A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 21cape, wherein he got the greatest victory that ever anyChristian prince betore that time obtained against the Turkishkings, with fifteen thousand soldiers he overthrewAbedin Bassa, sent against him most lagingly by reason ofa late shameful loss, according to Amurath's instructions,by " the slaughter of the flungarians to sacrifice unto themanes of their dead friends and companions," with an armyof fourscore thousand fighting men.^canderbeg also was such a mirror of manhood, and soterrible to the lurks, that nine years after his death, passingthrougli Lyssa where his body lay buried, *' they dug uphis bones with great devotion, reckoning it some part oftheir happiness if they might but see or touch the same ;and such as could get any part thereof, were it never solittle, caused the same to be set, some in silver, some ingold, to hang about their necks or wear upon their bodies,"thinking the very dead bones of that late invincible championwould animate their spirits with strange and extraordinaryelevation and vigour. Besides an admirable varietyof other rare exploits, at one time with the loss of sixtyChristians he slew Arnesa, with thirty, as some say, but atleast twenty thousand Turks : he killed with his own handabove two thousand enemies. When he entered into fight,the spirit of valour did so work within him, and the fiercenessof his courage so boiled in his breast, that it was wontto make blood burst out at his lips, and did so steel his armthat he cut many of his enemies asunder in the midst.But take notice, by the way, as the profession of theChristian religion inspired these renowned worthies with amatchless height of courage and might of spirit, so themixture with popish idolatry did then, and dotn to this dayunhappily hinder all thorough success and constant prevailingagainst that most mighty blood-thirsty Turkish tyrant,the terror of Christendom ; who, drunk with the wineof perpetual felicity, holds all the rest of the world in scorn,and is the greatest and most cruel scourge of it that everthe earth bore. And besides that the idolatry of the Romishchurch most principally and with special curse blasts andbrings to nought all undertakings of the Christian worldagainst that wicked empire, the practice also of some pestilentprinciples, proper to that man of sin, hath plaguedthe most hopeful enterprises in this kind. For instance, theking of Hungary, by the help of Huniades was in a faircourse and forwardness to have tamed and taken down,nay to have for ever crushed and confounded the insolencyand usurpation of that raging JNimrod ; but then comes inthe pope with a vile trick, and utterly dashes and undoes