CHAPTER IV.

Containing an Account of the Rule, Lives, and Manners of the Popes and Papists, who would seem to be the only Head and Members of the holy Catholic Church.

BUT whilst these men so bitterly reflect upon us, why do they not sometimes think what they themselves are? Are they who have so much leisure to attend what is done at a distance in Germany and England, so forgetful or so blind, that they cannot see what is done at Rome? Are we to be impeached by them, whose lives are so dissolute, as no honest, modest man can without blushing tell their story?

Let

2. We do not now intend to bring to light allthose villanies which may be much better buried with them; it becomes neither our religion, nor our modesty and shamefacedness; and yet he that will needs be called the vicar of Jesus Christ, and the head of the church, may easily consider with himself what those things are which he hears and sees, and suffers to be done at Rome; for we will go no further in giving an account of what they are. him make use of his own memory; let him be pleased . to consider that they are his own canonists, who have taught the people, that simple fornication is no sin, as if they had learned from the heathen comedian this doctrine, that it is not a sin for a young man to whore. Let him consider they are his own again, who have determined that a priest is not to be deposed for fornication. Let him remember that Cardinal Campejus, Albertus Pighius, and many other of his lawyers, have taught, that the priest who keeps a concubine, lives much more chastely and holily than he who has a lawful wife. I hope he hath not forgotten that there are at Rome many thousands of

public licensed whores, and that he levies upon them yearly, by way of tax, thirty thousand ducats. He cannot forget, surely, that himself is a public pimp, and from this base profit doth as dishonourably and wickedly increase his revenues and pleasures. Were all things well and holy at Rome, when Pope Joan, a woman of dissolute life, was the head of their church, and when for two years she had in that holy see prostituted herself to the lust of others, at length, in a public procession, in the sight of all the cardinals and bishops, in the open street she brought forth a child?

3. But why should we mention their concubines and pimping? for these are common and public crimes at Rome, and not unprofitable neither, for the misses there do not sit without the gates with their faces veiled and covered, as in ancient times, but they dwell in palaces and stately houses, and pass to and fro in the most public streets without masks, as if their trade were not only lawful, but honourable: but why should I use many words? their lusts are sufficiently known to the whole earth. St. Bernard writes thus truly and freely of the Pope's family and the Pope himself: Your court receives good men sometimes, but it makes none good: evil men thrive there ; good men are ruined. And whoever he was who wrote the tripartite work, which is commonly joined to the Lateran council, he saith thus: There is now so prevailing a luxury, not only in the inferior clergy and priests, but also in the prelates and bishops, that it strikes horror into the hearers of it.

4. But these things are not only usual, and even for the sake of the custom approved (as most of their vices are), but they are now become so well known by their long use, that they are putid, ripe for judg ment. For who has not heard what Petrus Aloisus, the son of Paul III. designed against Cosmus

Cherius, bishop of Fano? What Jo. Casa, archbishop of Benevento, the Pope's legate at Venice, wrote of a sin to be abhorred, whilst with a lewd eloquence and abominable words he commends what ought not to be named? Who knows not that Alphonsus Diazius, a Spaniard, was sent from Rome into Germany of purpose to murder the most innocent and holy man, John Diazius, his own brother, only because he had embraced the Gospel, and would not return to Rome-which he accordingly did? But they may pretend, perhaps, that such things as these are, may sometimes happen in the best-constituted governments, and that there are excellent laws against them.

5. Be it so ;. but what law passed upon these pests? Petrus Aloisus, when he had attempted the villany I have hinted at, was ever after in the bosom of Paul III. his father and his joy. Diazius, after he had assassinated his brother, was delivered out of the hands of the law by the interposition of the Pope. Johannes Casa, archbishop of Benevento, is yet alive, and at Rome, and lives under the eyes and in the sight of His Holiness. They have slain infinite numbers of our brethren, only because they truly and purely believed in Jesus Christ; but then of that infinite number of harlots, sodomites, and adulterers, who have they at any time, I will not say slain, but excommunicated, or so much as touched? What! are fornications, adulteries, pimping, sodomy, parasites, incests, and the like, no sins at Rome? or if they be, why are they so easily borne, as if they were not sins, in the city of Rome, that bulwark of sanctity, and by the Pope the vicar of Christ, the successor of St. Peter, that most holy father?

6. O holy Scribes and Pharisees! to whom this sanctity was never known! O sanctity and Catholic faith! St. Peter did never teach these things at

Rome, nor St. Paul live there at this rate. They. did not publicly exercise the trade of pimping; they took no tribute of the whores; they did not openly and freely tolerate adulterers and parasites; they did not admit them into their bosoms, their families, their councils, nor into the congregations of Christian men. These men ought not to have aggravated so much the faults of our lives: it had been much better to have approved their own to the world, or at least to have concealed them a little more from the eyes of men.

7. For, as for us, we retain and use our ancient paternal laws, and administer church discipline, seriously and diligently, as far as we possibly can, in so much corruption of all things, both as to manners and times; we have no stews, nor herds of harlots and concubines; nor do we prefer adulteries before marriage; nor do we exercise pimping, nor raise money from whore-houses; neither do we suffer incests and flagitious lusts; our Aloise's, or our Casa's, or our parricidical murdering Diazio's, do not go unpunished: for if these things had pleased us, there had been no occasion of separating from the society of those men, where these (rare) things flourish, and are in great esteem; and so we had also escaped the hatred of men, and the apparent dangers we have run into by our departure from them. It is not many months since Paul IV. had some monks of the Augustine order in prison at Rome, and many bishops, and a vast number of pious men, for the sake of religion; he exercised his tortures and his racks, and left nothing untried, and at the last how many adulterers, how many sodomites, how many fornicators, how many incestuous men, did he find amongst them? Blessed be God, though we are not what we should be, nor what we profess to be, yet whatever we are, if we be compared with these, our very

lives and innocency will easily confute all their slan ders. For we excite the people, not only by books and sermons, but by example and good manners, to all sorts of virtues and good works. We teach, that the Gospel is not an ostentation of knowledge, but a law of life; and that, as Tertullian expresseth it, A Christian should not speak great things, but live them; and that not the hearers, but the doers of the law shall be justified before God. Rom. ii. 13.

8. To all these things they commonly add, and amplify it too with all manner of reproaches, that we are a turbulent sort of men, that we snatch the sceptres out. of the hands of princes, arm the people against them, subvert their judicatories and courts of justice, and endeavour to reduce monarchies to popular states or commonwealths, dissolve the laws, and retrench the revenues of princes, and turn all things topsy-turvy; and that, in short, if we had our wills, there should nothing continue safe in the government of the world. Oh! how often have they by such pretences incensed the minds of princes against us, that so they might crush the Reformation in its first springing up, and princes might be possessed with an aversion for our religion before they knew what it was; and that magistrates might entertain an opinion, that, whenever they saw one of us, they saw one of their enemies.

9. It would have been a great affliction to us, to be thus hatefully accused of so great a crime as treason, but that we know that Christ himself and his Apostles, and an infinite number of other pious Christians, have been made the objects of public envy on the same pretence; for Christ, though he commanded to render unto Cæsar the things that were Caesar's (Matt. xxii. 21), yet he was accused of sedition, in that he was said to design a change in the government, and to affect and intend a kingdom; and so