Do you know that if any one desires to visit Rome, or any country where travelers incur danger, he sends his money to the bank, and for every hundred florins that he wishes to have, he gives five or six or ten more, that by means of the letters of this bank he may be safely repaid his money at Rome or elsewhere.... And you, for a quarter of a florin, will not receive these letters of indulgence, by means of which you may introduce into paradise not a vile metal, but a divine and immortal soul, without its running any risk. But more than this, indulgences avail not only for the living, but for the dead. For that repentance is not even necessary. Priests! nobles! merchant! wife! youth! maiden! do you not hear your parents and your other friends who are dead, and who cry from the bottom of the abyss: “We are suffering horrible torments! A trifling alms would deliver us; you can give it, and you will not!” At the very instant that the money rattles in the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory, and flies liberated to heaven. Oh, stupid and brutish people, who do not understand the grace so richly offered! Now heaven is everywhere opened! Do you refuse to enter now? When, then will you enter? Now you can ransom so many souls! Stiff-necked and thoughtless man! with twelve groats you can deliver your father from purgatory, and you are ungrateful enough not to save him! I shall be justified in the day of judgment; but—you will be punished so much the more severely for having neglected so great salvation. I declare to you, though you should have but a single coat, you should strip it off and sell it, in order to obtain this grace. The Lord our God no longer reigns. He has resigned all power to the pope. Do you know why our most Holy Lord distributes so rich a grace? It is to restore the ruined Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and those of a multitude of martyrs. The saintly bodies, through the present state of the building, are now, alas, beaten upon, inundated, polluted, dishonored, reduced to rottenness, by the rain and the hail. Alas, shall these sacred ashes remain longer in the mire and in degradation? “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: for I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things, which ye hear, and have not heard them!”