The Practice of Prelates

"Take heed, therefore, wicked prelates, blind leaders of the blind; indurate and obstinate hypocrites, take heed. For if the Pharisees for their resisting the Holy Ghost, that is to say, persecuting the open and manifest truth, and slaying the preachers thereof, escaped not the wrath and vengeance of God; how shall ye escape, which are far worse than the Pharisees? For though the Pharisees had shut up the scripture, and set up their own professions; yet they kept their own professions, for the most part. But ye will be the chiefest in Christ’s flock, and yet will not keep one jot of the right way of his doctrine. Ye have thereto set up wonderful professions, to be more holy thereby than ye think that Christ’s doctrine is able to make you, and yet keep as little thereof, except it be with dispensations; insomuch that if a man ask you, what your marvellous fashioned playing coats and your other puppetry mean, and what your disfigured heads and all your apish play mean, ye know not: and yet are they but signs of things which ye have professed. Thirdly, ye will be papists and hold of the pope; and yet, look in the pope’s law, and ye keep thereof almost nought at all. But whatsoever soundeth to make for your bellies, and to maintain your honour, whether in the scripture, or in your own traditions, or in the pope’s law, that ye compel the lay-people to observe; violently threatening them with your excommunications and curses, that they shall be damned, both body and soul, if they keep them not. And if that help you not, then ye murder them mercilessly with the sword of the temporal powers; whom ye have made so blind that they be ready to slay whom ye command, and will not yet hear his cause examined, nor give him room to answer for himself."