<464>I should do both this worthy prelate<465> and myself much wrong, if I should not commend him for many good parts; being one whom I have long known to have been greatly respected and favoured by the late Queen, and no less liked and approved in the more learned judgement of his Majesty. Howbeit, the ground on which I would build his chief praise, to some of the Aristarchi<466> and sour censurers of these days, requires first an apology. For I remember, that even in Cambridge, about 25 years since, (and I am sure he remembers it too,) a question rose among the divines (scarce fit for the schools, less fit for the pulpit, yet was it both handled and determined in the pulpit,) whether rhetorical figures and tropes, and other artificial ornaments of speech taken from profane authors, as sentences, adages, and such like, might be used in sermons; and not rather the plain naked truth, delivered out of the word of God. The precise sort, that would have the word and church and all go naked, (saving for some apron, perhaps of fig-leaves,) were not only earnest, but bitter, against the use of all such human, or (as they called them,) profane helps; calling them paintings fitter for strumpets, than for sober and chaste matrons. But the graver and more orthodox were of the other opinion; and namely, my learned tutor, Doctor Flemming, by appointment of the heads of the colledges, in an excellent sermon determind the controversy. "That seing now the extraordinary gifts, first of tongues, next of miracles, was ceased; and that knowledge is not now infusa, but acquisita,<467> we should not despise the help of any human learning; as neither St. Paul did, who used the sentences of poets, as well as of prophets, and hath many excellent tropes, with exaggerations and exclamations in his epistles: for chastity doth not abhor all ornaments, and Judith did attire her head as curiously as Jezebel," &c.

            About 12 year after this, the very same question in the same manner was canvassed at Oxford, and determined in the pulpit by Dr. House, against Dr. Reynolds, who had held the other opinion: but upon occasion of this sermon, at which my brother, (that had been his scholar,) and myself, happened both to be present; he retracted to us his opinion, or rather disclaimed it, as my Lord of Durham that now is (but then dean of Christ Church) doth well remember. This opinion then being sound, that eloquence may serve as a handmaid, and tropes and figures as jewels and ornaments, to this chaste matron, Divinity; I must say (as I began,) that his sermons are as well attended, and adorned in this kind, and as plentifully as any of his predecessors have been, or his successors are like to be; and that they were wont so to be long since, sufficeth this testimony, that her Majesty that last reigned, when she first heard him, said, "she thought the Holy Ghost was descended again in this Dove."

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