I sleep, but my heart, &c. chap. v. 1.—The negligence of the Church lying thus is declared first by her drowsiness, then by his enticing call, and lastly by the slight causes of her excuse. Sleep caused her outward senses to be benumbed, that she neither regarded nor considered how superstitions arose, as it happened to the householder in Matt. xiii. 25. Neither could it be otherwise (when the bridegroom left the garden and his friends or fellows drunken with prosperity, wholly gaping after riches and honours, all common good despised), but sleep would overcome the spouse, wherein outwardly she should not differ from a dead woman, however the heart should move and live, the seed of faith not altogether quenched. This drowsiness crept in, in the time of Constantine, when a gaping heaviness, with a continued desire of sleeping, so oppressed the spouse, that the sharpest-sighted pastors could not use their outward senses: not perceiving how ambition crept in among the bishops, and not only that, but how they began to consecrate temples to saints, earnestly to seek their reliques, to worship them with prayers, and to believe that prayers made in the honour of saints at their sepulchres did profit much. Who could now tell whether the Church were sleeping or waking? who neither loathed nor perceived such things. When Constantine was dead, Christ found the Church asleep, and sought by all means to stir her up both by knocking and calling. He knocked by persecutions in the times of Constance, Julian and Valens, of whom though Julian were a professed enemy, (A.D. 368,) yet the other two exceeded him in cruelty. After their tyrannous reign God stirred up Valentinian in the west parts, by whom Christ lovingly called his spouse, that, returning unto her former integrity, she should open and let him in. Then taking away Valens, he called more earnestly at both doors (as it were) as well in the west as in the east, by Gratian and Theodosius the elder; after by Arcadius and Honorius, then by Theodosius the younger, and Valentinian the third. And lastly, (that there might be four pair as it were answerable to the four voices, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled one,) by Marcion alone in the east. These emperors studied and laboured very religiously to defend and enlarge true religion; but the Church was in all the fault, who having these helps prepared, would not use them to recover her former brightness. To this readiness of the emperors was added the voice of the most excellent bishops, and best learned men of that time; as Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Hierome, Chrysostome, Augustine and others, the lights of that time. But seeing his profession of love could nothing move her, he tried what his shutting out of the doors at night would do.