The Roman church has entered a prescription! O simpletons, O ignoramuses in divine law! No length of years whatever can destroy a true title. Or indeed, if I were captured by barbarians and supposed to have perished, and should return again home after a hundred years of captivity, as a claimant of my paternal inheritance, should I be excluded? What could be more inhuman! And, to give another example, did Jephthah, the leader of Israel, when the Ammonites demanded back the land from “the borders of Arnon even unto Jabbok and unto Jordan,” reply, “Israel has prescribed this now through three hundred years’ occupation”? Or did he not show that the land which they demanded as theirs, had never been theirs, but had been the Amorites’? And the proof that it did not belong to the Ammonites was that they had never in the course of so many years claimed it.[524] The Roman church has prescribed! Keep still, impious tongue! You transfer “prescription,” which is used of inanimate, senseless objects, to man; and holding man in servitude is the more detestable, the longer it lasts. Birds and wild animals do not let themselves be “prescribed,” but however long the time of captivity, when they please and occasion is offered, they escape. And may not man, held captive by man, escape? Let me tell why the Roman pontiffs show fraud and craft rather than ignorance in using war instead of law as their arbiter,—and I believe that the first pontiffs to occupy the city [of Rome] and the other towns did about the same. Shortly before I was born, Rome was led by an incredible sort of fraud, I call those then present there to witness, to accept papal government or rather usurpation, after it had long been free.[525] The Pope was Boniface IX, fellow of Boniface VIII in fraud as in name,—if they are to be called Boniface (benefactor) at all, who are the worst malefactors. And when the Romans, after the treachery had been detected, stirred up trouble, the good Pope, after the manner of Tarquinius, struck off all the tallest poppies with his stick.[526] When his successor, Innocent [VII], afterwards tried to imitate this procedure he was driven out of the city. I will not speak of other Popes; they have always held Rome down by force of arms. Suffice it to say that as often as it could it has rebelled; as for instance, six years ago,[527] when it could not obtain peace from Eugenius, and it was not equal to the enemies which were besieging it, it besieged the Pope within his house, and would not permit him to go out before he either made peace with the enemy or turned over the administration of the city to the citizens. But he preferred to leave the city in disguise, with a single companion in flight, rather than to gratify the citizens in their just and fair demands. If you give them the choice, who does not know that they would choose liberty rather than slavery?