st escaped
must fall into the snare of wickedness, and for the first time be
truly captured. A child that has been baptised, rescued from all
sins, snatched from the devil and set out from Adam into Christ, when
he comes to reason is soon entangled and led away into error. Men
should be taught of faith, and love, and the holy cross, while our
clergy go their own way, throw up their work whereby these persons
fall back again into error, even though they had escaped it. But how
does this come to pass? Thus: in that by guile they allure the people
to the lust of the flesh. Their strongest persuasion is in their
saying that priests, monks and nuns should not be married, and should
bind themselves to maintain chastity, by which they do no more than
allure to unchastity, forasmuch as the wretched people must perish in
their wicked lusts, and there is nothing to help them.

But here you clearly see that Peter speaks of none other than
teachers who bear rule in Christendom, where men are baptised and
believers,--for among the Turks and heathen, no one has so escaped;
it is only among Christians, where they have the chance to lead souls
astray, and bring them into the snare of the devil.

V. 19. _And they promise them freedom, while they themselves are the
servants of corruption, for of whom any one is overcome, his servant
has he become._ They set up Orders by which a man is to be saved,--as
Thomas, the monk preacher, has shamelessly written, that when a man
shall enter into one of these Orders, be it as vile as it may, it is
as though he had but just come forth from his baptism; and then they
promise him freedom and forgiving of sins by works of his own. Such
blasphemy must we hear, while they set their human fancies and
ludicrous conceits, destitute of faith, on a level with faith and
baptism which God has established, and which are peculiarly his work.
Who is to endure this and still keep silent? Such stories have the
monks gotten up, and they cram them into the young; and such teachers
as these men have set up for saints. But the other saints, truly
such, they have burnt to ashes.

V. 20. _For if they have escaped the pollution of the world through
the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, but shall be
again entangled and overcome in the same, their last end is worse for
them than the first._ There Peter shows why they are the servant of
corruption. To confess Christ is to know what he is, even our
Saviour