"If your Majesty demand why we are more earnest now than we have been heretofore; we answer (our former silence nowise excused) that it is because we find ourselves frustrated of our hope and expectation; which was that, in process of time, your Grace's heart should have been mollified, so far as to have heard the public doctrine taught within this realm; by which, our farther hope was, God's Holy Spirit should so have moved your heart, that ye should have suffered your religion, which before God is nothing but abomination and vanity, to have been tried by the true touchstone, the written Word of God; and that your Grace finding it to have no ground or foundation in the same, should have given such glory unto God that ye would have preferred His truth unto your own preconceived vain opinion, of whatever antiquity it has been. Of this we in a part are now discouraged and can no longer keep silence, unless we would make ourselves criminal before God of your blood, perishing in your own iniquities; for we plainly admonish you of the dangers to come. "The second that we require is punishment of horrible vices, such as are adultery, fornication, open whoredom, blasphemy, and contempt of God, of His Word and of His Sacraments; vices which, in this realm, for lack of punishment, do even now so abound that sin is reputed to be no sin. And, therefore, as we see the present signs of God's wrath manifestly appear, so do we forewarn that He will strike, before long, if His law be permitted thus manifestly to be contemned, without punishment. If any object, that punishment cannot be commanded to be executed without a Parliament; we answer that the Eternal God in His Parliament has pronounced death to be the punishment for adultery and for blasphemy. If ye put not His acts to execution, seeing that kings are but His lieutenants, having no power to give life where He commands death, He will repute you, and all others that foster vice, patrons of impiety, and He will not fail to punish you for neglecting His judgments.