it nothing better than a love-song about a mistress, and an amorous conversation with Court flunkeys.  Whence drew he that intimation?  From the Spirit.  In the Apocalypse of John, every jot and tittle of which Jerane declares to bear some lofty and magnificent meaning, Luther and Brent and Kemnitz, critics hard to please, find something wanting, and are inclined to throw over the whole book.  Whom have they consulted?  The Spirit.  Luther with preposterous heat pits the Four Gospels one against another (Praef. in Nov.  Test.), and far prefers Paul’s Epistles to the first three, while he declares the Gospel of St. John above the rest to be beautiful, true, and worthy of mention in the first place,—­thereby enrolling even the Apostles, so far as in him lay, as having a hand in his quarrels.  Who taught him to do that?  The Spirit.  Nay this imp of a friar has not hesitated in petulant style to assail Luke’s Gospel because therein good and virtuous works are frequently commended to us.  Whom did he consult?  The Spirit.  Theodore Beza has dared to carp at, as a corruption and perversion of the original, that mystical word from the twenty-second chapter of Luke, this is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which (chalice) shall be shed for you [Greek:  potaerion ekchunomenon], because this language admits of no explanation other than that of the wine in the chalice being converted into the true blood of Christ.  Who pointed that out?  The Spirit.  In short, in believing all things every man in the faith of his own spirit, they horribly belie and blaspheme the name of the Holy Ghost.  So acting, do they not give themselves away? are they not easily refuted?  In an assembly of learned men, such as yours, Gentlemen of the University, are they not caught and throttled without trouble?  Should I be afraid on behalf of the Catholic faith to dispute with these men, who have handled with the utmost ill faith not human but heavenly utterances?  I say nothing here of their perverse versions of Scripture, though I could accuse them in this respect of intolerable doings.  I will not take the bread out of the mouth of that great linguist, my fellow-Collegian, Gregory Martin, who will do this work with more learning and abundance of detail than I could; nor from others whom I understand already to have that task in hand.  More wicked and more abominable is the crime that I am now prosecuting, that there have been found upstart Doctors who have made a drunken onslaught on the handwriting that is of heaven; who have given judgment against it as being in many places defiled, defective, false, surreptitious; who have corrected some passages, tampered with others; torn out others; who have converted every bulwark wherewith it was guarded into Lutheran “spirits,” what I may call phantom ramparts and parted walls.  All this they have done that they might not be utterly dumbfounded by falling upon Scripture texts contrary to their errors, texts which they would have found it as hard to get over as to swallow hot ashes or chew stones.  This then has been my First Reason, a strong and a just one.  By revealing the shadowy and broken powers of the adverse faction, it has certainly given new courage to a Christian man, not unversed in these studies, to fight for the Letters Patent of the Eternal King against the remnant of a routed foe.