  When writing in Latin, More could assume a sophisticated and informed readership, able to handle his criticism of contemporary abuses without drawing false conclusions. However, in an age of expanding literacy, vernacular readers were more exposed to misunderstanding, especially when confronted by conflicting voices.  More's concern about untutored access to controversial texts is made clear in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, where he treats the issue of an English Bible: he is in favour of one, provided that both translation and circulation are controlled by the bishops and that it is handed out to those who are “honest, sad and virtuous” and who will read it for purposes of devotion rather than disputation (CWM 6:1, 341). Like Erasmus, More is unhappy at the thought of letting unqualified readers loose on thorny theological issues like free will, or indeed on the biblical texts themselves, “meddling with such parts as least will agree with their capacities”. In the church, God “will have some readers and some hearers, some teachers and some learners”; even Plato, “the great philosopher”, restricted discussion of the laws to “folk meet therefore and in place convenient” (CWM 6:1, 334). Most arresting of all is his declaration in the Confutation of Tyndale that were anyone to translate his earlier Latin writings and Erasmus's Folly into English, he would burn the books with his own hands, “rather than folk should (though through their own fault) take any harm of them”.  For More, it is an issue of expediency, and that reference to translation is revealing: in the current state of affairs, when “men by their own default [incapacity] misconstrue and take harm of the very scripture of God”, it is the vulnerability of the vernacular reader that worries him (CWM 8:1, 177–79). If A Dialogue Concerning Heresies is the most successful of the polemical works, this is because it is not written as a direct riposte to an opponent but as a dialogue which enacts the process of persuasion. In this More, again adopting a fictional persona, wins over the youthful Messenger, his interlocutor, whose sincerity is never in doubt but whose anti-intellectual bias and self-reliance makes him representative of an evangelical readership.