Those in between—some for private profit, the hope of advancement in the Church (who taught the parrot its “greetings”?), popularity or servile flattery—must and will believe all their paradoxes and absurd doctrines without exception. Just as stubbornly, they will uphold and practise all their traditions and idolatrous ceremonies to the death, for their religion is half a business.

They will defend everything, even the Golden Legend, with all its lies and stories, such as those of Saint George, Saint Christopher, Saint Winifred, Saint Denis and the rest. It is astonishing to see how Nicholas Harpsfield, that pharisaical impostor among the others, in his Ecclesiastical History, chapter 22 of the first six centuries, ties himself in knots defending the ridiculous fable of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins: when they lived, how they came to Cologne, who martyred them, and so on.

Although he can say nothing in its favour, he must and will endorse it: “Ursula and her companions,” he says, “ennobled this century. I wish her history were as clear and certain to me as I am clearly and certainly convinced that she is a blessed virgin in heaven with her companions.”

They must and will, I say, believe out of blind zeal, or shift their compass with everyone else as the latitude of religion changes, adapting themselves to the times and seasons. Through fear and flattery they are willing to give their assent and do everything in their power to uphold and defend the existing government.

And servile churchmen—scholastic theologians, canon lawyers, Jesuits, friars, priests, orators and sophists—either because they had nothing else to do, their over-abundant ingenuity finding no other occupation in those idle times when the Church had few or no open opponents, or to defend more effectively their lies, fictions, miracles, transubstantiations, traditions, papal pardons, purgatories, masses, impossibilities and so on,

have used splendid displays, attractive pretexts, imposing words and plausible ingenuity to invent a thousand pointless questions, minute distinctions, subtleties, objections and solutions, moral and allegorical interpretations to explain away every appearance and objection; such quirks and quiddities, disputations on any subject whatever—as Bale says of Ferribrigge and Strode—counterexamples, extensions, decrees, glosses and canons,

so that sound commentaries and good preachers have been replaced by a crowd of mad sophists, first-and-second-part-of-the-second-part men, sectarians, canon lawyers, Sorbonne theologians and Franciscan friars, with a mob of pointless controversies and questions: Is the pope God, or something like God? Does he share both of Christ’s natures?

Is it as possible for God to be a bumblebee or a gourd as a man? Can he produce a relation without a foundation or an object, make a prostitute a virgin, or fetch Trajan’s soul from hell—and how? Then comes a crowd of questions about hellfire: is it a greater sin to kill a man or patch shoes on a Sunday? Can God make another God like himself?

Such, says Chemnitz, are most of your scholastic theologians—mere alchemists: two hundred commentators on Peter Lombard. Pits’s Catalogue of English Writers counts one hundred and eighty English commentators alone on the subject of the Sentences: Scotists, Thomists, realists, nominalists and the rest.

And so perhaps Saint Augustine’s saying may be proved true: The unlearned seize heaven, while the learned descend into hell. Thus they persisted in such error, blindness, decrees, sophisms and superstitions. Pointless ceremonies and traditions made up their newly minted holiness and religion. Through these tricks and stratagems they could entangle multitudes, deceive the most sanctified souls and, if it were possible, the very elect.

Meanwhile the true Church, like wine mixed with water, lay virtually hidden and obscure until Luther’s time. Suddenly he began to clarify it and, like another sun, to drive away those foggy mists of superstition and restore the purity of the early Church. After him, many good and godly men, inspired spirits, have worked to the same end, and still do.

And what their ignorance thought so holy, Our wiser ages reckon as folly.

But look at the devil, who will never let the Church be quiet or at rest. No garden is so well cultivated that harmful weeds do not spring up in it; no wheat is without its tares. Even among ourselves we have a mad, giddy company of religious rigorists, schismatics and some heretics at the opposite extreme: Fools, avoiding one vice, rush into its opposite.

In their excessive zeal against Antichrist, human traditions, Roman rites and superstitions, they would demolish everything. They allow no ceremonies whatever, no fast days, no sign of the cross at baptism, no kneeling at Communion, no church music and so on; no bishops’ courts, no church government. They rail against all our ecclesiastical discipline and will not hold their tongues—all for your peace, O Zion!

Some will not even tolerate degrees, universities or any human learning—it is the devil’s sewer. Hoods, robes, caps and surplices, things morally indifferent in themselves and used solely for ornament, propriety or distinction, they abhor, hate and snort at like a stallion meeting a bear. They make matters of conscience of them and would rather give up their church livings than assent to their use.

They allow no holy days or innocent recreations such as hawking and hunting; some allow no churches or bells because Catholics use them. They accept no discipline or ceremonies except those they invent themselves; no interpretations of Scripture, commentaries of the Church Fathers or councils except what their own fanciful spirits dictate—or right reason, as the Socinians call it. Misled by this spirit, they often put forward paradoxes as monstrous as those of the Catholics themselves.

Some become prophets, have secret revelations, claim to sit on God’s own privy council and know all his secrets: They hold the Holy Spirit by the hair and know everything, although they are the most obstinate asses of all.