The position they chose to assume in combating this "fine old gentlemanly vice" is a singular feature in its history. Their method was to associate the practice of swearing with the notion of actual bodily pain being occasioned to the Saviour. They made it appear that Christ in person was put to extreme physical agony on every occasion of its committal. Not alone did they assert the wantonness and hardihood of so directly incurring the Divine displeasure, but they raised the most piteous appeal to the compassion of these benighted swearers. It was daily proclaimed from their pulpits that the profanity in this one respect of professedly Christian men had worked a sharper and more agonising martyrdom than that formerly designed by the Jews themselves. In countless broadsheets, no less than by pictorial illustration, the wounds of Christ were portrayed as hourly re-opened, and the sufferings of Golgotha renewed from day to day. The doctrine gained additional credit when transferred from the hands of monkish authors and embraced by popular and captivating pens. Stephen Hawes, own poet to carpet-knights and buckram soldiery, brought home conviction to a class of offenders that a whole consistory would not have succeeded in convincing. In a rhyming pamphlet, prefaced by a figure of the bleeding Christ, Hawes depicts with awful realism those sufferings which, as he believed, were being actually and bodily inflicted.[24] The author of 'Bel Amour' describes the feet and hands of Christ as literally pierced anew, and every member torn and lacerated by reason of the imprecations of unheeding Christians. At this time of day it might be difficult to ascertain with any certainty the origin of this forced view of the iniquity of swearing. So far as concerns printed literature, we discover it for the first time in the doggerel of the poet Hawes, but it is none the less traceable to that encyclopaedic work of the thirteenth century, the 'Miroir du Monde.' This takes us to the year 1279, and instances could be furnished showing its regular passage through the next three centuries, until the monkish notion is at last surrendered and delivered over to the cleansing fires of the Reformation. The last of the English authors who seems to have seriously advanced the theory is to be found in the rigid disciple of asceticism, Thomas Becon.