Your see, however, which is called the Court of Rome, and which neither
you nor any man can deny to be more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom,
and quite, as I believe, of a lost, desperate, and hopeless impiety,
this I have verily abominated, and have felt indignant that the people
of Christ should be cheated under your name and the pretext of the
Church of Rome; and so I have resisted, and will resist, as long as
the spirit of faith shall live in me. Not that I am striving after
impossibilities, or hoping that by my labours alone, against the furious
opposition of so many flatterers, any good can be done in that most
disordered Babylon; but that I feel myself a debtor to my brethren, and
am bound to take thought for them, that fewer of them may be ruined, or
that their ruin may be less complete, by the plagues of Rome. For many
years now, nothing else has overflowed from Rome into the world--as
you are not ignorant--than the laying waste of goods, of bodies, and of
souls, and the worst examples of all the worst things. These things are
clearer than the light to all men; and the Church of Rome, formerly the
most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves,
the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and
hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any
addition to its wickedness.
Meanwhile you, Leo, are sitting like a lamb in the midst of wolves,
like Daniel in the midst of lions, and, with Ezekiel, you dwell among
scorpions.
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