A03519:72
Certain Sermons or Homilies (First Book of Homilies)
Certain sermons, or homilies appointed by the kings Majesty, to be declared and read, by all persons, vicars, or curates, every Sunday in their churches, where they have cure. Anno 1547.Certayne sermons, or homelies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie, to be declared and redde, by all persones, vicars, or curates, euery Sondaye in their churches, where they haue cure. Anno 1547.
London: printed by Richard Grafton printer to his most royal Majesty, 1547London: printed by Rychard Grafton printer to his moste royall Maiestie, 1547
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
some Jupiter, Juno, Diana, Saturnus, Apollo,1 Neptunus Ceres, Bacchus, and other dead men and women: Some therewith not satisfied, worshipped diverse kinds of beasts, birds, fish, foul, and serpents ⟨image 33⟩every Region, town, and house, in manner being divided, and setting up Images of such things as they liked, and worshipping the same. Such was the rudeness of the people, after they fell to their own phantasies, and left the eternal living GOD and his commandments, that they devised innumerable Images, & Gods. In which error and blindness they did remain, until such time as almighty GOD, pitying the blindness of man, sent his true prophet Moses into the world, to reprehend this extreme madness, and to teach the people to know the only living God, and his true honour and worship. But the corrupt inclination of man, was so much given to follow his own phantasies, and (as you would say) to favour his own bird, that he brought up himself, that all the admonitions, exhortations, benefits, and threatenings of God, could not keep him from such his inventions. For notwithstanding all the benefits of God,2 showed unto the people of Israel, yet when Moses went up into the mountain, to speak with almighty God: he had tarried there but a few days, when the people began to invent new gods. And as it cam in their heads, they made a calf of gold,3 and knelled down & worshipped it. And after that, they followed the Moabites, & worshipped Beelphegor the Moabites God. Read the book of Judges, the books of the Kings and the Prophets, and there shall you find, how inconstant the people were, how full of inventions, and more ready to run after their own phantasies, then Gods most holy commandments. There shall you read of Baal, Moloch, Chamos, Mechom, ⟨image 33⟩Baalpeor, Astaroth, Beel the dragon, Priapus, the brazen serpent, the twelve signs, and many other: unto whose images, the people with great devotion, invented Pilgrimages, preciously decking and censing them, kneeling down and offering to them, thinking that, an high merit before God, and to be esteemed above the precepts and commandments of god.