An apology or answer in defence of the Church of England with a brief…An apologie or answere in defence of the Churche of Englande with a briefe…

But marvellous notable and to very good purpose for these days be Niecomes words: Whosoever (saith he) the Devil hath deceived and enticed to fall a sleep as it were with the sweet & deathly enchantments of the mermaids the Sirens,¹ those persons doth Gods word awake up, saying unto them: Arise thou that sleepest, lift up thy self, and Christ shall give the light. Therefore at the coming of Christ, of God's word, of the ecclesiastical doctrine, and as the full destruction of Nineveh, and of that most be witfull harlot, then shall the people which heretofore had been ca•t in a trance under their masters, be raised up, and shall make haste to go to the Mountains of the Scripture, […] shall they find hills, Moses, ••reey and Joshua the son of Nun: other ••les also which a• the Prophets: […] of the new testament, which […] the Apostles and the Evangelists: ⟨image 120⟩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, butte 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 Hieromes 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 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 ⟨image 120⟩who is so blind that he seeth not these men be the masters, by whom the people, as saith Hierome, hath been led into error, and lulled a sleep? Or who seeth not Rome, that is their Nineveh, which sometime was painted with fairest colours, but now her visor being pulled of, is both better seen and less set by? Or who seeth not that good men being a waked as it were out of their dead sleep, at the light of the Gospel, and at the voice of God, have resorted to the hills of the Scriptures, waiting not at all for the Councils of such masters?