by his own blow be smitten violently with the wound
of an anathema. At length yielding your lives to wickedness, reaching
the two paths of Pythagoras, ye choose the left branch, and going
backward ye let go the lot of God which ye had first assumed, becoming
companions of thieves. And thus ever going from bad to worse, dyed
with theft and murder and manifold impurities, your fame and conscience
stained by sins, at the bidding of justice ye are confined in manacles
and fetters, and are kept to be punished by a most shameful death.
Then your friend is put far away, nor is there any to mourn your lot.
Peter swears that he knows not the man: the people cry to the judge:
Crucify, crucify Him! If thou let this man go, thou act not Caesar's
friend. Now all refuge has perished, for ye must stand before the
judgment-seat, and there is no appeal, but only hanging is in store for
you. While the wretched man's heart is thus filled with woe and only
the sorrowing Muses bedew their cheeks with tears, in his strait is
heard on every side the wailing appeal to us, and to avoid the danger
of impending death he shows the slight sign of the ancient tonsure
which we bestowed upon him, begging that we may be called to his aid
and bear witness to the privilege bestowed upon him. Then straightway
touched with pity we run to meet the prodigal son and snatch the
fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he has not forgotten
is handed to him to be read, and while with lips stammering with fear
he reads a few words, the power of the judge is loosed, the accuser is
withdrawn, and death is put to flight. O marvellous virtue of an
empiric verse! O saving antidote of dreadful ruin! O precious reading
of the psalter, which for this alone deserves to be called the book of
life! Let the laity undergo the judgment of the secular arm, that
either sewn up in sacks they may be carried out to Neptune, or planted
in the earth may fructify for Pluto, or may be offered amid the flames
as a fattened holocaust to Vulcan, or at least may be hung up as a
victim to Juno: while our nursling at a single reading of the book of
life is handed over to the custody of the Bishop, and rigour is changed
to favour, and the forum being transferred from the laity, death is
routed by the clerk who is the nursling of books.

But now let us speak of the clerks who are vessels of virtue. Which of
you about to preach ascends the pulpit or the rostrum without in some