"The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and human traditions that they think one heaven is not reward enough for such great doings, never that the time will come when Christ shall set all this aside and claim his rule of charity. One will show his belly stuffed with every sort of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts and make up for them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner. Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven ships would hardly hold them; another will boast that for sixty years he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his hands; another wears a cowl so greasy and filthy that no sailor would think it decent. Another will boast that for eleven lusters he has led the life of a sponge, always fixed to the same spot; another will display his voice hoarse with much chanting; another a drowsiness contracted from solitary living; another a tongue palsied by long silence. But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging and will demand:--'whence this new kind of Judaism? One law and that my own I recognise, and that is the only thing I hear nothing about. In that day I promised openly and using no twisted parables, the inheritance of my Father, not to cowls and prayers and fastings, but to deeds of love.' And yet no one dares reproach those people, who belong, as it were, to another commonwealth--and especially the Begging Friars, because they know everybody's secrets through what they call 'confessions.'" Erasmus more than hints that the friars had ways enough of playing fast and loose with the secrets confided to them, and, running together his assaults upon the schoolmen and the monks, shows up the scholastic preaching of the friars by some excellent specimens. "I myself have heard one distinguished fool--I beg his pardon, a scholar I would say--who, in a famous sermon on the mystery of the Holy Trinity, in order to show his uncommon learning and please the ears of the theologians, took a quite new method, namely from the letters, syllables, and discourse itself and then from the agreement of nouns and verbs, of adjective and substantive, to the great admiration of some, but causing others to grumble in the words of Horace: 'what is all this rot about?' "At last he got the thing down so fine, that he showed as plainly as any mathematician could chalk it out, that the mystery of the whole Trinity is expressed in the rudiments of grammar. This most highly theological person sweat away for eight months over that speech, so that the whole sight of his eyes ran into his wits and he is now as blind as a mole; but the creature cares naught for his eyesight and thinks his glory very cheaply bought.