Bernardino Ochino

In 1539, urged by Bembo, he visited Venice and delivered a course of sermons showing a sympathy with justification by faith, which appeared more clearly in his Dialogues published the same year.

According to his own statement, he was deterred from presenting himself at Rome by the warnings of Cardinal Contarini, whom he found at Bologna, dying of poison administered by the reactionary party.

He was cordially received by John Calvin, and published within two years several volumes of Prediche, controversial tracts rationalizing his change of religion.

Ochino found asylum in England, where he was made a prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral, received a pension from Edward VI's privy purse, and composed his major work, the Tragoedie or Dialoge of the unjuste usurped primacie of the Bishop of Rome.

The state, represented by the emperor Phocas, is persuaded to connive at the pope's assumption of spiritual authority; the other churches are intimidated into acquiescence; Lucifer's projects seem fully accomplished, when Heaven raises up Henry VIII of England and his son for their overthrow.

In 1563 a long simmering storm burst on Ochino with the publication of his Thirty Dialogues, in one of which his adversaries maintained that he had justified polygamy under the disguise of a pretended refutation.

Fleeing the country, he encountered the plague at Pińczów; three of his four children were carried off; and he himself, worn out by misfortune, died in solitude and obscurity at Slavkov in Moravia, about the end of 1564.

He was charged by Thomas Browne in 1643[3] with the authorship of the legendary-apocryphal heretical treatise De tribus Impostoribus, as well as with having carried his alleged approval of polygamy into practice.