copied, and the appearance, in 1642, of private editions,
forced the author to issue it himself.


_I.--THE BROAD-MINDED CHRISTIAN_


For my religion I dare, without usurpation, assume the honourable style
of a Christian. Not that I merely owe this title to the font, my
education, or the clime wherein I was born; but that having, in my riper
years and confirmed judgment, seen and examined all, I find myself
obliged, by the principles of grace and the law of mine own reason, to
embrace no other name but this.

But, because the name of a Christian is become too general to express
our faith--there being a geography of religion as well as lands--I am of
that reformed new-cast religion, wherein I dislike nothing but the name:
of the same belief our Saviour taught, the apostles disseminated, the
fathers authorised, and the martyrs confirmed; but, by the sinister ends
of princes, the ambition and avarice of prelates, and the fatal
corruption of the times, so decayed, impaired, and fallen from its
native beauty, that it required the careful and charitable hands of
these times to restore it to its primitive integrity.

Yet do I not stand at sword's point with those who had rather
promiscuously retain all than abridge any, and obstinately be what they
are than what they have been. We have reformed from them, not against
them, for there is between us one common name and appellation, one faith
and necessary body of principles common to us both; and therefore I am
not scrupulous to converse and live with them, to enter their churches