Erasmus is introduced to Colet.
Prior Charnock seems to have at once appreciated Erasmus. He did all in his power to give him a warm welcome to the university.[184] He seems to have taken him at once to hear Colet lecture;[185] and he very soon informed Colet that his new guest turned out to be no ordinary man.[186] Upon this report Colet wrote to Erasmus a graceful and gentlemanly letter,[187] giving him a hearty welcome to England and to Oxford, and professing his readiness to serve him.
Erasmus replied, warmly accepting Colet’s friendship, but at the same time telling him plainly that he would find in him a man of slender or rather of no fortune, with no ambition, but warm and open-hearted, simple, liberal, honest, but timid, and of few words. Beyond this he must expect nothing. But if Colet could love such a man—if he thought such a man worthy of his friendship—he might then count him as his own.[188]
Colet and Erasmus become warm friends.
Colet did think such a man worthy of his friendship, and from that moment Erasmus and he were the best of friends. The lord mayor’s son, born to wealth and all that wealth could command, whilst steeling his heart against the allurements of city and court life, eagerly received into his bosom-friendship the poor foreign scholar, whom fortune had used so hardly, whose orphaned youth had been embittered by the treachery of dishonest guardians, and who, robbed of his slender patrimony and cast adrift upon the world without resources, had hitherto scarcely been able to keep himself from want by giving lessons to private pupils. Whether he was likely to find in the foreign scholar the fulfilment of his yearnings after fellowship, it will be for further chapters of this history to disclose.
II. TABLE-TALK ON THE SACRIFICE OF CAIN AND ABEL (1498?).
Table-talk at Oxford.
It chanced that, after the delivery of a Latin sermon, the preacher—an accomplished divine—was a guest at the long table in one of the Oxford halls. Colet presided. The divine took the seat of honour to the left of Colet; Charnock, the hospitable prior, sat opposite; Erasmus next to the divine; and a lawyer opposite to him. Below them, on either side, a mixed and nameless group filled up the table. At first the tide of table-talk ebbed and flowed upon trivial subjects. The conversation turned at length upon the sacrifices of Cain and Abel—why the one was accepted and the other not.
Colet’s views upon sacrifice.
The difference between Cain and Abel in the men, not in the offerings.
Colet—if we may judge from the earnest way in which, in his exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, he had urged the uselessness of outward sacrifices, unless accompanied by that living sacrifice of heart and mind which they were meant to typify—was not likely to advocate any view which should attribute the acceptance of the one offering and the rejection of the other, merely to any difference in the offerings themselves. He would be sure to place the difference in the character of the men. Colet seems on this occasion to have done so, and to have fancied he saw in the different occupations chosen by the two brothers evidence of the different spirit under which they acted. The exact course of the conversation we have no means of following. All we know is, that Colet took one side, and Erasmus and the divine the other, and that the chief bone of contention was the suggestion thrown out by Colet, that Cain had in the first instance offended the Almighty by his distrust in the Divine beneficence, and too great confidence in his own art and industry, and that this was proved by his having been the first to attempt to till the cursed ground; while Abel, with greater resignation, and resting content with what nature still spontaneously yielded, had chosen the gentle occupation of a shepherd.[189]