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from the following elegant extracts. If we perchance should not mark the page from which we have copied, we beg the reader to attribute it to the hurry of short, furtive visits to St. Patrick's Library. FitzSimon writes:

"How do you like, Mr. Rider, this dislike of St. Jerome and Tertullian towards your women's scripturing? But plead well for them, and make much of them; for, in my own knowledge, you have need to seek credit among them, considering that few or none of them, how base soever, but disdain marriage with the ministers of the word, and accept of them only for want of others.'

"Mr. Rider is specially troubled that a word by me was miswritten bless for break, and he exclaims at it as at the most wicked infidelity in the world. Now this very word bless he delivers Bess, as if he were thinking of some sister in the Lord of that name. I say nothing else thereto, but that your Fidd (for so you are wont to name Fidworth, your wife) might enjoy your mind also from all Besses and business that your bonds and brains cannot brook, and consequently contain your homeliness in homely matters, without engaging them in school points; wherein, even by your physiognomy, you are denied to have any interest.

"He often tells us he is a man sine fuco et fraude; yet the London Counter Prison often embraced him, the Dublin Senate House, or Tholsel, denounced him as a Sir; and now lastly, for like fuco et fraude, as Beza used in selling his benefices to divers, and for such enormities he is deposed from his ample Deanery of St. Patrick's, and is also likely in time to pass from holding a Provostry to be holden in a Provostry.2

"He promises and threatens to prove many things in print. But he will perform these promises in his printed books, when he performeth other promises in merchants' books, the frustration whereof in London was otherwise encountered than in Dublin. If he performed his promises, many a merchant would be rejoiced, and many a long expectation satisfied.3

"He is a plain Puritan, and yet will take to himself the name of Protestant-imitating the nature of the Polypus, a fish which borroweth the colour of whatsoever it sticketh to, whereby not being mistrusted it deceiveth, and receiveth all prey passing by. Being a man of all times and professions,' omnium horarum homo,' he will lose nothing within his reach, though he should change his shape and name from Puritan to State Protestant, and back again. Now he is, as the new phrase of soldiers beareth, reformed from the Protestants among the Puritans.

"I confess myself to be sometimes offended with our learned 1" Confutation," 269. "Replie," 71. 3" Confutation," 243. "Confutation," 302.

controversialists, because they suffer the adversaries, without any right, to harp upon every mention of the spiritual being of Christ in the Blessed Eucharist as being favourable to them; whereas indeed their doctrine is carnal, not only by gross and pharisaical conceiving of the word corporal, but also by not enduring the word spiritual to belong to that mystery-which hitherto few seem to have duly observed, and of which these two proofs may serve for a taste. . . . The spiritual Mr. Rider thinks he has as good a right to all testimonies containing the word spiritually, although otherwise they be most repugnant to him, as to all tithes and fruits of his Deanery bequeathed for purposes altogether opposite to his wonted offices of spirituality, as if he fulfilled them. As often as he hath denied, or shall deny the Fathers to be of our opinion, which happeneth in most of his discourses and sermons, and in all his books, so often he hath been and will be to himself such a disprover as Daniel was to the discordant judges.

"This tender-hearted gentleman, for so he is now lately by God's permission and good St. Patrick, is shaking and quaking to deliver doctrine by us, as he saith, printed, but indeed only by himself forged. To term this an untruth is more courteous, and expresseth sufficiently the matter. He wrote against the Cross when he was a Puritan; now, perhaps, he dares not christen without it. In the meantime, in his great wisdom he hath made to Protestants and Catholics many points known, which had been more to his behoof unrevealed.

"Can he seem to any men worthy to be held a lawful preacher or faithful witness (when so many his betters are in great extremity), who hath yearly above 1500 raziers or combs of corn, besides other commodities in such a choice Deanery? Mr. Rider testifies that a certain author denies the Real Presence. He no more denies the matter than if one should confess you to have the rich Deanery of St. Patrick's; and muse by what means, whether by assured simony, or unknown desert, or blind choice you came thereto-whereof, God willing, I will treat in the Explication of the Mass.

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"You boast that you have proved my answer to be bran. A speech in season, tractat fabrilia faber!' Being a baker, it is a pity you changed white for black. However, as a

second Melancthon, you have again forsaken your book to be a baker; but as you have so many barrels of corn, without any more function, as you say, than any believing Christian, should be commanded to sell double size to that of the poor Dublinian bakers, who buy their corn in the market and must bear cess and press, watch and ward, &c.1 You make an apostrophe to the city of Dublin. Dublin knows you too well, "Replie," 23.

and few of your sort better, not only for your former hindrance of the bakers therein, but also for your transferring their trade of merchandize into your house and liberties among your own sons-in-law-they being foreigners and very fleshworms in Dublin; such as neither cess nor press, watch nor ward, toll nor custom, and in the meantime suck the juice of the city into their private purses under the warmth of your wings (to use your own phrase) and under the protection of your liberties.1

"Since you have appealed to Eusebius, to him you shall go. I will once again, as the proverb says, exalt the baker to the pillory, and make no other than the witness by him alleged to nail his ears Your conclusion is, then, that treason is committed by injury to the pictures and persons alike. Then woe and well away to all your brethren image-breakers. Then woe and well away to Waller the murderer, under-minister of Swords, who, in the year 1603, hanged on a gibbet the image of Christ crucified. Then woe and well away to Mr. Rider, who, only to have stones to build an oven to bake bread (to impoverish the bakers of the city, not having idly or without price seventeen hundred barrels of corn yearly, as he hath), pulled down the fair Cross in St. Patrick's, which all others his predecessors of that profession had permitted unviolated; and to the same use to have fire, pulled down all the trees therein. This sentence of his, given against himself and brethren, made his own son, in May, 1604, when he attempted to pull down an image, to be by God's judgment precipitated from a height and altogether crushed, and at the same time caused his servant to be stricken with the plague.2

