hings; and that
through the windows of your exterior senses he hath vouchsafed to transmit
unto the interior faculties of your mind nothing but what is good and
virtuous. For in my time there hath been found on the continent a certain
country, wherein are I know not what kind of Pastophorian mole-catching
priests, who, albeit averse from engaging their proper persons into a
matrimonial duty, like the pontifical flamens of Cybele in Phrygia, as if
they were capons, and not cocks full of lasciviousness, salacity, and
wantonness, who yet have, nevertheless, in the matter of conjugal affairs,
taken upon them to prescribe laws and ordinances to married folks. I
cannot goodly determine what I should most abhor, detest, loathe, and
abominate,--whether the tyrannical presumption of those dreaded sacerdotal
mole-catchers, who, not being willing to contain and coop up themselves
within the grates and trellises of their own mysterious temples, do deal
in, meddle with, obtrude upon, and thrust their sickles into harvests of
secular businesses quite contrary and diametrically opposite to the
quality, state, and condition of their callings, professions, and
vocations; or the superstitious stupidity and senseless scrupulousness of
married folks, who have yielded obedience, and submitted their bodies,
fortunes, and estates to the discretion and authority of such odious,
perverse, barbarous, and unreasonable laws. Nor do they see that which is
clearer than the light and splendour of the morning star,--how all these
nuptial and connubial sanctions, statutes, and ordinances have been
decreed, made, and instituted for the sole benefit, profit, and advantage
of the flaminal mysts and mysterious flamens, and nothing at all for the
good, utility, or emolument of the silly hoodwinked married people. Which
administereth unto others a sufficient cause for rendering these churchmen
suspicious of iniquity, and of an unjust and fraudulent manner of dealing,
no more to be connived at nor countenanced, after that it be well weighed
in the scales of reason, than if with a reciprocal temerity the laics, by
way of compensation, would impose laws to be followed and observed by those
mysts and flamens, how they should behave themselves in the making and
performance of their rites and ceremonies, and after what manner they ought
to proceed in the offering up and immolating of their various oblations,
victims, and sacrifices; seeing that, besides the decim