He did full penance for us all upon his painful cross, he washed us there all clean with the water of his sweet side, and brought us out of the devil’s danger with his dear precious blood.  Leave therefore, leave, I beseech you, these inventions of men, your foolish Lenten fasts and your childish penance!  Diminish never Christ’s thanks nor look to save yourselves!  It is Christ’s death, I tell you, that must save us all—­Christ’s death, I tell you yet again, and not our own deeds.  Leave your own fasting, therefore, and lean to Christ alone, good Christian people, for Christ’s dear bitter passion!” Now, so loud and shrill he cried “Christ” in their ears, and so thick he came forth with Christ’s bitter passion, and that so bitterly spoken with the sweat dropping down his cheeks, that I marvelled not that I saw the poor women weep.  For he made my own hair stand up upon my head.

And with such preaching were the people so taken in that some fell to break their fast on the fasting days, not of frailty or of malice first, but almost of devotion, lest they should take from Christ the thanks of his bitter passion.  But when they were awhile nursled in that point first, they could afterward abide and endure many things more, for which, if he had begun with them, they would have pulled him down.

Anthony:  Cousin, God amend that man, whatsoever he be, and God keep all good folk from such manner of preachers!  One such preacher much more abuseth the name of Christ and of his bitter passion than do five hundred gamblers who in their idle business swear and foreswear themselves by his holy bitter passion at dice.  They carry the minds of the people from perceiving their craft by the continual naming of the name of Christ, and crying his passion so shrill into their ears that they forget that the Church hath ever taught them that all our penance without Christ’s passion would not be worth a pea.  And they make the people think that we wish to be saved by our own deeds, without Christ’s death; whereas we confess that his passion alone meriteth incomparably more for us than all our own deeds do, but that it is his pleasure that we shall also take pain ourselves with him.  And therefore he biddeth all who will be his disciples to take their crosses on their backs as he did, and with their crosses follow him.

And where they say that fasting serveth but for temperance to tame the flesh and keep it from wantonness, I would in good faith have thought that Moses had not been so wild that for the taming of his flesh he should have need to fast whole forty days together.  No, not Hely neither.  Nor yet our Saviour himself, who began the Lenten forty-days fast—­and the apostles followed, and all Christendom hath kept it—­that these folk call now so foolish.  King Achab was not disposed to be wanton in his flesh, when he fasted and went clothed in sackcloth and all besprent with ashes.  No more was the king in Nineveh and all the city, but they wailed and did