‘I hear, sire,’ he wrote to the king, ‘that the bishops are driving souls away from the oracles of Christ. Could the Turks do anything worse? Would morality exist in independence of the Holy Scriptures?[170] Would religion itself be anything else than a certain discipline of public manners? That is the doctrine of Epicurus; but what will become of the Church if the bishops propagate Epicurean dogmas? God ordains that we should hear the Son, not as a doctor who philosophizes on the theory of morals, but as a prophet who reveals holy things unknown to the world. If the bishops promote the infliction of the severest penalties on those who hear his word, the knowledge of Jesus Christ will become extinct, and the people will take up pagan opinions.[171] ‘Most serene king, resist these impious counsels! Those who are in the fulness of age, infancy, and the generation to come, unite in imploring you to do so. We are punished, we are put to death.... Eurybiades of Sparta, commander-in-chief, having in the course of a debate raised his staff against Themistocles while forbidding him to speak, the Athenian replied, “Strike, but hear!” We shall say the same. We shall speak, for the Gospel alone can strengthen souls amidst the infinite perils of the present time.’ Neither king nor priests replied to the _Letter of Alesius_; but a famous German, Cochlæus, the opponent of Luther, undertook to induce James V. to pay no attention to that discourse. ‘Sire,’ he wrote to him, ‘the calamities which the New Testaments disseminated by Luther have brought down upon Germany are so great, that the bishops, in turning their sheep away from that deadly pasture, have shown themselves to be faithful shepherds. Incalculable sums have been thrown away on the printing of a hundred thousand copies of that book. Now, what advantage have its readers drawn from it, unless it be an advantage to be cast into prison, to be banished, and made to suffer other tribulations? A decree is not enough, sire; it is necessary to act. The bishop of Treves has had the New Testaments thrown into the Rhine, and with them the booksellers who sold them. This example has frightened others, and happily so, for that book is the Gospel of Satan, and not of Jesus Christ.’[172] This was the model proposed to King James.