=It's kittle shooting at corbies and clergy.=--_Scotch._
Crows are very wary, and the clergy are vindictive; therefore it is
ticklish work trying to get the better of either. "One must either not
meddle with priests or else smite them dead," say the Germans;[770]
and Huss, the Bohemian reformer, in denouncing the sins of the clergy
in his day, has preserved for us a similar proverb of his countrymen:
"If you have offended a clerk kill him, else you will never have
peace with him."[771] "The bites of priests and wolves are hard to
heal" (German).[772] "Priests and women never forget" (German).[773]
"How dangerous it was," says Gross, "to injure the meanest retainer
of a religious house is very ludicrously but justly expressed in the
following old English adage, which I have somewhere met with:--
='Yf perchaunce one offend a freere's dogge, streight clameth the
whole brotherhood, An heresy! An heresy!'"=
There is an old German proverb to the same purpose, which Eiserlein
heard once from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monastery in
the Black Forest: "Offend one monk, and the lappets of all cowls will
flutter as far as Rome."[774]
=What was good the friar never loved.=
Popular opinion attributes to the clergy, both secular and regular, a
lively regard for the good things of this life, and a determination to
have their full share of them. "No priest ever died of hunger" is a
remark made by the Livonians; and they add, "Give the priests all thou
hast, and thou wilt have given them nearly enough." "A priest's pocket
is hard to fill,"[775] at least in Denmark; and the Italians say, that
"Priests, monks, nuns, and poultry never have enough."[776] "Abbot of
Carzuela," cries the Spaniard, "you eat up the stew, and you ask for
the stewpan."[777] The worst testimony against the monastic order comes
from the countries in which they most abound: "Where friars swarm,
keep your eyes open" (Spanish).[778] "Have neither a good monk for a
friend, nor a bad one for an enemy" (Spanish).[779] "As for friars,
live with them, eat with them, walk with them, and then sell them, for
thus they do themselves" (Spanish).[780] The propensity of churchmen to
identify their own personal interests with the welfare of the church
are glanced at in the following:--"The monk that begs for God's sake
begs for two" (Spanish, French).[781] "'Oh, what we must suffer for
the church of God!' cried the abbot, when the roast fowl burned his
fingers" (German).[782]
=There's no mischief done in the world but there's a woman or a priest
at the bottom of it.=