Those twins of learning which he raised in you,

Ipswich and Oxford!”

Good Bishop Fisher was hard at work introducing Greek studies at Cambridge, where Croke was delivering lectures, and where the new learning was better received than it had been at Oxford. The noble Countess of Richmond[338] had founded her two Cambridge colleges, her grammar-school at Wimbourne, and her “Lady Margaret” professorships; Fox, now Bishop of Winchester, was drawing up the statutes of Corpus Christi, that classical beehive, as he was pleased to term it, in which he provided for the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, under the professors or “herbalists,” who were for ever to drive all barbarism out of the bee-garden, and provide that the best classical authors should be read by his students. Linacre was now the royal physician and a man of importance; he had translated Galen, founded two lectureships at Oxford, and the College of Physicians, but at this moment he was contemplating whether it might not be well to give up professional fame and Court favour, in order to die a priest; and this design he afterwards executed. Grocyn, too, had ably maintained his scholar’s reputation, and was universally respected as long as he lived, says Erasmus, for his chaste and holy life. In the judgment of that critic, however, his firm adherence to Catholic dogma was somewhat excessive, and bordered on superstition, and he considers it necessary to apologise for this weakness on the part of his friend, who, he says, had from childhood been trained in the scholastic theology, and was exceedingly learned in questions of ecclesiastical discipline. More, whose early inclination for the cloister had yielded to the persuasions of his director Colet, had married and embraced a professional career; he had written his Utopia, and was struggling hard to preserve his independence, and keep out of the royal service, into which others so eagerly sought admittance. He desired nothing better than to be suffered to enjoy in freedom his happy Chelsea home, where it was his delight to direct the education of his children, to gather around him his learned friends, and relieve the intervals of business with polite and Christian studies. In that family circle Erasmus always found a place during his visits to England, and it is to him that we owe the charming portraiture of a household, the venerable memory of which has sunk into the English heart and become almost the typical example of an English home. As to Erasmus himself, his course during the same period is easily told: he had published his Greek Testament and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had thereby earned a European reputation; he had flitted about from England to Paris, from Paris to Germany, from Germany back again to England, and thence to Rome. Courted, flattered, and admired by all, he was the great bel-esprit of the day, and the lighter productions of his pen were telling upon public opinion, much perhaps in the same sort of way that clever journalism affects it in our own day. He was directing his keen powers of ridicule against some real abuses, but at the same time his mocking wit was recklessly striking at sacred things and bringing them into popular contempt. In his “Praise of Folly,” and his “Adages,” he had hit hard at popes, cardinals, pilgrimages, devotions to the saints, and indulgences, but above all at monks and friars, whom he invariably holds up to execration, as something too pitiably vile and puerile to be endured by men of sense. In short, to use the oft-quoted saying, he had laid the egg which Luther was to hatch, and though he afterwards resented this charge, and was wont to say that he had laid a hen’s egg, and Luther had hatched it a crow’s, yet, as Hallam has shrewdly remarked, whatever were the bird, it pecked hard against the Church and her religious orders. His mode of warfare was to paint every one who opened his lips in defence of the old order of things as a half-witted ignoramus, and to bespatter his adversaries with epithets and witticisms, in an easy flowing style which everybody read and everybody laughed at; and when the laugh was once raised the victory was more than half won.

It remains to speak of Colet, now Dean of St. Paul’s, who had steadily followed out the purpose to which he had devoted himself at Oxford, had given himself up heart and soul to the task of reviving the study of Scriptural Divinity, and was opposing himself like a rock to every form of practical corruption. At this distance of time it is not easy for us to satisfy ourselves as to the real character of one who has left nothing but his fame behind him, and whose views and teaching are to be gathered, not from his own writings but from the epistolary correspondence of Erasmus, whose narrative is naturally coloured by the bias of his own mind.[339] In those days of Court sycophancy, we cannot but admire the courageous independence of such a man, and the single-hearted fervour with which he set himself to reform his chapter, to expound the gospel to the people, and to urge upon his fellow clergy a strict observance of the canons. In his sermon preached before Convocation, in 1511, he chose for his text the words of St. Paul: “Be ye not conformed to this world;” and thundered out in plain, strong, and noble words his denunciation of those abuses which he called the “matter of the Church’s reformation;” such as “the worldly lives of the prelates,” “their hunting and hawking,” and “their covetousness after high promotions.” The reformation he said must begin with my “reverend Fathers the Lord Bishops,” whom he prayed to excuse his boldness, for he spoke out of very zeal for Holy Church. In this famous sermon there is doubtless something too much of asperity, yet it does not seem to have been taken amiss. The single-hearted honesty of the speaker was understood and appreciated by his hearers; and it must be added that his own example added force to his words. Colet was a man of pure and blameless life, simple and austere in manners, and ready to spend himself for what he deemed the cause of Christ. His exhortations had extraordinary success; other ecclesiastics were animated to greater zeal in the discharge of their pastoral duties, and began to preach to their people on sermons and festival days. Divinity lectures, too, were delivered in the church of St. Paul, both by the Dean, and certain learned men whom he invited to assist him, and these lectures were no longer permitted to take the form of dry disputations, but were chiefly commentaries on the Scriptures, particularly on the Epistles of St. Paul, with which Colet was so enamoured, says Erasmus, that he seemed to be wholly wrapped up in them. With all his classical tastes he thought less of manner than of matter, in his public orations. Scriptural simplicity was what he aimed at; he wanted, to use his own rather uncourteous phrase, to “clear away the cobwebs of the schoolmen from the plain text of the Bible.” He did not altogether neglect the study of style, and sometimes condescended to read Chaucer and other English poets for the purpose of improving his diction. But in general his thoughts came out too hot and molten for him to deliberate much in what words to utter them, and the careful polish which Erasmus bestowed on his writings was viewed by him as more worthy of a pedagogue than of a preacher, who has his heart full of big thoughts and is in haste to utter them.

