For I am persuaded,
and I may speak it with an absit invidia verbo, and nowise in
derogation of antiquity, but as in a good emulation between the vine
and the olive, that if the choice and best of those observations
upon texts of Scriptures which have been made dispersedly in sermons
within this your Majesty's Island of Brittany by the space of these
forty years and more (leaving out the largeness of exhortations and
applications thereupon) had been set down in a continuance, it had
been the best work in divinity which had been written since the
Apostles' times.
(19) The matter informed by divinity is of two kinds: matter of
belief and truth of opinion, and matter of service and adoration;
which is also judged and directed by the former--the one being as
the internal soul of religion, and the other as the external body
thereof. And, therefore, the heathen religion was not only a
worship of idols, but the whole religion was an idol in itself; for
it had no soul; that is, no certainty of belief or confession: as a
man may well think, considering the chief doctors of their church
were the poets; and the reason was because the heathen gods were no
jealous gods, but were glad to be admitted into part, as they had
reason.
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