It was of the usual kind--the passionate language of passionate conviction. When it was over, Latimer turned to Forest, and asked him whether he would live or die. "I will die" was the gallant answer. "Do your worst upon me. Seven years ago you durst not, for your life, have preached such words as these; and now, if an angel from heaven should come down and teach me any other doctrine than that which I learnt as a child, I would not believe him. Take me; cut me to pieces, joint from joint. Burn--hang--do what you will--I will be true henceforth to my faith."[364] It was enough. He was laid upon his iron bed, and slung off into the air, and the flame was kindled. In his mortal agony he clutched at the steps of the ladder, to sway himself out of the blaze; and the pitiless chronicler, who records the scene, could see only in this last weakness an evidence of guilt. "So impatiently," says Hall, "he took his death as never any man that put his trust in God."[365] [Sidenote: The bodies of the saints.] Still the torrent rolled onward. Monasteries and images were gone, and fancied relics, in endless numbers. There remained the peculiar treasures of the great abbeys and cathedrals--the mortal remains of the holy men in whose memories they had been founded, who by martyrs' deaths, or lives of superhuman loftiness, had earned the veneration of later ages. The bodies of the saints had been gathered into costly shrines, which a beautiful piety had decorated with choicest offerings. In an age which believed, without doubt or pretence, that the body of a holy man was incorporated into the body of Christ, that the seeming dust was pure as Christ's body was pure, and would form again the living home of the spirit which had gone away but for awhile, such dust was looked upon with awe and pious fear. Sacred influences were imagined to exhale from it. It was a divine thing, blessed and giving blessing. Alas! that the noblest feelings can pass so swiftly into their opposites, that reverend simplicity should become the parent of a miserable superstition! The natural instinct of veneration had ossified into idolatry, and saints' bones became charms and talismans. The saints themselves became invisible under the swathings of lies. The serpent of healing had become a Nehushtan--an accursed thing, and, with the system to which it belonged, was to pass away and come no more. [Sidenote: Circulars for the demolition of shrines.]