How little there was of a courtier about him may be gathered from the sermon which he preached before the king at the time when he was preparing for his French war, in which, instead of offering that monarch the welcome incense of flattery, he very plainly expounded to his hearers the sin which Christian princes committed by wars of ambition, in which they fought, not under the banner of Christ, but under that of the devil.[340] Much of this was surely excellent; and had this been all, we should be ready to yield our hearty sympathy to Colet in spite of those “specks of human infirmity” which his best friends saw and regretted. A reformer has rough work to do, and in doing it has need of a certain fund of audacity which easily overpasses the just bounds of discretion, and can scarcely avoid wounding the susceptibilities of those whom he undertakes to amend. Yet such things are easily pardoned in them whom we know to be only “zealous for the Lord of Hosts,” and who cannot “restrain their lips” when they declare His justice in the midst of the people. But there were other elements in the character of Colet from which we instinctively shrink, for the simple reason that they betray a mind out of harmony with the teachings of faith. We have already seen him bringing the charge of arrogance—himself surely with greater arrogance—against the Angelic doctor, unable to repress his intolerance of what he deemed his too strict definitions of doctrine; and betraying an angry contempt for the popular devotions sanctioned by the Church, but which he impeached of superstition. That practical abuses may easily have crept into many of these devotions is what no Catholic will think himself called on to deny, and that where they existed they deserved to be exposed and denounced is equally obvious; yet when we find that the only fact alluded to by Colet’s biographer as having stirred the wrath of the reformer was the eagerness displayed by the Canterbury pilgrims to kiss the shoe of St. Thomas, preserved there as a relic, we are disposed to think that it was not merely these supposed abuses, but the devotions themselves which he regarded with dislike. And this judgment is confirmed when we find him betraying a similar want of sympathy with the spirit and practice of the Church in cases where there could be no question of superstition. He set very little store by the practice of daily hearing or saying Mass: he considered the recitation of the Divine Office in private by priests to be both a burdensome and a superfluous duty, and seems to have been, to say the least, indifferent to the value of prayer for the dead. All this we learn from the correspondence of Erasmus, who further informs us that there were a vast number of opinions received in the schools from which Colet strongly dissented, and that he not only read the works of heretical writers without scruple, but was accustomed to say that he often learned more out of them than he did from orthodox writers, who were content to be always running over a beaten track.[341] It can therefore be no great matter of surprise that Colet, before long, became involved in trouble. While some men regarded him as little short of a saint, others, alarmed at his bold views and the uncompromising language in which he expressed them, looked on him as an incipient heretic, and as such denounced him to his bishop. Articles were drawn up against him and laid before the Primate, but Warham dismissed the case as frivolous, and Colet was never afterwards interfered with on account of his liberty of speech.[342]

Erasmus, and after him Fox, tells us that the three articles of accusation referred to his manner of treating the worship of images, his preaching against the worldly lives of the clergy, and his complaints of those who read their sermons in a cold and formal manner; vague charges, which would be very justly designated as “frivolous.” Tyndale, however, in his usual burlesque style, declares in his “Reply to More,” that “the bishop would have made Colet a heretic for translating the Pater Noster into English,” and this random shot has been gravely taken up and handed on from one author to another as a sober bit of history. “He even gave the people parts of the Bible in English,” says a Scotch reviewer, “such as the Lord’s Prayer!” Whilst Knight seriously assures his readers that not only were the English Scriptures at this time utterly unknown, but that “there was scarce so much as a Latin Testament in any cathedral church in England.”

Colet’s friendship with More and Erasmus meanwhile remained unbroken, and in the intervals of graver duties the three friends were wont to meet at the house of Dame Christian Colet, the Dean’s mother, in the (then) pleasant country suburb of Stepney, of which parish Colet was vicar. Erasmus has sketched the good old lady in her 90th year, with her countenance “still so fair and cheerful, you would think she had never shed a tear;” and Colet lets us know the pleasure which she found in receiving her son’s guests, and in their agreeable and witty conversation. Stepney, with its green lanes, fresh country air, and rural population, would often picture itself to the eye of More when he grew weary of his life in town; and in his early married days, when his narrow means obliged him to content himself with a house in Bucklersbury, the hardworked lawyer was glad enough, like other cockneys, to run down to Stepney on Saturday afternoons, and refresh himself with the merry talk of his friends, as they sauntered in the trimly-kept gardens and admired the noble strawberries brought over from Holland, or the damask roses lately introduced into England by Linacre.

