144 LIVES OF THE PURITANS. as follows : " Coleman-street Conclave visited ; and that grand Impostor, the Schismatics Cheater in Chief; (who hath long slily lurked therein,) truly and duly discovered ; con- taining a most palpable and plain Display of Mr. John Goodwin's self-conviction, (under his own hand writing,) and of the notorious Heresies, Errors, Malice, Pride and Hypocrisyof this most hugeGaragantua in falsely pretended Piety, to the lamentable misleading of his too credulous soul-murdered Proselytes of Coleman-street, and elsewhere : collected principally out of his own big-braggadochio wave-like swelling and swaggering Writings, full fraught with six-footed Terms, and fieshlie rhetorical Phrases, far more than solid and sacred Truths, and may fitly serve, (if it be the Lord's will,) like Belshazzar's Hand-writing on the Wall of his Conscience, to strike Terror and Shame into his own Soul and shameless Face, and to undeceive his most miserably cheated, and inchanted or bewitched 'Followers," 1648. Facing the title is John Goodwin's picture, with a wind-mill over his head, and a weather-cock upon it : the devil is represented blowing the sails ; and there are other hieroglyphics or emblems about him, " designed," says Wood, " to shew the instability of the man."4 The late Mr. Toplady, in the fervour of his zeal against arminianism, seems highly delighted with what he calls ." this facetious title."t To us, however, it affords a lamentable proof of the degradation to which even good men sometimes subject themselves, when they suffer their passions to get the better of their reason. Such language, in the present day, would . in justice be treated with silent contempt. Though it does not appear at what place Mr. Vicars laboured in the ministry, one of his name was beneficed at Stamford inLincolnshire, and prosecuted for nonconformity. He was apprehended by a pursuivant and cast into prison, upon the bare accusation of a drunken, popish innkeeper, where he continued manyweeks before any articles were exhibited against him. He was afterwards bailed, but forced to enter into bonds not to go ten miles fromLondon. And when he was carried before his spiritual judges, he was again cast into prison, sentenced to pay a great fine, and deprived 'of his living, upon the most frivolous charges, which were disproved by many respectable witnesses.t Atheune Oxon. vol. ii. p. 85. Toplady's Historic Proof, vol. i. p.41. t Huntley's Prelates' Usurpations, p. 165.
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