"If the Scripture were in the mother tongue," they will say, "then would the lay people understand it every man after his own ways." Wherefore serveth the curate but to teach them the right way? Wherefore were the holidays made but that the people should come and learn? Are ye not abominable schoolmasters in that ye take so great wages, if ye will not teach? If ye would teach, how could ye do it so well and with so great profit as when the lay people have the Scripture before them in their mother tongue? For then should they see, by the order of the text, whether thou juggledest or not. And then would they believe it because it is the Scripture of God, though thy living be never so abominable. Where now, because your living and your preaching are so contrary and because they grope out in every sermon your open and manifest lies and smell your unsatiable covetousness, they believe you not when you preach truth. But alas, the curates themselves (for the most part) wot no more what the New or Old Testament meaneth than do the Turks. Neither know they of any more than that they read at masse, matins, and evensong, which yet they understand not. Neither care they but even to mumble up so much every day (as the pie and popinjay speak they wot not what) to fill their bellies with all. If they will not let the lay-man have the word of God in his mother tongue, yet let the priests have it, which, for a great part of them, do understand no Latin at all; but sing and say and patter all day with the lips only that which the heart understandeth not. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE BURNT (1529). +Source.+--Edward Hall's _Henry VIII_. Grafton's Edition, 1548.[41]