nowledge, there is no
counsel against the Lord." "Things endure not" (saith Hilarius), "that
be set up with men's workmanship: by another manner of means must the
Church of God be builded and preserved: for that Church is grounded upon
the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, and is holden fast together
by one corner stone, which is Christ Jesu."

But marvellous notable, and to very good purpose for these days, be
Hierom's words: "Whosoever" (saith he) "the devil hath deceived, and
enticed to fall asleep, as it were with the sweet and deathly
enchantments of the mermaids the Syrens, those persons doth God's word
awake up, saying unto them, Arise, thou that sleepest; lift up thyself,
and Christ shall give thee light. Therefore, at the coming of Christ, of
God's word, of the ecclesiastical doctrine, and of the full destruction
of Nineveh, and of that most beautiful harlot, then, then shall the
people, which heretofore had been cast in a trance under their masters,
be raised up, and shall make haste to go to the mountains of the
Scripture; and there shall they find hills, Moses verily, and Joshua the
son of Nun, other hills also, which are the Prophets; and hills of the
New Testament, which are the Apostles and the Evangelists. And when the
people shall flee for succour to such hills, and shall be exercised in
the reading of those kind of mountains, though they find not one to teach
them (for the harvest shall be great, but the labourers few), yet shall
the good desire of the people be well accepted, in that they have gotten
them to such hills; and the negligence of their masters shall be openly
reproved." These be Hierom's sayings, and that so plain, as there
needeth no interpreter. For they agree so just with the things we now
see with our eyes have already come to pass, that we may verily think
that he meant to foretell, as it were, by the spirit of prophecy, and to
paint before our face the universal state of our time; the fall of the
most gorgeous harlot Babylon; the repairing again of God's Church; the
blindness and sloth of the bishops, and the good will and forwardness of
the people. For who is so blind, that he seeth not these men be the
masters, by whom the people, as saith Hierom, hath been led into error
and lulled asleep? Or who sooth not Rome, that is their Nineveh, which
sometime was painted with fairest colours, but now, her vizard being
palled off, is both better seen and less set by? Or who see