The Rebuttal of Some Nonsense

● One day in 1529 Hugh Latimer, the English reformer, preached at Cambridge a sermon arguing in favor of translation and popular reading of the Bible. The clergy were enraged, especially since copies of Tyndale’s English Bible were being smuggled into England and the clergy could not burn them fast enough. Some infuriated friars selected their champion, Friar Buckingham, to demolish the arguments of Latimer. The next Sunday the friars’ champion sermonized. “Thus,” asked the friar with a triumphant smile, “where Scripture saith no man that layeth his hand to the plough and looketh back is fit for the kingdom of God, will not the ploughman when he readeth these words be apt forthwith to cease from his plough, and then where will be the sowing and the harvest? Likewise also whereas the baker readeth, ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,’ will he not be forthwith too sparing in the use of leaven, to the great injury of our health? And so also when the simple man reads the words, ‘If thine eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee,’ incontinent he will pluck out his eyes, and so the whole realm will be full of blind men, to the great decay of the nation and the manifest loss of the King’s grace. And thus by reading of the Holy Scriptures will the whole realm come into confusion.” The following week Latimer replied to the friar’s sermon. “Only children and fools,” said Latimer, “fail to distinguish between the figurative and the real meanings of language—between the image which is used and the thing which that image is intended to represent. For example,” Latimer continued, casting a penetrating glance at his opponent, who was sitting before the pulpit, “if we paint a fox preaching in a friar’s hood, nobody imagines that a fox is meant, but that craft and hypocrisy are described, which so often are found in that garb.”