.ffiT. 89.] LIFE OF IZAAK WALTON. cxi 



might be sincere, well-meaning men, whose indiscreet zeal might 

 be so like charity, as thereby to cover a multitude of errors," 

 Walton observes, " Of this party there were many that were 

 possessed of an high degree of spiritual wickedness ; I mean with 

 an innate, restless, radical pride and malice ; I mean not those 

 lesser sins which are more visible and more properly carnal, and 

 sins against a man's self, as gluttony, drunkenness, and the like 

 (from which good Lord deliver us), but sins of a higher nature, 

 because more unlike to the nature of God, which is love, and 

 mercy, and peace, and more like the devil (who is no glutton, nor 

 can be drunk, and yet is a devil) ; those wickednesses of malice 

 and revenge, and opposition, and a complacence in working and 

 beholding confusion (which are more properly his work, who is the 

 enemy and disturber of mankind) ; and greater sins, though many 

 will not believe it ; men whom a furious zeal and prejudice hath 

 blinded, and made incapable of hearing reason, or adhering to the 

 ways of peace ; men whom pride and self-conceit had made to 

 over-value their own wisdom and become pertinacious, and to hold 

 foolish and unmannerly disputes against those men which they 

 ought to reverence, and those laws which they ought to obey ; men 

 that laboured and joyed to speak evil of government, and then to 

 be the authors of confusion (of confusion as it is confusion) ; whom 

 company and conversation, and custom had blinded, and made 

 insensible that these were errors ; and at last became so restless 

 and so hardened in their opinions, that like those who perished in 

 the gainsaying of Korah, so these died without repenting these 

 spiritual wickednesses, of which Coppinger and Racket, and their 

 adherents, are too sad testimonies." ^ 



Perhaps one of the soundest criticisms ever pronounced upon 

 the merits of sermons, is contained in his description of those of 

 Hooker : " The design of his sermons (as indeed of all his dis- 

 courses) was to show reasons for what he spake ; and with these 

 reasons such a kind of rhetoric, as did rather convince and 

 persuade, than frighten men into piety ; studying not so much for 

 matter (which he never wanted), as for apt illustrations to inform 

 and teach his unlearned hearers by familiar examples, and then 

 make them better by convincing appUcations ; never labouring by 

 hard words, and then by needless distinctions and sub-distinctions 

 to amuse his hearers and get glory to himself, but glory only to 

 God, ' which intention,' he would often say, ' was as discernible in 

 a preacher, as an artificial from a natural beauty.' " ^ 



9 Life of Hooker, ed. Zouch, i. 353, 356- 1 Ibid. I. +24. 



