • swarm of libertines have arisen among us, and do every day increase in number, power and malice, and under various forms oppugn the unquestionable interests of Iesus Christ, to the great scandal of reformation and the sadning of the hearts of the godly. We seem to be ripe for a judgment, but from what corner the storm shall blow we cannot tell; some fear a return of Popery, and that a second deluge of Antichristianisme shall overwhelm the Western Churches; the Papists (I confess▪ are dangerous, but the great and next fear I think to be from libertines and a yokeless generation of men who are most reproachful to religion and most troublesom.

The spirit and drift of this Epistle is carried out mainly against this fanatical and libertine party; and therefore I suppose it to be a mistake in Dr Willet, Mr Perkins and others, when they would turn the edge of it against the Papists, I confess they had a temptation that ⟨image 8⟩