So far, then, from More’s new position having extinguished his own opinions or changed his views, he had the satisfaction of being able now and then to advance the interests of the ‘new learning,’ and to act the part of its ‘friend at court.’
III. THE EVENING OF COLET’S LIFE (1518-19).
The sweating sickness.
The sweating sickness continued its ravages in England, striking down one here and another there with merciless rapidity. It was generally fatal on the first day. If the patient survived twenty-four hours he was looked upon as out of danger. But it was liable to recur, and sometimes attacked the same person four times in succession. This was the case with Cardinal Wolsey; whilst several of the royal retinue were attacked and carried off at once, Wolsey’s strong constitution carried him through four successive attacks.[724]
Colet three times attacked by it.
During the period of its ravages Colet was three times attacked by it and survived, but with a constitution so shattered, and with symptoms so premonitory of consumptive tendencies, as to suggest to him that the time might not be far distant when he too must follow after his twenty-one brothers and sisters, and leave his aged mother the survivor of all her children.
Meanwhile an accidental ray of light falls here and there upon the otherwise obscure life of Colet during these years of peril, revealing little pictures, too beautiful in their simple consistency with all else we know of him to be passed by unheeded.
The first glimpse we get of Colet reveals him engaged in the careful and final completion of the rules and statutes by which his school was to be governed after his own death. Having spent a good part of his life and his fortune in the foundation of this school, as the best means of promoting the cause which he had so deeply at heart, one might have expected that he would have tried, in fixing his statutes, to give permanence and perpetuity to his own views. This is what most people try to do by endowments of this kind.
No sooner do most reformers clear away a little ground, and discover what they take to be truths, than they attempt, by organising a sect, founding endowments, and framing articles and trust-deeds, to secure the permanent tradition of their own views to posterity in the form in which they are apprehended by themselves. Hence, in the very act of striking off the fetters of the past, they are often forging the fetters of the future. Even the Protestant Reformers, whilst on the one hand bravely breaking the yoke under which their ancestors had lived in bondage, ended by fixing another on the neck of their posterity. Those who remained in the old bondage found themselves, as the result of the Reformation, bound still tighter under Tridentine decrees: whilst those who had joined the exodus, and entered the promised land of the Reformers, found it to be a land of almost narrower boundaries than the one they had left. Freed from Papal thraldom it might be, but bound down by an Augustinian theology as rigid and dogmatic as that from which they had escaped.
If Colet did not do likewise, he resisted with singular wisdom and success a temptation which besets every one under his circumstances. That Colet strove to found no sect of his own has already been seen. If the movement which he had done so much to set agoing had produced its fruits—if a school or party had been the result—he had not called it, or felt it to be, in any way his own; he might call it ‘Erasmican’ in joke, and leave Erasmus indignantly to repudiate ‘that name of division;’ but Erasmus expressed the view of Colet as well as his own when he said to the abbot, ‘Why should we try to narrow what Christ intended to be broad?’