Tell me, you anti-saints, why brass
With you is shorter lived than glass?
And why the saints have scap’t their falls
Better from windows than from walles?
Is it, because the Brethrens fires
Maintain a glass-house at Blackfryars?
Next which the church stands North and South,
And East and West the preacher’s mouth.
Or is ’t, because such painted ware
Resembles something that you are,
Soe py’de, soe seeming, soe unsound
In manners, and in doctrine, found,
That, out of emblematick witt,
You spare yourselves in sparing it?
If it be soe, then, Faireford, boast
Thy church hath kept what all have lost;
And is preserved from the bane
Of either warr, or puritane:
Whose life is colour’d in thy paint,
The inside drosse, the outside saint.