A Revision of Two Letters from George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, to Jan van Vliet

A large decorative woodcut initial 'D' begins the text, featuring ornate leafy foliage and scrollwork within a square border.

These two letters, of which I present you the summary here, learned reader, together with responses to their individual chapters, are part of a book published in England about five months ago by our master, George Morley, Doctor of Sacred Theology, of Oxford, and Bishop of Winchester. Having once followed the exiled King and living among Catholics, he gave some evidence of his zeal for his mother, the Protestant Church of England, both by voice and by pen, attacking various heads of the Orthodox Faith. All these matters are contained in that book, with the addition of others which he both spoke and wrote upon his return to his fatherland. He has thus encompassed in this single volume (which may be called a cento, conflated from various treatises, having nothing in common except hatred for the orthodox Church) whatever he was able to collect through long and arduous labor and continuous study, at a very advanced age (he is over eighty), against various dogmas of the Roman Church.

We thought that the good old man, tired of contentions of this kind, was thinking thoughts of peace, preferring to promote charity rather than schism, and that a union between discordant churches was closer to his heart than many of the wiser men of that sect either seriously or feignedly desire. And indeed, his advancing age and impending death suggested that he should sound the retreat; for an old man [to be a]

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