Note (Back to Main Text) — Chapter IV · THE MARTYRS.

"You were sometime, as I and other poor men, in mean estate. God hath called you from better to better, from higher to higher, and never gave you over till he made you, legatum natum, Metropolitan Archbishop, Primate of England. Who was more earnest then in defence of the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament of the altar than ye were? Then was your candle shining to be a light to all the world, set on high on a pinnacle. But after you began to fall from the unity of the Catholic Church by open schism, and would no longer acknowledge the supremacy of the pope's holiness by God's word and ordinance;—and that by occasion, that you, in whose hands then rested the sum of all, being primate, as was aforesaid, would not, according to your high vocation, stoutly withstand the most ungodly and unlawful request of your prince touching his divorce, as that blessed martyr, St. Thomas of Canterbury, sometime your predecessor, did withstand the unlawful requests of the prince of his time, but would still not only yield and bear with things not to be borne withal, but also set a-flame the fire already kindled—then your perfections diminished; then began you, for your own part, to fancy unlawful liberty. Then decayed your conscience of your former faith, your former promise, the vow of chastity and discipline after the order of priesthood; and when good conscience was once cast off, then followed after, as St. Paul noteth, a shipwreck in the faith. Then fell you from the faith, and out of the Catholic Church, as out of a sure ship, into a sea of dangerous desperation; for out of the church, to say with St. Cyprian, there is no hope of salvation at all. To be brief; when you had forsaken God, his Spouse, his faith, and fidelity to them both, then God forsook you; and as the apostle writeth of the ingrate philosophers, delivered you up in reprobum sensum, and suffered you to fall from one inconvenience to another, as from perjury into schism, from schism into a kind of apostasy, from apostasy into heresy, from heresy into traitory, and so, in conclusion, from traitory into the highest displeasure and worthiest indignation of your most benign and gracious queen."[499]