28 A MEMORIAL RESPECTING
give no heed to this, but abominate it as mischievous to your greatness, your conscience, and to your crown. For this conquest is to be a spiritual and evangelical one, and by no means entailing, as is supposed, any considerable expense upon Your Majesty, nor a matter which can divert you from walking conformably to the dictates of the Apostle. But rather, in order to secure Your Majesty the restoration and increase of your royal power to the extent of your de- sires, may Your Majesty give the attention of your exalted understanding to the words of the Apostle to his disciple Timothy, as if he had addressed them personally to Your Majesty : " For the time will come (please God that it may not be that in which we live) when they who are under an obligation to follow sound doctrine so important as this, not only do not receive it, but cannot endure it, heaping up to themselves the opinions of men with the title of teachers, who thereby only flatter them and conform to their wishes, turning away their ears from the truth and changing it into fables." For such are the superficial arguments of expe- diency for reasons of state which are advanced in opposition to the extension of the Catholic Church and the increase of our holy faith. The Apostle then says, and we may reason- ably understand him as on the present occasion addressing himself to Your Majesty : " But do thou (who, as sovereign prince of this Catholic monarchy, and as having made a con- tract with the King of kings, art pledged by promise to the completing of the preaching of the gospel), abominating those who shall propose to thee the contrary, watch day and night over the fulfilment of this glorious and important obligation, labour as much as lieth in you that it may by all I^ossible means be accomplished, do the work of an evan- gelist ; for as the evangelists wrote the gospel in order that thou mightest cause it to be preached to the gentiles, do thou after thy manner perform the same office which they performed in preaching. Placing great value on the fiict
