[Quoting Tyndale] ‘The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith, and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. For Origen and the doctors of his time drew all the scripture unto allegories; whose example that came after followed so long, till they at last forgot the order and process of the text, supposing that the Scripture served but to feign allegories upon; insomuch that twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song. Then came our sophisters with their analogical and chopological sense, and with an antitheme of half an inch, out of which some drew a thread nine days long.’

The all-important theology of Paul, to take a most powerful example, had vanished, smothered under tomes of what amounted to free association, and was absolutely not available to the common man (From the “Introduction” in Tyndale’s New Testament (in a modern-spelling edition with introduction by David Daniell), xvii).