PREFACE. THE celebrating of the praises of the dead, is an argument so worn out by long and frequent use, and now become so nauseous, by the flattery that usually attends it, that it is no wonder if funeral orations, or panegyricks, are more considered for the elegancy of style, and fineness of wit, than for the authority they carry with them, as to the truth of matters of fact. And yet I am not hereby deterred from meddling with this kind of argument, nor from handling it with all the plainness I can delivering only what I myself heard and saw, without any borrowed ornament. I do easily foresee how many will be engaged for the support of their impious maxims and immoral practices, to disparage what I am to write. Others will censure it, because it comes from one of my profession, too many supposing us to be indu 1 ced to frame such discourses for carrying on what they are pleased to call our trade. Some will think I dress it up too artificially, and others, that I present it too plain and naked. But, being resolved to govern myself by the exact rules of truth, I shall be less concerned in the censures I may fall under. It may seem liable to great exception, that I should disclose so many things, that were discovered to me, if not under the seal of confession, yet under the confidence of friendship; but this noble lord himself not only released me from all obligations of this kind, when I waited on him in his last sickness, a few days before he died, but gave it me in charge, not to spare him in any thing, which I thought might be of use to the living; and was not ill pleased to be laid open, as well in the worst as in the best and last part of his life; being so sincere in his repentance, that he was not unwilling to take shame to himself, by suffering his faults to be exposed for the benefit of others. " I write with one great disadvantage-that I cannot reach his chief design, without mentioning some of his faults: but I have touched them as ten derly as occasion would bear; and I am sure with much more softness than he desired, or would have consented to, had I told him how I intended to manage this part. I have related nothing with personal reflections on any others concerned with him; wishing rather they themselves, reflecting on the sense he had of his former disorders, may be thereby led to forsake their own, than that they should be any ways reproached by what I write; and therefore, though he used very few reserves with me, as to his course of life, yet, since others had a share in most parts of it, I shall relate nothing but what more immediately concerned himself; and shall say no more of his faults, than is necessary to illustrate his repentance. The occasion, that led me into so particular a knowledge of him, was an intimation, given me by a gentleman of his acquaintance, of his desire to see me. This was sometime in October, 1679, when he was slowly recovering out of a great disease. He had understood, that I had often attended on one well known to him, that died the summer before; he was also then entertaining himself, in that low state of health, with the first part of the History of the Reformation, then newly come out, with which |