In the management of this famous argument, which was conducted by syllogism and in the schools, we have an excellent example of the ratiocinations of those days. Certainly, the Roman Catholic doctors displayed no lack either of policy or acuteness; but it was the policy of men aware of their weakness, and therefore slow to measure their strength; and the acuteness of sophists whose object it was rather to perplex the adversary, than to unravel the truth; it was one of those cowardly conflicts, “ubi tu cædis, ego vapulo tantum;” where one strikes and the other must be content to be smitten--the popish disputants putting objections to the reformers, but refusing to appoint a second meeting in which the reformers might retaliate, so Cranmer complains to the council--where a single defendant is assailed by a multitude of discordant voices, lifted up against him together--and where, at intervals, the partial prolocutor would translate into English, after a fashion of his own, for the benefit of the unlearned spectators, some passage in the dialogue which served as a signal for hisses, peals of laughter, and shouts of “Vicit veritas!” to the extinction of all fair argument, and the confusion of all modest men. “I have but one tongue,” cries Ridley, “I cannot answer at once to you all.” “O what unright dealing is this!” he again exclaims, on hearing the perverted quotations which he was not permitted to expose. Whilst poor Latimer, faint, and afraid to drink for vomiting; making an appeal moreover to Weston, enough to touch a stone; “Good master, I pray be good to an old man: you may, if it please God, be once as old as I am; you may come to this age and this debility,” is subjected to clamour still more inhuman; for he disputed in English, and was therefore better understood. “Although,” says he, “I have spoken in my time before two kings more than once, two or three hours together without interruption, now (that I may speak the truth by your leave) I cannot be suffered to declare my mind before you; no, not by the space of a quarter of an hour, without snatches, revilings, checks, rebukes, taunts, such as I have not felt the like in such an audience all my life long.”