the people the right serving of God, and brought them to worship the golden calves, lest perchance they might afterward change their mind and slip away, getting them again to Jerusalem to the temple of God, there he exhorted them with a long tale to be steadfast, saying thus unto them:  “O Israel, these calves be thy gods.  In this sort commanded your God you should worship Him, for it should be wearisome and troublous for you to take upon you a journey so far off, and yearly to go up to Jerusalem, there to serve and honour your God.”  Even after the same sort every whit, when these men had once made the law of God of non-effect through their own traditions, fearing that the people should afterward open their eyes and fall another way, and should somewhence else seek a surer mean of their salvation, Jesu, how often have they cried out, “This is the same worshipping that pleaseth God, and which He straitly requireth of us, and wherewith He will be turned from His wrath.  That by these things is conserved the unity of the Church.  By these all sins be cleansed, and consciences quieted, and that whoso departeth from these hath left unto himself no hope of everlasting salvation.”  For it were wearisome and troublous, say they, for the people to resort to Christ, to the Apostles, and to the ancient fathers, and to observe continually what their will and commandment should be.  This ye may see, is to “withdraw the people of God from the weak elements of the world, from the leaven of the Scribes and Pharisees, and from the traditions of men.”  It were reason, no doubt, that Christ’s commandments and the Apostles’ were removed, that these their devices might come in place.  O just cause, I promise you, why that ancient and so long allowed doctrine should be now abolished, and a new form of religion be brought into the Church of God.

And yet whatever it be, these men cry still that nothing ought to be changed:  that men’s minds are well satisfied herewithal:  that the Church of Rome, the Church which cannot err, hath decreed these things.  For Silvester Prierias saith, that the Romish Church is the squire and rule of truth, and that the Holy Scripture hath received from thence authority and credit.  “The doctrine,” saith he, “of the Romish Church is the rule of most infallible faith, from the which the Holy Scripture taketh his force.  And indulgences and pardons, saith he, are not made known to us by the authority of the Scriptures, but they are made known to us by the authority of the Romish Church, and of the Bishops of Rome, which is greater.”  Pighius also letteth not to say, that without the license of the Romish Church, we ought not to believe the very plain Scriptures.  Much like as if any of those that cannot speak pure and clean Latin, and yet can babble out quickly and readily a little some such law Latin as serveth the court, would needs hold that all others ought also to speak after the same way which Mammetrectus and Catholicon spake many years ago, and which themselves