“What a world of wit is here packed together! I know not whether the sight doth more dismay or comfort me. It dismays me to think that here is so much I cannot know; it comforts me to think that this variety yields so good helps to know what I should. Blessed be the memory of those who have left their blood, their spirits, their lives, in these precious books, and have willingly wasted themselves into these during monuments, to give light unto others.”
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Joseph Hall was an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way.
Bishop Hall's polemical writings, although vigorous and effective, were chiefly of ephemeral interest, but many of his devotional writings have been often reprinted.