neighbours have drawn near, and stood up against thee:  from the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head there is no part whole.  Iniquity is proceeded from the elders, the judges, and deputies, which pretend to rule thy people.  We cannot say now, Look how the people be, so is the priest.  For the people is not so ill as the priest is.  Alas, alas, O Lord God, the selfsame persons be the chief in persecuting thee, which seem to love the highest place, and bear most rule in Thy Church!” The same Bernard again, upon the Canticles, writeth thus:  “All they are thy friends, yet are they all thy foes:  all thy kinsfolk, yet are they all thy adversaries.  Being Christ’s servants, they serve Antichrist.  Behold, in my rest, my bitterness is most bitter.”  Roger Bacon, also a man of great fame, after he had in a vehement oration touched to the quick the woeful state of his own time:  “These so many errors,” saith he, “require and look for Antichrist.”  Gerson complaineth, that in his days all the substance and efficacy of sacred divinity was brought unto a glorious contention and ostentation of wits, and to very sophistry.  The friars of Lyons, men, as touching the manner of their life, not to be misliked, were wont boldly to affirm, that the Romish Church (from whence alone all counsel and order was then sought) was the very same “harlot of Babylon and rout of devils,” whereof is prophesied so plainly in the Apocalypse.

I know well enough the authority of these foresaid persons is but lightly regarded among these men.  How then if I call forth those for witness, whom they themselves have used to honour?  What if I say that Adrian, the Bishop of Rome, did frankly confess that all these mischiefs brast out first from the high throne of the Pope?  Pighius acknowledgeth herein to be a fault, that many abuses are brought in, even into the very mass, which mass otherwise he would have seem to be a reverend matter.  Gerson saith, that through the number of most fond ceremonies, all the virtue of the Holy Ghost, which ought to have operation in us, and all true godliness, is utterly quenched and dead.  Whole Greece and Asia complain, how the bishops of Rome, with the marts of their purgatories and pardons, have both tormented men’s consciences and picked their purses.

As touching the tyranny of the bishops of Rome, and their barbarous Persian-like pride, to leave out others, whom perchance they reckon for enemies, because they freely and liberally find fault with their vices, the same men which have led their life at Rome in the holy city, in the face of the most holy father, who also were able to see all their secrets and at no time departed from the Catholic faith:  as, for example, Laurentius Valla, Marsilius Patavinus, Francis Petrarch, Hierom Savonarola, Abbot Joachim, Baptist of Mantua, and, before all these, Bernard the abbot, have many a time and much complained of it, giving the world also sometime to understand that the Bishop