[302] The school of Cartwright were as little disposed as the episcopalians to see the laity fatten on church property. Bancroft, in his famous sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1588 (p. 24), divides the puritans into the clergy factious, and the lay factious. The former, he says, contend and lay it down in their supplication to parliament in 1585, that things once dedicated to a sacred use ought so to remain for ever, and not to be converted to any private use. The lay, on the contrary, think it enough for the clergy to fare as the apostles did. Cartwright did not spare those who longed to pull down bishoprics for the sake of plundering them, and charged those who held impropriations with sin. Bancroft takes delight in quoting his bitter phrases from the ecclesiastical discipline. [303] The old friends and protectors of our reformers at Zurich, Bullinger and Gualter, however they had favoured the principles of the first nonconformists, write in strong disapprobation of the innovators of 1574. Strype's _Annals_, ii. 316. And Fox, the martyrologist, a refuser to conform, speaks, in a remarkable letter quoted by Fuller in his _Church History_, p. 107, of factiosa illa Puritanorum capita, saying that he is totus ab iis alienus, and unwilling perbacchari in episcopos. The same is true of Bernard Gilpin, who disliked some of the ceremonies, and had subscribed the articles with a reservation, "so far as agreeable to the word of God;" but was wholly opposed to the new reform of church discipline. _Carleton's Life of Gilpin_, and Wordsworth's _Ecclesiastical Biography_, vol. iv. Neal has not reported the matter faithfully.