My lords, if you know not how to rule your clergy, you
will most certainly, like a man that cannot rule his wife, have
neither quiet at home nor honor abroad. Their honest vocation is
to teach your children at the schools and the universities, and
the people in the parishes, and yours is concerned to see that
they do not play the shrews, of which parts does consist the
education of your commonwealth, so far as it regards religion.
"To justice, or that part of it which is commonly executive,
answers the education of the inns of court and chancery. Upon
which to philosophize, requires a public kind of learning that I
have not. But they who take upon them any profession proper to
the educations mentioned -- that is, theology, physic, or law --
are not at leisure for the essays. Wherefore the essays, being
degrees whereby the youth commence for all magistracies, offices,
and honors in the parish, hundred, tribe, Senate, or prerogative;
divines, physicians, and lawyers not taking these degrees,
exclude themselves from all such magistracies, offices, and
honors. And whereas lawyers are likest to exact further reason
for this, they (growing up from the most gainful art at the bar
to those magistracies upon the bench which are continually
appropriated to themselves, and not only endowed with the
greatest revenues, but also held for life) have the least reason
of all the rest to pretend to any other, especially in an equal
commonwealth, where accumulation of magistracy or to take a
person engaged by his profit to the laws, as they stand, into the
power, which is legislative, and which should keep them to what
they were, or ought to he, were a solecism in prudence.
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