‘When you have read what is contained on this sheet of paper, let me have it again, for I have no copy of it; and, although I am not in the habit of keeping my letters, and cannot do so, as I send them off just as I write them, without keeping a copy; yet if any of them contain anything instructive (aliquid doctrinæ), I do not like to lose them entirely. Not that they are in themselves worth preserving, but that, left behind me, they may serve as little memorials of me. And if there be any other reason why I should wish to preserve my letters to you, this is one, and a chief one—that I should be glad for them to remain as permanent witnesses of my regard for you.
‘Again, farewell!’
The sole survivor of a family of twenty-two, though himself but thirty, Colet might well keep always in view the possibility of an early death.
III. COLET ON THE MOSAIC ACCOUNT OF THE CREATION (1497?).
It would seem that one of Colet’s friends, named Radulphus, had been attempting to expound ‘the dark places of Scripture,’ and that in doing so he had commenced with the words of Lamech in the fourth chapter of Genesis, as though this were the first ‘dark place’ to be found in the Bible!
Letters of Colet on the Mosaic account of creation.
Out of this circumstance arose a correspondence on the meaning of the first chapter of Genesis, which Colet thought required explanation as much as any other portion of Scripture. Four of Colet’s letters to Radulphus, containing his views on the Mosaic account of the creation, have fortunately been preserved, bound up with a copy of his manuscript exposition on the Epistle to the Romans, in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[102] Colet seems to have thought them worth preserving, as he did the letter to the Abbot of Winchcombe; and as any attempt to realise the position and feelings of Colet, when commencing his lectures at Oxford on St. Paul’s epistles, would have been very imperfect without the story of the priest’s visit, so these letters to Radulphus, apart from their intrinsic interest, are especially valuable as giving another practical illustration of the position which Colet had assumed upon the question of the inspiration and interpretation of the Scriptures; as showing, perhaps, more clearly than anything else could have done, that the principles and method which he had applied to St. Paul’s writings, were not hastily adopted, but the result of mature conviction,—that Colet was ready to apply them consistently to the Old Testament as well as to the New, to the first chapter of Genesis as well as to the Epistle to the Romans.
First letter to Radulphus.
Colet begins his first letter by telling Radulphus how surprised he was that, whilst professing to expound the ‘dark places of Scripture,’ he should, as already mentioned, have commenced with the words of Lamech, leaving the first three chapters of Genesis untouched; for these very chapters, so lightly passed over by Radulphus, seemed to him, he said, ‘so obscure that they might almost in themselves be that “abyss” to which Moses alluded when he wrote that “darkness covered the face of the deep.”’[103]
Use of a knowledge of Hebrew.