ions, your tyranny. They
have required in you a long season, and yet require, diligence and
sincerity. I commanded you, that with all industry and labour ye should
feed my sheep: ye earnestly feed yourselves from day to day, wallowing in
delights and idleness. I commanded you to teach my commandments, and not
your fancies; and that ye should seek my glory and my vantage: you teach
your own traditions, and seek your own glory and profit. You preach very
seldom; and when ye do preach, do nothing but cumber them that preach
truly, as much as lieth in you: that it were much better such were not to
preach at all, than so perniciously to preach. Oh, what hear I of you?
You, that ought to be my preachers, what other thing do you, than apply
all your study hither, to bring all my preachers to envy, shame,
contempt? Yea, more than this, ye pull them into perils, into prisons,
and, as much as in you lieth, to cruel deaths. To be short, I would that
christian people should hear my doctrine, and at their convenient leisure
read it also, as many as would: your care is not that all men may hear
it, but all your care is, that no lay man do read it: surely, being
afraid lest they by the reading should understand it, and understanding,
learn to rebuke our slothfulness. This is your generation, this is your
dispensation, this is your wisdom. In this generation, in this
dispensation, you be most politic, most witty. These be the things that
I hear of your demeanour. I wished to hear better report of you. Have
ye thus deceived me? or have ye rather deceived yourselves? Where I had
but one house, that is to say, the church, and this so dearly beloved of
me, that for the love of her I put myself forth to be slain, and to shed
my blood; this church at my departure I committed unto your charge, to be
fed, to be nourished, and to be made much of. My pleasure was ye should
occupy my place; my desire was ye should have borne like love to this
church, like fatherly affection, as I did: I made you my vicars, yea, in
matters of most importance.

"For thus I taught openly: 'He that should hear you, should hear me; he
that should despise you, should despise me.' I gave you also keys, not
earthly keys, but heavenly. I left my goods that I have evermore most
highly esteemed, that is, my word and sacraments, to be dispensed of you.
These benefits I gave you, and do you give me these thanks? Can you find
in your hearts thus to abuse my goo