There was this in common among the Cathari, Waldenses, Albigenses and other heretical bodies that overran so many parts of Western Europe in the second half of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, that they all inveighed against the wealth of the clergy, and preached the practice of austere poverty and a return to the simple life of Christ and the Apostles.
His first speech appears to have been on the 22nd of January 1673, in which he inveighed against the stop of the exchequer, the attack on the Smyrna fleet, the corruption of courtiers with French money, and "the ill ministers about the king."
He was the first bishop appointed by letters patent under the act passed in 1547 without the form of capitular election; and the service performed at his consecration was also novel, being in English; he also preached at St Paul's on the 11th of November clad only as a priest and not as a bishop, and inveighed against vest= ments and altars.
The comic poets satirized them, and Plato and Demosthenes inveighed against them; but they continued to spread, with all their fervid enthusiasm, their superstition and their obscene practices, wide among the people, whose religious cravings were not satisfied with the purely external religions of Hellenism.
Two lines in the poem suggest that the satirist, who inveighed with just severity against the worst corruptions of Roman morals, was not too rigid a censor of the morals of his friend.