steps, which all the holy
fathers, Apostles, and Angels, which Christ Himself the Son of God, as
often as was needful, did allege for testimony and proof; will ye, as
though they were unworthy for you to hear, bid them avaunt away? That
is, will ye enjoin God to keep silence, who speaketh to you most clearly
by His own mouth in the Scriptures? or that Word, whereby alone, as Paul
saith, we are reconciled to God, and which the prophet David saith, is
"holy and pure, and shall last for ever;" will ye call that "but a bare
and dead letter?" or will ye say that all our labour is lost which is
bestowed in that thing which Christ hath commanded us diligently to
search, and to have evermore before our eyes? And will ye say that
Christ and the Apostles meant with subtlety to deceive the people when
they exhorted them to read the Holy Scriptures, that thereby they might
flow in all wisdom and knowledge? No marvel at all though these men
despise us and all our doings, which set so little by God Himself and His
infallible sayings. Yet was it but want of wit in them, to the intend
they might hurt us, to do so extreme injury to the Word of God.

But Hosius will here make exclamation, saying we do him wrong, and that
these be not his own words, but the words of the heretic Zuenckfeldius.
But how then, if Zuenckfeldius make exclamation on the other side, and
say, that the same very words be not his, but Hosius' own words? For
tell me where hath Zuenckfeldius ever written them? or, if he have
written them, and Hosius have judged the same to be wicked, why hath not
Hosius spoken so much as one word to confute them? Howsoever the matter
goeth, although Hosius peradventure will not allow of those words, yet he
doth not disallow the meaning of the words For well near in all
controversies, and namely touching the use of the holy "communion under
both kinds," although the words of Christ be plain and evident, yet doth
Hosius disdainfully reject them, as no better than "cold and dead
elements;" and commandeth us to give faith to certain new lessons,
appointed by the Church, and to I wot not what revelations of the Holy
Ghost. And Pighius saith: "Men ought not to believe, no not the most
clear and manifest words of the Scriptures, unless the same be allowed
for good by the interpretation and authority of the Church."

And yet, as though this were too little, they also burn the Holy
Scriptures, as in times past wicked King Aza did, or as