Erasmus was working hard at his Paraphrases at Louvain, when the news reached him that Colet was dead! On the 11th September Pace had written to Wolsey that ‘the Dean of Paul’s had lain continually since Thursday in extremis, but was not yet dead.’[782] He had died on the 16th of September 1519.
The grief of Erasmus on hearing of it.
His estimate of Colet’s character.
When Erasmus heard of it, he could not refrain from weeping. ‘For thirty years I have not felt the death of a friend so bitterly,’[783] he wrote to Lupset, a young disciple of Colet’s. ‘I seem,’ he wrote to Pace, ‘as though only half of me were alive, Colet being dead. What a man has England and what a friend have I lost!’ To another Englishman he wrote, ‘What avail these sobs and lamentations? They cannot bring him back again. In a little while we shall follow him. In the meantime we should rejoice for Colet. He now is safely enjoying Christ, whom he always had upon his lips and at his heart.’[784] To Tunstal, ‘I should be inconsolable for the death of Colet did I not know that my tears would avail nothing for him and for me;’[785] and to Bishop Fisher, ‘I have written this weeping for Colet’s death.... I know it is all right with him who, escaped from this evil and wretched world, is in present enjoyment of that Christ whom he so loved when alive. I cannot help mourning in the public name the loss of so rare an example of Christian piety, so remarkable a preacher of Christian truth!’[786] And, in again writing to Lupset, a month or two afterwards, a long letter, pouring his troubles, on account of a bitter controversy which Edward Lee had raised up against him, into the ears of Lupset, instead of, as had hitherto been his wont, into the ears of Colet, he exclaimed in conclusion, ‘O true theologian! O wonderful preacher of evangelical doctrine! With what earnest zeal did he drink in the philosophy of Christ! How eagerly did he imbibe the spirit and feelings of St. Paul! How did the purity of his whole life correspond to his heavenly doctrine! How many years following the example of St. Paul, did he teach the people without reward!’[787] ‘You would not hesitate,’ finally wrote Erasmus to Justus Jonas, ‘to inscribe the name of this man in the roll of the saints although uncanonised by the Pope.’
More’s estimate of Colet’s character.
‘For generations,’ wrote More, ‘we have not had amongst us any one man more learned or holy!’[788]
The inscription on the leaden plate laid on the coffin of Dean Colet[789] bore witness that he died ‘to the great grief of the whole people, by whom, for his integrity of life and divine gift of preaching, he was the most beloved of all his time;’ and his remains were laid in the tomb prepared by himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
X. CONCLUSION.
The fellow-work of the Oxford Reformers accomplished.
The Protestant Reformation a new movement under which theirs was submerged.
With the death of Colet this history of the Oxford Reformers may fitly end. Erasmus and More, it is true, lived on sixteen years after this, and retained their love for one another to the last. But even their future history was no longer, to the same extent as it had been, a joint history. Erasmus never again visited England, and if they did meet during those long years, it was a chance meeting only, on some occasion when More was sent on an embassy, and their intercourse could not be intimate.
The fellow-work of the Oxford Reformers was to a great extent accomplished when Colet died. From its small beginnings during their college intercourse at Oxford it had risen into prominence and made its power felt throughout Europe. But now for three hundred years it was to stop and, as it were, to be submerged under a new wave of the great tide of human progress. For, as has been said, the Protestant Reformation was in many respects a new movement, and not altogether a continuation of that of the Oxford Reformers.