Forty Sermons, Dedication 2
TO THE Right Honourable EDWARD Earl of CLARENDEN, Lord high Chancellour of England, and Chancellour of the University of Oxford.
My LORD,
TO vouch your Lordships commands for the publishing this Discourse, I might reasonably think, would be to libel your judgment; and the prefixing your Name to it, and this mean address, would look rather like revenge than homage or obedience: If I did not know that low performances are due to the transcendency of such a subject as I then discours'd upon, and such a Patron as I now Dedicate to: So I lie prostrate under my great Arguments, here insufficiency is Art and Rhetorick. And the truth is, My Lord, it was not this which made me so sollicitous to avoid your injunctions, but apprehensions of the unusefulness of the Discourse it self.
When God's most signal methods of all sorts do not seem to have wrought much conviction; when neither our own dismal guilts, nor miseries, nor most express miracles of deliverance have made us sensible, but after the equally stupendous Thirtieth of January and Twenty Ninth of May, and the black time that interven'd; we are still the same perverse untractable people; when luxury is the retribution made for plenty, license for liberty, and Atheism for Religion, whil'st miracles of mercy are acknowledged only by prodigies of ingrateful disobedience: And on the other side, when factious humours swell against all Laws, as they would either over-flow those mounds, or make them yield and give way to them; when Declarations and Decrees, which infallible when they came only from a party of a part of a Parliament, are neither of force nor esteem when they have all solemnity and obligation that just and full authority can give; alas, what hopes of doing any thing can a weak Harangue entertain? But, My Lord, since you are pleas'd to Command, I give up both it and my understanding to Your Lordship, and the weaker the Discourse is, so much the more pregnant testimony is it of the obsequiousness of.
My Lord, Your Lordships most devoted and most humble Servant, RICH. ALLESTRY.