Conclusion
Conclusion
These things, I say, to know, is to have all the Scripture unlocked and opened before you, so that if you will go in and read, you cannot but understand. And in these things to be ignorant is to have all the Scripture locked up, so that the more you read it, the blinder you are, and the more contrariety you find in it, and the more tangled are you therein, and can nowhere [get] through: for if you had a gloss49 in one place, in another it will not serve. And therefore, because we be never taught the profession of our baptism, we remain always unlearned, as well the spiritualty,50 for all their great clergy and high schools (as we say), as the lay people. And now, because the lay and unlearned people are taught these first principles of our profession, therefore they read the Scripture and understand and delight therein. And our great pillars of holy church, which have nailed a veil of false glosses on Moses’s face, to corrupt the true understanding of his law, cannot come in. And therefore they bark, and say the scripture makes heretics, and it is not possible for them to understand it in the English, because they themselves do not in Latin. And of pure malice, that they cannot have their will, they slay their brethren for their faith they have in our Savior, and therewith utter their bloody wolfish tyranny, and what they be within, and whose disciples. Herewith, reader, be committed unto the grace of our Savior Jesus, unto Whom, and God our Father through Him, be praise forever and forever. Amen.