the Aloisians, Casians, and Diazians were. For if
these things would have pleased us, we needed not to have departed from
these men's fellowship, amongst whom such enormities be in their chief
pride and price. Neither needed we, for leaving them, to run into the
hatred of men, and into most wilful dangers. Paul the Fourth, not many
months sithence, had at Rome in prison certain Augustine friars, many
bishops, and a great number of other devout men, for religion's sake. He
racked them and tormented them: to make them confess, he left no means
unassayed. But in the end how many brothels, how many whoremongers, how
many adulterers, how many incestuous persons could he find of all those?
Our God be thanked, although we be not the men we ought and profess to
be, yet, whosoever we be, compare us with these men, and even our own
life and innocency will soon prove untrue and condemn their malicious
surmises. For we exhort the people to all virtue and well-doing, not
only by books and preachings, but also with our examples and behaviour.
We also teach that the Gospel is not a boasting or bragging of knowledge,
but that it is the law of life, and that a Christian man (as Tertullian
saith) "ought not to speak honourably, but ought to live honourably; nor
that they be the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law, which are
justified before God."

Besides all these matters wherewith they charge us, they are wont also to
add this one thing, which they enlarge with all kind of spitefulness:
that is, that we be men of trouble, that we pluck the "sword and sceptre
out of kings' hands;" that we arm the people: that we overthrow judgment
places, destroy the laws, make havoc of possessions, seek to make the
people princes, turn all things upside down: and, to be short, that we
would have nothing in good frame in a commonwealth. Good Lord, how often
have they set on fire princes' hearts with these words, to the end they
might quench the light of the Gospel in the very first appearing of it,
and might begin to hate the same ere ever they were able to know it, and
to the end that every magistrate might think he saw his deadly enemy as
often as he saw any of us!

Surely it should exceedingly grieve us to be so maliciously accused of
most heinous treason, unless we knew that Christ Himself, the Apostles,
and a number of good and Christian men, were in times past blamed and
envied in manner for the same faults. For although Christ t