A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures

...priests of Baal a reference to the false prophets in the Old Testament, 1 Kings 18, who slashed their own flesh before an idol of wood? Would God your bewitched dotage were not as palpable, and more lamentable than theirs, in that you fall down and adore a morsel of bread, that kiss and fondle with religious devotion the Pope’s toe, for bearing the feigned counterfeit of our Savior on earth. This is performed with the right Egyptian gloss: original: "non Papæ sed Petro, non aſinæ sed deæ" "Not to the Pope but to Peter, not to the ass but to Isis." Your Popes have been proclaimed by your own Oracles to the world, one to be an ass, another a fox, another a wolf.

What people, but you, were ever so bewitched as to be led to believe that a house was carried in the air from Palestine to Loreto the Holy House of Loreto, traditionally believed to be the house of the Virgin Mary, transported by angels? That a painted image on a wall does work as high miracles as were ever performed by the eternal Son of God? That the prints of Saint Francis’s stripes, the tail of our Savior’s ass, and the milk of our blessed Lady are this day to be seen? And that these graceless, insipid frauds are to be believed, or countenanced, by men of wit, understanding, and spirit, such as many are today in the Roman Church? If you ask me the cause, what can it be but this: that God has given them over to the spirit of illusion, to believe unsavory lies, for refusing in their pride to embrace the pure, naked sincerity of the Gospel of Christ. He that sits in the heavens, Almighty God, with his Angels and Saints, does laugh these misshapen monsters to scorn.

And who can but bleed in heart, to see you as far bewitched by our impostor-renegades, who come fresh from the Pope’s dressing room, masked with the visor of holy, burning zeal? First, it may please you to observe that the wiser, graver sort of them do keep themselves warm in their Cloisters at home, and do feed themselves fat with the spoils of your confusion. These lighter superfluities, whom they disgorge among you—how they play the bats and moles, either trenching themselves in the mines of your labyrinths at home, or masking in your gold and silver abroad in the fashion...