idst a comical account of the prayers offered up to
their saintships, he mentions the tokens of gratitude to them hung upon
the walls and ceilings of churches; and adds, very shrewdly, that he
could find "no relics presented as a memorandum of any that were ever
cured of Folly, or had been made one dram the wiser." Even the worship
of the Virgin Mary is glanced at--her blind devotees being said "to
think it manners now to place the mother before the Son."

Erasmus calls the monks "a sort of brainsick fools," who "seem confident
of becoming greater proficients in divine mysteries the less they are
poisoned with any human learning." Monks, as the name denotes, should
live solitary; but they swarm in streets and alleys, and make
a profitable trade of beggary, to the detriment of the roadside
mendicants. They are full of vice and religious punctilios. Some of them
will not touch a piece of money, but they "make no scruple of the sin of
drunkenness and the lust of the flesh."

Preachers are satirised likewise. They are little else than
stage-players. "Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures! What heights
and falls in their voice! What teeming, what bawling, what singing, what
squeaking, what grimaces, making of mouths, apes' faces, and distorting
of their countenance; and this art of oratory, as a choice mystery, they
convey down by tradition to one another." Yes, and the trick of it still
lives in our Christian pulpits.

"Good old tun-bellied divines," and others of the species, come in
for their share of raillery. They know that ignorance is the mother of
devotion. They are great disputants, and all the logic in the world will
never drive them into a corner from which they cannot escape by some
"easy distinction." They discuss the absurdest and most far-fetched
questions, have cats' eyes that see best in the dark, and possess "such
a piercing faculty as to see through an inch-board, and spy out
what really never had any being." The apostles would not be able to
understand their disputes without a special illumination. In a happy
phrase, they are said to spend their time in striking "the fire of
subtlety out of the flint of obscurity." But woe to the man who meddles
with them; for they are generally very hot and passionate. If you differ
from them ever so little, they call upon you to recant; it you refuse
to do so, they will brand you as a heretic and "thunder out an
excommunication."

Popes fare as badly as preache