"The keeping away of certain books from the Faithful is, you say, our strongest tenure.' First I answer, the phrase of 'tenure,' in that sense wherein it seemeth intended, is new and improper. However it bringeth to my memory, how you, reprehending minister Hicoxe for keeping a trull, and he you for you know what, you called him base and he called you counter. Whereunto if you conjoin your word tenure,' it may be forgotten how close the counter in London and you were married together; and divers will or may think by such conjunction thereof with 'tenure,' that his meaning was only that you sang a counter in London, and in Dublin reached to a tenure; and that your meaning was only that he sang a base and never could reach higher. I also observe among yourselves that you debar several books of ours from reading ; rifling men's houses for them, and forfeiting all them you find as lords over all men's goods.3

146 Confutation," 286. "Confutation," pp. 210, 370.
364 Confutation," p. 270.

"Mr. Rider, by you, and such as you, the churches have been turned into stables, the vestments to cushions and breeches, the chalices to swilling bowls, churchmen have been pursued, and thousands of religious houses have been profaned and burned. Yet you, Mr. Rider, quote St. Bernard against the Catholic priests, though all he says belongs to your last attire, wherein I did behold you, when you came forth in your short cloak and cassock, ungirded and lifted before on both sides, to present in sight a great trunk pair of French russet, or dowk purple velvet breeches. And at other times when you glisten and rustle in your satin gown, faced with velvet, in your silks and in your pontificalibus, upon my conscience, among all the Princes of blood of the clergy whom I viewed in Rome or elsewhere, I did behold none so player-like, or whose altars were so far less bright than their spurs, as yours and your own self.1

"This Mr. Rider was pronounced infamous by the voice of the public crier, from a Wigan miller turning Oxford student, by perjury he became an abortive little master. This bad grammarian and worse vocabulary-maker, this convicted simoniac turned master of the word; the notorious impostor, who was often imprisoned as well in England as in Ireland; the spendthrift become Dean; the quarrelsome rake metamorphosed into a bishop. Such is the wood from which these Mercuries and minister-bishops are made."2

FitzSimon hits hard. There is an aroma of the Elizabethan era in his words. What a character he gives of Rider, who was mitred soon after FitzSimon had rubbed shame on his face! He was not as bad as his contemporaries Bishop Tod, or Bishop Atherton of Waterford, who was hanged for an abominable crime, or as the founders of the Elizabethan Church, who, says the Protestant Dr. Littledale, "were such utterly unredeemed villains for the most part, that to compare them to the Jacobin leaders would be somewhat unjust to Robespierre, Danton, and Marat."

As to the Dean's veracity we find the following assertions in FitzSimon :—

"His words are continually true, like dreams, contrariously, for, upon my credit, St. Chrysostom hath neither any such homily nor any such doctrine. Behold how contrarious to all Christianity, yet how courageous he is! My good sir, afford us some citation of such our doctrine, according to your promise to allege book, leaf, etc., or else we will think that we may lawfully say you ride, so great an itching vexeth you to

1 Confutation." 2 "Britannomachia."

3" This conviction," says Dr. Littledale, " has been built up in me by years of careful reading.”—Dr. Littledale's Letter to the Guardian, May 20, 1868.

corrupt and deprave. You only want to delude, and only for purchasing of time during your not being confuted, you audaciously affirm what all Christians, as well Catholics as Protestants, do deny, and you deny what they affirm, you being in fact disabled by the State for your enorme ignorance.

"In your Claim to Antiquitie you have been guilty of at least two hundred and eight lewd, loud, and palpable untruths, which I have pointed out and confuted. All your untruths tend to one capital untruth, and thus all your allegations are converted into a main sea of one falsehood. Spit out, man, and let truth have once a clean seat in your mouth.1 Contradict not the truth by any means, and of the lie of thy unlearnedness be confounded.'-(Eccl. 7.)

"Lying is intrinsical to your profession. I know not what this assertion of yours is, if it be not to ride as fast as your tilt can gallop, and that you may not ride alone, Luther has sent this sentence as a footboy to accompany you: 'He that once lieth is in all things to be suspected.'

"If denials were disproofs, if the dissembling of our arguments were the dissolving of them, if hypocritical protestations be allowed for lawful pleadings, our cause will lose its process. Your hundred and thirteenth untruth is, that there is scarcely a line in the seven chapters of such book of St. Athanasius but containeth a lie. I remember one Mistress Kirie, an Englishwoman, who dwelled in St. Thomas-street in Dublin, in 1580, to have been replied to by a poor begging woman who had craved her alms for the sake of God and our Ladie; when Mistress Kirie said she would give nothing for our Ladie, because she was better than she herself. Mischief,' said the beggar, 'take the worse of you both.' The same might be said of the most lying lines in your book, and the one here specified. You have gotten the habit or facility and perfection of falsifying, that now it is ingrafted in you as a second natural inclination.2

"In whom is the lie here? Mr. Rider dareth not say it is in Theodoret. He can bestow it nowhere so well as on his own lips, where it is in a proper freehold and habitation of inheritance. There it is as in the most impregnable sconce, out of which truth is banished and hath lost all jurisdiction. Of which sconce the teeth are the walls, the lips the rampart, the beard the trenches. There it is as a cock crowing on its own dunghill, whom as the lion, king of the beasts, cannot terrify, so is falsehood in that mouth, teeth, lips, beard and dunghill not surmountable by veritie. My cavaliero has a resolution to trample all truth under foot, like the Protestant, 1" Confutation," 355. 26 Confutation," 380.

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