Christian Classics
‹ Good Thoughts in Bad Times and Other Papers

Thomas Fuller · 168 of 228

XIV. Recovered.

TYRANNUS was a good word at first, importing no more than a king; the pride and cruelty of some made the word to bear ill, as it doth in the modern acceptation thereof.

, as good a word as any in divinity, hath suffered so much in the modern abusing thereof, that conscientious people begin to loathe and hate it. For God’s hath been alleged against God’s precepts. King’s bare word was never in our land produced against his broad seal. Yet success (an argument borrowed from the Turks) hath been pleaded as the voice of God’s approbation against his positive and express will in his word.

But God hath been pleased to vindicate his own honour, and to assert the credit of , which is now become a good word again. If impulsive (a new-coined phrase) hath given the late army their greatness, expulsive (a newer phrase) hath given them their smallness: being now set by, laid aside as useless; and not set by, so far from terrifying of any, by few they are regarded.