What persuasion could effect this address would have effected; but kindness and menace were alike unavailing. A seed was growing and to grow, which the king knew not of; and it was to grow, as it were, in the disguise of error, with that abrupt violence which so often, among human beings, makes truth a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence. The young were generally on one side, the old on the other--an inversion of the order of nature when the old are wrong and the young are right.[434] The learned, again, were on the wrong side, the ignorant were on the right--a false relation, also fertile in evil. Peasant theologians in the public-houses disputed over their ale on the mysteries of justification, and from words passed soon to blows. The Bibles, which lay open in every parish church, became the text-books of self-instructed fanatics. The voluble orator of the village was chosen by his companions, or, by imagined superior intelligence, appointed himself, to read and expound; and, ever in such cases, the most forward was the most passionate and the least wise. Often, for the special annoyance of old-fashioned church-goers, the time of divine service was chosen for a lecture; and opinions were shouted out in "loud high voices," which, in the ears of half the congregation, were damnable heresy.[435] The king's proclamations were but as the words of a man speaking in a tempest--blown to atoms as they are uttered. The bishops were bearded in their own palaces with insolent defiance; Protestant mobs would collect to overawe them on their tribunals;[436] and Cromwell was constituted a referee, to whom victims of episcopal persecution rarely appealed without finding protection.[437] Devout communities were scandalized by priests marrying their concubines, or bringing wives whom they had openly chosen to their parsonages. The celibacy of the clergy was generally accepted as a theory; and, though indulgence had been liberally extended to human weakness and frailty, the opinion of the world was less complacent when secret profligacy stepped forward into the open day under the apparent sanction of authority.[438] [Sidenote: Outrages in churches during the celebration of the mass.] [Sidenote: Scene at an execution at Ipswich.]