Not unfrequently the party included some of the learned foreigners who just then crowded the Tudor Court, such as Andreas Ammonius,[343] the king’s Latin secretary, whom Erasmus praises as being “so noble and generous, so free from envy, and so full of great endowments,” or their old Oxford crony, John Sixtine, a Frisian by birth, but now naturalised in England, and esteemed by all good scholars for his versatile genius. It seems strange to us in these days to associate the names of foreign canonists and divines with our country parish churches, of which, however, they not unfrequently enjoyed the revenues. Hidden in a sequestered valley of Devonshire, surrounded by woods that are dear to village children for the sweet-scented violets that grow there in such wild profusion, shut in by hills which they will not easily forget who have seen their sloping fields all bright with golden sheaves, made brighter with the intense sunshine that seems borrowed from a southern sky; the tourist may perhaps have stumbled on the little church of St. Blaze of Haccombe, with its quaint encaustic tiles and cross-legged effigies of the crusading lords of Haccombe, all as perfect as in the days of John Sixtine, the friend of More and Erasmus, who was arch-priest of the college formerly attached to this church by Sir Stephen de Haccombe, to the end that perpetual prayer might be made there for the souls of his ancestors. Dr. Sixtine had other more splendid and lucrative benefices, but the beauty of that little rural valley seems to have clung to his heart, and among the various bequests which he names in his will, appears the sum of fifteen pounds in honour of God and St. Blaze, towards the reparation of the church of Haccombe. Let the good deed be noted here, as well as the kind and homely feeling which induced him to direct that twenty pounds should be distributed among his parishioners at Eglescliffe, “to buy them instruments necessary for their country labours.”

Both these distinguished men were frequent visitors to Stepney, and in the pleasant conferences which Colet held with the familiar coterie, one project of his must often have furnished them with a topic of conversation: it was his wish to found a school. Schools, indeed, there already were in rich abundance; during the last thirty years a very harvest of them had been springing up all over England, but none yet founded were quite to Colet’s mind. He desired to see an academy in which there should be laid a solid foundation of learning, both sacred and profane. Classical, or what he termed “clene Latin,” the fashionable study of Greek, and Scriptural divinity, would never, he argued, establish themselves in the universities until they were first taught in preparatory schools; and he pleased himself with the thought of attaching such a grammar-school to his own church of St Paul’s, and bestowing his wealth and his study in bringing it to perfection. He hoped to raise a generation of scholars who should be trained to understand the true sense and spirit of the classical authors, so as to read, write, and speak the learned tongues with ease and elegance; and who, at the same time, should have gone through a careful course of religious instruction; a large-hearted design, which met the warm approval of his literary friends, and of none more than of Erasmus.

The school was accordingly commenced in 1509, at the east end of St. Paul’s churchyard. The front next the church was finished in the year following, and bore this inscription:—Schola catechizationis puerorum in Christi Opt. Max. fide et bonis literis, Anno Christi, MDX. The endowments provided for the free education of one hundred and fifty-three scholars,[344] and for the maintenance of a master, usher, and chaplain. The school, when complete, was divided into four parts. First the porch, where those whom Colet called his catechumens were instructed in religion, no one being admitted who could not at least say the catechism and know how to read and write. Then came a room for the lower class taught by the usher, and a third for the higher class taught by the master. The captain of each form had a little desk to mark his pre-eminence, and the apartments were only divided by curtains. Lastly, there was a small chapel opening into the schoolroom, where Mass was said daily. The children, however, were not intended to hear Mass daily, for, according to Colet’s views, this would have been a waste of time. Unlike Bede and Alfred, he was ignorant of what has been called the grand secret of education, “the way how to lose time wisely.” Week-day Masses were in his eyes simple superfluities, and he judged the moments so consumed much better spent in study. In accordance with this principle, he himself only said Mass on Sundays and festivals, and argued that he spent the time thus saved more profitably in arranging the matter for his sermons! His scholars, indeed, had their Mass said for them every morning in the chapel; but the statutes enjoined that when the Sacring bell was heard, they should only prostrate until after the Elevation, and then rise and go on with their studies. What a revelation of character appears in traits like these, and how wide a distance separates such a tone of spirituality from that of the monastic scholars! How little of the spirit of faith was likely to be imbibed during this daily lesson of irreverence, and what could have been the theory which this much-vaunted director possessed of the spiritual life, when he practically taught his pupils by word and example to value work above prayer, and to save time for study by cutting short their Mass! Yet Colet designed this as a Catechetical school, and intended it to be a nursery of Christian piety. The image of the child Jesus stood on the master’s seat in the attitude of teaching, with the apposite inscription, “Hear ye Him.” The children were instructed to regard Him as the Master of the school, and as they went and came, to bow to His image and salute Him with a brief hymn. Thrice a day, moreover, they were to prostrate, and recite appointed prayers; in short, there were not wanting provisions of a religious character, only much of the true spirit of Catholic devotion had been pared away.