Poor Miles went back to his rooms feeling very much perplexed. Here was the great Chancellor Wolsey building a new college to extend the new learning, which everybody extolled, and for the want of which his father was acting so unjustly towards his poor, helpless tenants. And yet when he proposed to extend the most notable outcome of this, by translating the Greek New Testament into English, he was told that he should be breaking one of the fundamental laws of the Church! And the Church itself was believed to be founded on the very truths and doctrines he wanted to make known to the unlearned, as well as those who could read Greek, that they might form their lives upon the truth of Christ Himself!
Life was a dreadful puzzle, he thought, as he sat down in his little room to try and think out the problem that had been forced upon him.
He had enrolled himself among the Grecians of his college without thinking much about it, beyond its being a good rallying cry when there was a fight among the students and the town lads, or among the students themselves over some knotty point that could not be solved by logic, and until he went home and saw the depopulated village this had satisfied him.
There, however, while his injured ankle compelled him to keep within the shelter of his own room, he had time to think of many things, and what he heard and saw during this last visit to his home had brought him face to face with the stern realities of life in a fashion he had never dreamed of before. Now, for the first time, his public profession of being a "Grecian"—a follower of the new learning—had brought him into conflict with that which, to his mind, the word "Trojan" represented; and he clung most tenaciously to the thought that if his father had only had the opportunity of learning Greek, and reading the New Testament in that language, he would never have turned Rankin and the rest of the poor folks off the land as he had done.
This being so, was it not the duty of those who had been enlightened to do what they could to extend its influence, so that men like his father, who were too old to learn a new language, or Rankin, who would never have time to do so, might yet be able to learn these all-important truths, which, if carried out, would make life for all mankind a fairer, sweeter, holier thing than men had ever dreamed it could be?
In the midst of these reflections his friend came in who had promised to lend him a book written in English by an Englishman; and he was almost as eager to hear about it as his friend was to tell him of its wonders.
Sir Thomas More, it seemed, on one of his journeys abroad, had met with a sailor who had seen the new world beyond the great sea, and this had set Sir Thomas More thinking of what this new land of "Nowhere" or "Utopia" ought to be.
"Let me read you a little bit about the houses in 'Utopia,'" said his friend, after he had related some of its wonders. "'The houses in the beginning were very low,'" he read, "'and like homely cottages, or poor shepherd huts, made at all adventures of every rude piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls and ridged roofs thatched over with straw.'"
"Oh! we can see them any day here in Oxford or Woodstock," interrupted Miles.
"Yes, of course, but wait a minute; whoever saw houses like these?" And he read on, "'The streets were twenty feet broad; the houses backed by spacious gardens and curiously builded, after a gorgeous and gallant sort, with their stories one after the other. The outsides of the walls be made either of hard flint, or of plaster, or of bricks, and the inner sides be well strengthened with timber work. The roofs be plain and flat, covered over with plaster that be so tempered that no fire can hurt or perish it, and withstanding the violence of the weather better than any lead. They keep the wind out of their windows with glass, for it is there much used, and sometimes also with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, and that for two commodities, for by this means more light cometh in, and the wind is better kept out.'"