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

as many days in composing the responses, although I was involved in various other occupations in the meantime. I began them on the 11th of April and finished them on the 1st of May. I would not want this to be understood as if I hope for any praise for a hurried work (which I know to be doubtful in the estimation of praise and blame), but to show that no difficulty occurred in those letters that would long delay us in our haste. We hastened, however, so that our responses might reach him more certainly, as he is already near to fate, certainly not very far removed (for old men cannot live long, says the prince of the Latin language). For although the Greeks have said that it is equally difficult to correct the error of an old man and to raise the dead, one should not despair of the improvement of anyone as long as he lives. Hence there is hope that he will think better, or at least less badly, of the Catholic and Apostolic Church, when he knows that it has been unjustly accused of idolatry, and that nothing is done by it in this age, while it prays for the dead and invokes the saints (which are the two points treated almost exclusively in these letters), that was not done in the first centuries, and even in the judgement of the heretics themselves, the purest centuries.

Another head of idolatry left untouched by Dr. Morley, yet reproached against the Church by others of his fellow-believers, is the veneration of images, which they claim agrees with the worship of idols. To refute them, I have added an Appendix concerning idolatry, or the worship exhibited to idols by the Pagans; from the explanation of which it will be evident that the veneration exhibited to images in the