"And if you, Master Bates, would ask me how it is possible that such matters should be so spoken of, openly, in this country, which licence would not be permitted elsewhere, I shall offer in reply his own words on ecclesiastical princedoms. For he says: 'Certainly, if religion had been able to maintain itself as a Christian republic, such as its divine founder had established, the States which professed it would have been happier than they are now. But how is she fallen! and the most striking proof of her decadence is to see that the peoples bordering on the Church of Rome, that capital of our religion, are precisely the least religious. If one examines the primitive spirit of her institutions, and when he sees how far her practice hath departed from them, he might easily believe that we are approaching a time of ruin or of retribution. And, since some assert that the happiness of Italy depends on the Church of Rome, I should bring against that Church several reasons which offer themselves to my mind, among which there are two extremely grave, and which I think, cannot be denied. First, the evil examples of the court of Rome have extinguished in this country all devotion and all religion, which fact carries in its train innumerable inconveniences and disorders; and as, wherever religion reigns one must believe the existence of good, so wherever it hath disappeared one must suppose the presence of evil. We owe it then, we other Italians, to the Church and to the priests that we are without religion or morals, but we owe them one other obligation, which is the source of our ruin; it is that the Church has always stirred up, and stirs up incessantly, the division of this unhappy country.'
"My mind doth see you, sitting, perchance, in your garden, by the dial, as is your wont after the business of the day is over, and mocking me, that I have found a new prophet. But, indeed, it doth seem so to me, and I am content to sit in his company gleaning the ripe ears of his wisdom. And if I have out-wearied your patience with my praise of him, whose every word hath the force of a deed, let me remind you of a summer day in the garden of your old house at Boston, how we plucked the apricocks from the espaliers, while you read to me the discourses of Sir Thomas More upon Augustine's _De Civitate Dei_, when, if I did not gape, it was but from politeness and my great respect for yourself. For this man doth stand among his countrymen like a giant in a city of pigmies, overlooking their petty disputations, and reading the future from the mirror of the past. He doth foresee the ruin of the Church, the birth of Empires, the dawn of a new greatness for the world, the emancipation of the peoples from the ecclesiastical tyranny of to-day. He standeth like one prophetic upon Pisgah. He doth see that the world must be freed from this pestilence of monks. He says: 'Our religion, having shown us the truth and the only way of salvation, hath lessened in our eyes the worth of worldly honours.... The ancient religions offered divine honours only to those illustrious with worldly glory, such as famous captains, and leaders of the Republic; our religion, on the contrary, only sanctifies the humble, and men given to contemplation rather than to an active life; she hath placed the _summum bonum_ in humility, in the contempt for worldly things, and even in abjection; while the pagans made it consist in greatness of soul, in bodily strength, and in all that might help to make men brave and robust. And if our religion asks us to have strength, it is rather the strength to suffer evils than to do great things. It seems that this new morality has made mankind weaker, and given the world over as a prey to the wicked.'