The court of Rome, in the early part of the sixteenth century, was flagrantly corrupt. No language could be too strong to describe its falsehood and treachery, and its accursed love of money, its sumptuous extravagance, its loathsome licentiousness, its fierce despotism, and its unrelenting cruelty. Its turpitude was known over the world, and shocked the moral sense of all Christian nations; so that, wherever the name of Jesus was breathed with reverence, there was one universal demand, that there should be a reformation in the Church, in its head and in its members.