I wish all our simoniacal patrons, and those who withhold tithes, would read the judicious tracts written on this subject by Sir Henry Spelman and Sir James Sempill, and the recent, painstaking and learned treatises by Dr Tillesley and Mr Montagu. But even if they read them, it would do little good: “You may shout and confound sea with sky.” Thunder, flash lightning, preach hell and damnation, tell them it is a sin: they will not believe it.

Denounce and terrify them: their consciences are seared, and they pay no attention. Like the adder faced with a charm, they stop their ears. Call them base, irreligious, profane, barbarous, pagans, atheists, Epicureans—as some of them surely are—and, like the pimp in Plautus, they cry, “Bravo! Excellent!” They applaud themselves with that miser, “as soon as I gaze at the money in my chest”. Say what you will: “Money, by whatever means.” Like a dog barking at the moon, your words achieve nothing. Keep your heaven; let them have money.

A base, profane, Epicurean, hypocritical rabble! For my part, let them profess whatever zeal they please, counterfeit religion, blind the world’s eyes, pad themselves out and swell their greatness with the spoils of the Church, and glitter like so many peacocks. My charity is so cold, so deficient in this respect, that I shall never think better of them than that they are rotten at the core, their bones full of Epicurean hypocrisy and atheistical marrow. They are worse than heathens.

For, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus observes in Roman Antiquities, book 7, “First place”, and so on: Greeks and non-Greeks observe all their religious rites and dare not break them for fear of offending their gods. But our simoniacal dealers, our senseless Achans, our stupefied patrons fear neither God nor devil. They find evasions: it is no sin; or the payment is not due “by divine law”; or, if it is a sin, it is no great sin, and so on.

And though they are punished for it daily and plainly see that, as the saying goes, frost and fraud come to foul ends, yet, as Chrysostom pursues the point, “No correction comes from punishment; as though adversity provoked human wickedness, the thing to be punished grows daily.” They become worse rather than better: “They draw anger and defiance from their crime.” The more they are chastised, the more they offend.

But let them take their course: “Gnaw the vines, goat.” Let them go on as they began—it is no sin! Let them rejoice in their security. God’s vengeance will overtake them in the end, and these ill-gotten goods, like an eagle’s feathers, will consume the rest of their property. It is “the gold of Tolosa”, and will produce no better consequences.

“Let them store it safely,” says Chrysostom, “make their arrangements as secret as they please, lock and shut the door: fraud and greed, two most violent thieves, are still shut inside, and a little gain dishonestly acquired will overthrow the rest of their goods.”

The eagle in Aesop, seeing a piece of meat ready for sacrifice, snatched it up in her claws and carried it to her nest. But a burning coal happened to be stuck to it, and before she knew it, it consumed her, her young, her nest and everything together. Let our simoniacal patrons who trade in church livings, those sacrilegious Harpies, expect no better outcome.

A second cause is ignorance, and from it contempt: “Hatred of letters has arisen from the ignorance of the multitude,” as Junius clearly perceived. This hatred and contempt of learning proceeds from ignorance. Since they themselves are uncultivated, unlearned, dull, illiterate and proud, they judge others accordingly.

Let there be patrons like Maecenas, Flaccus, and Virgils will not be lacking.

Let there be generous patrons, and there will be hardworking scholars in every branch of knowledge. But when they despise learning and think themselves sufficiently qualified if they can read and write, stumble through a legal document, or know as much Latin as that emperor—“He who does not know how to dissemble does not know how to live”—they are unfit to serve their country or undertake any activity or employment that might benefit the commonwealth, except to fight or administer local justice with common sense, which any yeoman can equally do.

And so they bring up their children as uncultivated as themselves: unqualified, untaught and, for the most part, ill-mannered. “Who among our young people is properly educated in letters? Who touches the orators or philosophers? Who reads history, which is, as it were, the soul of practical affairs? Parents rush to fulfil their wishes, and so on.” This was Lipsius’s complaint to his illiterate countrymen; it may also be ours.

Are these men to judge a scholar’s worth, when they have no worth themselves, know nothing of a student’s labour, and cannot distinguish a true scholar from a drone? Or from someone who, with a fluent tongue, a strong voice, a pleasing tone and a few truant’s aids from a Polyanthea, steals and gleans a few notes from other people’s harvests, and so makes a finer show than someone genuinely learned? They think preaching is no more than talking, or running off with an empty cart, as a respected man said. And so they disparage us and our labour, and scorn us and all learning.

Because they are rich and have other means of support, they think learning is no concern of theirs and not worth their trouble. They think being a pen-and-ink man, a slave to book learning, is a fitter occupation for younger brothers or poor men’s sons, entirely unbecoming to a gentleman’s station. As Frenchmen and Germans commonly do, they therefore neglect all human learning. What have they to do with it?