he appears more zealous and violent for the cause than such as are retarded by conscience or consideration.  His religion is a mummery, and his Gospel-walkings nothing but dancing a masquerade.  He never wears his own person, but assumes a shape, as his master, the devil, does when he appears.  He wears counterfeit hands (as the Italian pickpocket did), which are fastened to his breast as if he held them up to heaven, while his natural fingers are in his neighbour’s pocket.  The whole scope of all his actions appears to be directed, like an archer’s arrow, at heaven, while the clout he aims at sticks in the earth.  The devil baits his hook with him when he fishes in troubled waters.  He turns up his eyes to heaven like birds that have no upper lid.  He is a weathercock upon the steeple of the church, that turns with every wind that blows from any point of the compass.  He sets his words and actions like a printer’s letters, and he that will understand him must read him backwards.  He is much more to be suspected than one that is no professor, as a stone of any colour is easier counterfeited than a diamond that is of none.  The inside of him tends quite cross to the outside, like a spring that runs upward within the earth and down without.  He is an operator for the soul, and corrects other men’s sins with greater of his own, as the Jews were punished for their idolatry by greater idolaters than themselves.  He is a spiritual highwayman that robs on the road to heaven.  His professions and his actions agree like a sweet voice and a stinking breath.

AN OPINIONATER

Is his own confidant, that maintains more opinions than he is able to support.  They are all bastards commonly and unlawfully begotten, but being his own, he had rather, out of natural affection, take any pains, or beg, than they should want a subsistence.  The eagerness and violence he uses to defend them argues they are weak, for if they were true they would not need it.  How false soever they are to him, he is true to them; and as all extraordinary affections of love or friendship are usually upon the meanest accounts, he is resolved never to forsake them, how ridiculous soever they render themselves and him to the world.  He is a kind of a knight-errant that is bound by his order to defend the weak and distressed, and deliver enchanted paradoxes, that are bewitched and held by magicians and conjurers in invisible castles.  He affects to have his opinions as unlike other men’s as he can, no matter whether better or worse, like those that wear fantastic clothes of their own devising.  No force of argument can prevail upon him; for, like a madman, the strength of two men in their wits is not able to hold him down.  His obstinacy grows out of his ignorance, for probability has so many ways that whosoever understands them will not be confident of any one.  He holds his opinions as men do their lands, and though his tenure be litigious, he will