f what thou art to me is known."

I have also known in my time some men's writings found fault with for
being purely human and philosophical, without any mixture of theology;
and yet, with some show of reason, it might, on the contrary, be said
that the divine doctrine, as queen and regent of the rest, better keeps
her state apart, that she ought to be sovereign throughout, not
subsidiary and suffragan, and that, peradventure, grammatical,
rhetorical, logical examples may elsewhere be more suitably chosen, as
also the material for the stage, games, and public entertainments, than
from so sacred a matter; that divine reasons are considered with greater
veneration and attention by themselves, and in their own proper style,
than when mixed with and adapted to human discourse; that it is a fault
much more often observed that the divines write too humanly, than that
the humanists write not theologically enough. Philosophy, says St.
Chrysostom, has long been banished the holy schools, as an handmaid
altogether useless and thought unworthy to look, so much as in passing
by the door, into the sanctuary of the holy treasures of the celestial
doctrine; that the human way of speaking is of a much lower form and
ought not to adopt for herself the dignity and majesty of divine
eloquence. Let who will 'verbis indisciplinatis' talk of fortune,
destiny, accident, good and evil hap, and other suchlike phrases,
according to his own humour; I for my part propose fancies merely human
and merely my own, and that simply as human fancies, and separately
considered, not as determined by any decree from heaven, incapable of
doubt or dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; things which I
discourse of according to my own notions, not as I believe, according to
God; after a laical, not clerical, and yet always after a very religious
manner, as children prepare their exercises, not to instruct but to be
instructed.

And might it not be said, that an edict enjoining all people but such as
are public professors of divinity, to be very reserved in writing of
religion, would carry with it a very good colour of utility and justice
--and to me, amongst the rest peradventure, to hold my prating? I have
been told that even those who are not of our Church nevertheless amongst
themselves expressly forbid the name of God to be used in common
discourse, nor so much even by way of interjection, exclamation,
assertion of a truth, or comparison; and