How to treat false prophets 1

Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture. Among the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with furze and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death. Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?

Michael Montaigne (1533-1592) Essays (1575) ‘Of Cannibals’

We cannot escape the fact the Church of England as we know it came into being because of the will, whims, and cruelties of Henry Tudor, the eighth king of that name. The Church of England is not solely a product of Henry’s need for a divorce, but the gulf between the way the church was in the 1520s and the way the church was in the 1550s is stupendous: the way a church building was laid out, the way in which it was decorated, the language spoken in the church, the legal framework which compelled you to worship, the pattern of the church’s year, even the landscape of the country— all were unimaginably altered.
And this was caused by a loyal, thoughtful, conscientious Catholic: Henry VIII.

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