eld. From
this period there is a blank in his biography for about ten years.
Most probably his life was rambling and desultory. He speaks of
himself as having been about that time a chaplain in the army. His
first two works, published in 1653 and 1654, "The Saints' Guide," and
"The Judgment Set and the Books Opened,"[24] show that in the
interval he had deserted the Established Church, and, probably, after
some of those restless fluctuations of belief to which men of his
ardent temperament are subject, settled at last in a wilder sort of
Independency, which he eulogizes as "unmanacling the simple and pure
light of the Gospel from the chains and fetters of cold and dead
formality, and of restrictive and compulsory power." His language in
these two works is more assimilated to that of the Seekers or Quakers,
which it resembles in the cloudy mysteriousness of its phraseology,
than that of the more rational and sober writers of the Independent
school. Amongst the dregs of fanaticism of which they consist, the
reader will look in vain for any germ or promise of future excellence
or distinction as an author. It would seem that he preached the
sermons contained in "The Judgment Set and Books Opened" at the church
of All-Hallows, Lombard-street, at which he must have been for some
time the officiating minister, and where the amusing incident, in
which Webster was concerned, narrated by Wood, which had many a
parallel in those times, no doubt occurred. "On the 12th of Oct.,
1653," says the author of the _Athenae._,[25] "he (_i.e._ William
Erbury) with John Webster, sometimes a Cambridge scholar, endeavoured
to knock down learning and the ministry both together, in a
disputation that they then had against two ministers in a church in
Lombard-street, in London. Erbury then declared that the wisest
ministers and purest churches were at that time befool'd, confounded,
and defil'd, by reason of learning. Another while he said, that the
ministry were monsters, beasts, asses, greedy dogs, false prophets;
and that they are the Beast with seven heads and ten horns. The same
person also spoke out and said that Babylon is the Church in her
ministers, and that the Great Whore is the Church in her worship, &c.;
so that with him there was an end of ministers and churches and
ordinations altogether. While these things were babbled to and fro,
the multitude being of various opinions, began to mutter, and many to
cry out, and immediately it came