Their intolerable greed bears witness: their strange forgeries, absurdities, follies, wicked subtleties, frauds, illusions, new doctrines, paradoxes, traditions and false miracles, which they have continually fabricated to enslave, ensnare and subjugate people, maintaining their own possessions. At one time, through bulls, pardons, indulgences, their doctrine that good works earn merit, and hope of heaven, they have so fleeced ordinary people and spurred on this willing, superstitious horse that he runs himself blind and becomes an ass to carry burdens.

They have so enlarged Peter’s patrimony that, from a poor bishop, he has become King of kings, Lord of lords, a demigod—as his canon lawyers, Felinus and the rest, make him—above God himself. In wealth and worldly possessions he is not inferior to many kings; his cardinals are the peers of princes.

In almost every kingdom, abbots, priors, monks, friars and the rest of his clergy have gathered a third, a half, and in some places everything into their hands. Three prince-electors in Germany are bishops, besides those of Magdeburg, Speyer, Salzburg, Bremen, Bamberg, and so on.

In France, as Bodin tells us in his book On the Commonwealth, their revenues amount to twelve million three hundred thousand livres; and of the twelve parts of France’s revenues, the Church possesses seven. The Jesuits, a new sect begun in this age, have three or four hundred colleges in Europe, according to the reckoning of Middendorpius and Pelargus, and greater revenues than many princes. In France, as Arnoldus shows, within thirty years they have acquired two hundred thousand pounds a year: £200,000. I say nothing of their other orders.

In England, as Armachanus demonstrates, we have had more than thirty thousand friars at once. As Speed gathers from Leland and others, there were almost six hundred religious houses, with nearly two hundred thousand pounds in revenue at the old rental valuation, besides images of gold and silver, precious metal vessels, furniture, goods and ornaments. Weever calculates these possessions and estimates their worth at the dissolution of the abbeys at a million in gold.

How many towns in every kingdom has superstition enriched? What heaps of money their Mass-priests have amassed through musty relics, images and idolatry, and what sums they have scraped together through their other tricks! Loreto in Italy, Walsingham in England in those days—where everything gleams with gold, as Erasmus says—Saint Thomas’s shrine, and the rest, can bear witness. Delphi, once so renowned in Greece for Apollo’s oracle; Delos, a common meeting place and marketplace protected by religion alone; and Dodona, whose fame and wealth were sustained by religion, were neither so rich nor so famous.

If they can obtain even a relic of some saint, a picture of the Virgin Mary, idols or the like, that city’s fortune is made for ever; it needs no other support. Now if any of their frauds or juggling tricks is disputed or questioned—if a generous-spirited or zealous Luther, a heroic Luther, as Dithmarus calls him, dares threaten the monks’ bellies—everything is in a blaze, everything in uproar. Demetrius and his associates stand ready to tear him apart to preserve their trades: Great is Diana of the Ephesians! With a mighty shout lasting two hours they will roar and refuse to be pacified.

As for their authority: through private confession, satisfaction, penance, Peter’s keys, thunderings, excommunications and roaring bulls, this high priest of Rome, shaking his Gorgon’s head, has terrified many a simple person’s soul, trampled on majesty itself, and swaggered over almost all Europe for many ages. He still does so to some, keeping them in a servile subjection greater than that in which tyrannical Spaniards ever held the poor Africans they enslaved, or Turks their galley slaves.

The bishop of Rome, says his flatterer Stapleton in On the Greatness of the Church, 2.1, has accomplished without arms what the Roman emperors could never achieve with forty legions of soldiers: deposed kings and crowned them again with his foot, reconciled enemies and chastised at his pleasure, and so on. It is astonishing, says Machiavelli in Florentine Histories, book 1, what servitude King Henry II endured for the death of Thomas Becket, what the pope commanded him to do, and how he submitted to things that in our times a private man would not endure—all through superstition.

Henry IV, deposed from his empire, stood barefoot with his wife at the gates of Canossa. Emperor Frederick was trodden on by Alexander III. Another held Adrian’s stirrup; King John kissed the knees of Pandulph, the pope’s legate, and so on.

What made so many thousands of Christians travel from France, Britain and elsewhere into the Holy Land, spend such enormous sums, go so often on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawl and crouch in submission, but servile superstition? What makes them so readily risk their lives, leave their native countries and seek martyrdom in the Indies, but superstition? What makes them become assassins, face death and murder kings, but a false conviction of merit, of canonical or blind obedience, instilled into them, and encouragement through strange illusions and the hope of becoming martyrs and saints? Such fine tricks can the Devil perform through priests, and so skilfully can they play their parts for their own advantage.

And if it were still not enough to deceive mankind through priests and politicians, and torture people’s souls, he has more actors in his tragedy, more irons in the fire: another scene of heretics, factional and ambitious minds, arrogant spirits, schismatics, impostors, false prophets, and blind guides;