not only totally or collectively, but distributively in clauses and words, infinite springs and streams of doctrine to water the Church in every part.  And therefore as the literal sense is, as it were, the main stream or river, so the moral sense chiefly, and sometimes the allegorical or typical, are they whereof the Church hath most use; not that I wish men to be bold in allegories, or indulgent or light in allusions:  but that I do much condemn that interpretation of the Scripture which is only after the manner as men use to interpret a profane book.

(18) In this part touching the exposition of the Scriptures, I can report no deficiency; but by way of remembrance this I will add.  In perusing books of divinity I find many books of controversies, and many of commonplaces and treatises, a mass of positive divinity, as it is made an art:  a number of sermons and lectures, and many prolix commentaries upon the Scriptures, with harmonies and concordances.  But that form of writing in divinity which in my judgment is of all others most rich and precious is positive divinity, collected upon particular texts of Scriptures in brief observations; not dilated into commonplaces, not chasing after controversies, not reduced into method of art; a thing abounding in sermons, which will vanish, but defective in books which will remain, and a thing wherein this age excelleth.  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.  Neither did they respect the pureness of heart, so they might have external honour and rites.