Among such personages, and under their influence, the court was formed, and the trial of the reformer of England began. Tyndale refused to be represented by counsel. 'I will answer my accusers myself,' he said. The doctrine for which he was tried was this: 'The man who throws off the worldly existence which he has lived far from God, and receives by a living faith the complete remission of his sins, which the death of Christ has purchased for him, is introduced by a glorious adoption into the very family of God.' This was certainly a crime for which a reformer could joyfully suffer. In August 1536, Tyndale appeared before the ecclesiastical court. 'You are charged,' said his judges, 'with having infringed the imperial decree which forbids any one to teach that faith alone justifies.'[459] The accusation was not without truth. Tyndale's _Unjust Mammon_ had just appeared in London under the title: _Treatise of Justification by Faith only_. Every man could read in it the crime with which he was charged. Tyndale had his reasons when he declared he would defend himself. It was not his own cause that he undertook to defend, but the cause of the Bible; a Brabant lawyer would have supported it very poorly. It was in his heart to proclaim solemnly, before he died, that while all human religions make salvation proceed from the works of man, the divine religion makes it proceed from a work of God. 'A man, whom the sense of his sins has confounded,' said Tyndale, 'loses all confidence and joy. The first thing to be done to save him is, therefore, to lighten him of the heavy burden under which his conscience is bowed down. He must believe in the perfect work of Christ which reconciles him completely with God; then he has peace, and Christ imparts to him, by his Spirit, a holy regeneration.—Yes,' he exclaimed, 'we believe and are at peace in our consciences, because that God who cannot lie, hath promised to forgive us for Christ's sake. As a child, when his father threateneth him for his fault, hath never rest till he hear the word of mercy and forgiveness of his father's mouth again; but as soon as he heareth his father say, "Go thy way, do me no more so; I forgive thee this fault!" then is his heart at rest; then runneth he to no man to make intercession for him; neither, though there come any false merchant, saying: "What wilt thou give me and I will obtain pardon of thy father for thee," will he suffer himself to be beguiled. No, he will not buy of a _wily fox_ what his father hath given him freely.'[460] [Sidenote: TYNDALE DEGRADED.]