[The flour of godly prayers] [most worthy to be used in these our days…[The flour of godly praiers] [most worthy to be vsed in these our daies…

IN thy last and most sweet sermon, which thou madest a little before thy passion (o Christ thou son of the living God) thou gavest thy peace unto thy disciples,¹ and willedst them diligently to keep and maintain the same among them unto the •nd. This peace is the quietness of con science, the rest of the mind, and the perfect consent and whole agreement among the faithful in matters of thy holy religion. In the prayer also made unto thy heavenly father thou desirest,² that as thou and thy father are one, so thy disciples may be one, that is to say knit together in one mind, in one judgment, in one meaning concerning matters of Christen faith,³ that they may all speak one thing, preach and writ one ⟨image 87⟩thing, and by no means dissent one from another. This peace, this unity, this perfect consent in faith and religion is almost banished from among us in these our days,⁴ while every man laboureth to establish the inventions and dreams of his own heart, while every man sweateth to imagine a new kind of religion and to maintain the same, while every man seeketh to worship thee, not after the rule of thy blessed word, but after his own fleshly fancy and idle imagination. Thy holy Apostle, O Lord, could not abide, that there should be sects among the Corinthians, nor that one should hold of Apollo,⁵ another of Paul, the third of Cephas, but that they only should embrace thee, which alone by thy blessed passion broughtest unto them everlasting life, forasmuch ⟨p. lxxii⟩as thou and none other were crucified for them. If that thy blessed Apostle had lived in this our time, oh Lord how heavily would he have taken the sects that are now among the children of men, sprung out of hell and thrust in by Satan, yea and that is most to be lamented, among them that profess thy holy name. Instead of Apollo, Paul, and Cephas, we have Benet, Bernard, Francis, Augustine,