[Sidenote:  An address]

“I beseech your Majesty to hear me with patience, and to believe that your’s and the Church’s safety are dearer to me than my life, but my conscience dearer than both:  and therefore give me leave to do my duty, and tell you, that Princes are deputed nursing Fathers of the Church, and owe it a protection; and therefore God forbid that you should be so much as passive in her ruin, when you may prevent it; or that I should behold it without horror and detestation; or should forbear to tell your Majesty of the sin and danger of Sacrilege.  And though you and myself were born in an age of frailties, when the primitive piety and care of the Church’s lands and immunities are much decayed; yet, Madam, let me beg that you would first consider that there are such sins as Profaneness and Sacrilege:  and that, if there were not, they could not have names in Holy Writ, and particularly in the New Testament.  And I beseech you to consider, that though our Saviour said, ‘He judged no man;’ and, to testify it, would not judge nor divide the inheritance betwixt the two brethren, nor would judge the woman taken in adultery; yet in this point of the Church’s rights he was so zealous, that he made himself both the accuser, and the judge, and the executioner too, to punish these sins; witnessed, in that he himself made the whip to drive the profaners out of the Temple, overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and drove them out of it.  And I beseech you to consider, that it was St. Paul that said to those Christians of his time that were offended with Idolatry, and yet committed Sacrilege; ’Thou that abhorrest Idols, dost thou commit Sacrilege?’ supposing, I think, Sacrilege the greater sin.  This may occasion your Majesty to consider, that there is such a sin as Sacrilege; and to incline you to prevent the Curse that will follow it, I beseech you also to consider, that Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, and Helena his Mother; that King Edgar, and Edward the Confessor; and indeed many others of your predecessors, and many private Christians, have also given to God, and to his Church, much land, and many immunities, which they might have given to those of their own families, and did not; but gave them for ever as an absolute right and sacrifice to God:  and with these immunities and lands they have entailed a curse upon the alienators of them:  God prevent your Majesty and your successors from being liable to that Curse, which will cleave unto Church-lands as the leprosy to the Jews.

“And to make you, that are trusted with their preservation, the better to understand the danger of it, I beseech you forget not, that, to prevent these Curses, the Church’s land and power have been also endeavoured to be preserved, as far as human reason and the law of this nation have been able to preserve them, by an immediate and most sacred obligation on the consciences of the Princes of this realm.  For they that consult Magna Charta shall find, that