The third vice is [Greek:  homonumia], which has a very wide range.  For example:  What is the meaning of an Order of Priests, when John has called us all priests? (Apoc. v. 10).  He has also added this:  we shall reign upon the earth.  What then is the use of Kings?  Again:  the Prophet (Isaias lviii.) cries up a spiritual fast, that is, abstinence from inveterate crimes.  Farewell then to any discernment of meats and prescription of days. Indeed?  Mad therefore were Moses, David, Elias, the Baptist, the Apostles, who terminated their fasts in two days, three days, or in so many weeks, which fasting, being from sin, ought to have been perpetual.  You have already seen what manner of argument this is.  I hasten on.

Added to the above is a fourth vice, Vicious Circle, in this way.  Give me the notes, I say, of the Church. The word of God and undefiled Sacraments.  Are these with you? Who can doubt it? I do, I deny it utterly. Consult the word of God. I have consulted it, and I favour you less than before. Ah, but it is plain. Prove it to me. Because we do not depart a nail’s breadth from the word of God. Where is your persecution?  Will you always go on taking for an argument the very point that is called in question?  How often have I insisted on this already?  Do wake up:  do you want torches applied to you?  I say that your exposition of the word of God is perverse and mistaken:  I have fifteen centuries to bear me witness stand by an opinion, not mine, nor yours, but that of all these ages. I will stand by the sentence of the word of God:  the Spirit breatheth where it will (John iii. 8).  There he is at it again; what circumvolutions, what wheels he is making!  This trifler, this arch-contriver of words and sophisms, I know not to whom he can be formidable:  tiresome he possibly will be.  His tiresomeness will find its corrective in your sagacity:  all that was formidable about him facts have taken away.

TENTH REASON

ALL MANNER OF WITNESS

This shall be to you a straight way, so that fools shall not go astray in it (Isaias xxxv. 8).

Who is there, however small and lost in the crowd of illiterates, that, with a desire of salvation and some little attention, cannot see, cannot keep to the path of the Church, so admirably smoothed out, eschewing brambles and rocks and pathless wastes!  For, as Isaias prophesies, this path shall be plain even to the uneducated; most plain therefore, if you choose, to you.  Let us put before our eyes the theatre of the universe:  let us wander everywhere:  all things supply us with an argument.  Let us go to heaven:  let us contemplate roses and lilies, Saints empurpled with martyrdom or white with innocence:  Roman Pontiffs, I say, three and thirty in a continuous line put to death:  Pastors all the world over, who have pledged their blood for the name of Christ: