Ceremony keeps up things: 'tis like a penny glass to a rich spirit, or some excellent water; without it the water were spilt, and the spirit lost.

Prayer should be short, without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this or that; He knows best wheat is good for us. If your boy should ask you for a suit of clothes and give you reasons, would you endure it? You know his needs better than he; let him ask for a suit of clothes.

Religion is like the fashion, one man wears his doublet slashed, another lashed, another plain; but every man has a doublet; so every man has a religion. We differ about the trimming.

Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up his dignity.

The clergy would have us believe them against our own reason, as the woman would have her husband against his own eyes.

No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man.

We pick out a text here and there to make it serve our turn; whereas , if we take it all together, and considered what went before and what followed after, we should find it meant no such thing.