norant as not at all to apprehend them,
or so impudent as to scoff and deride them; or finally, so well skilled
at the same weapons, that they would be able to keep their pass, and
fence off all assaults of conviction: and this last way the victory
would be altogether as hopeless, as if two persons were engaged of so
equal strength, that it were impossible any one should overpower the
other.

If my judgment might be taken, I would advise Christians, in their next
expedition to a holy war, instead of those many unsuccessful legions,
which they have hitherto sent to encounter the Turks and Saracens,
that they would furnish out their clamorous Scotists, their obstinate
Occamists, their invincible Albertists, and all their forces of tough,
crabbed and profound disputants: the engagement, I fancy, would be
mighty pleasant, and the victory we may imagine on our side not to be
questioned. For which of the enemies would not veil their turbans at so
solemn an appearance? Which of the fiercest Janizaries would not
throw away his scimitar, and all the half-moons be eclipsed by the
interposition of so glorious an army?

[Illustration: 270]

I suppose you mistrust I speak all this by way of jeer and irony; and
well I may, since among divines themselves there are some so ingenious
as to despise these captious and frivolous impertinences: they look upon
it as a kind of profane sacrilege, and a little less than blasphemous
impiety, to determine of such niceties in religion, as ought rather
to be the subject of an humble and uncontradicting faith, than of a
scrupulous and inquisitive reason: they abhor a defiling the mysteries
of Christianity with an intermixture of heathenish philosophy, and judge
it very improper to reduce divinity to an obscure speculative science,
whose end is such a happiness as can be gained only by the means of
practice. But alas, those notional divines, however condemned by the
soberer judgment of others, are yet mightily pleased with themselves,
and are so laboriously intent upon prosecuting their crabbed studies,
that they cannot afford so much time as to read a single chapter in
any one book of the whole bible. And while they thus trifle away their
mis-spent hours in trash and babble, they think that they support
the Catholic Church with the props and pillars of propositions and
syllogisms, no less effectually than Atlas is feigned by the poets to
sustain on his shoulders the burden of a tottering world.