810. I was later told a number of reasons why these preachers are deprived of their priestly office. They said that the primary one was that they did not base their sermons on the Word, and so on God's spirit, but on the feeble light of their own reason, and so on their own spirit. They start with a text from the Word as a prelude, but merely pay lip-service to this, and abandon it as if tasteless. Then they select some tasty morsel from their own intelligence, which they roll around the mouth and turn over on the tongue as if it were a delicacy, and thus teach it. They said that as a result there is no more spirituality in their sermons than in the song of birds; and their allegories are dressed up like elegantly curled wigs whitened with barley flour on a bald head. They compared the mysteries about justification by faith alone, which fill their sermons, to the quails which came from the sea and fell upon the camp of the Children of Israel, which caused several thousand deaths (Numbers, chapter 11). However, they compared theological statements about charity and faith together to manna from heaven.
I once heard their priests talking among themselves about faith alone, and an image they formed, which represented their doctrine of faith alone; the feeble light of their imagination made this appear like a huge giant. But when light from heaven was let in, it appeared in its upper part like a monster, in its lower part like a snake. On seeing this they drew back, and the bystanders threw it into a lake.
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