Inner circle of intimate friends.
Colet’s personal loyalty to Christ.
Moreover, Colet soon gathered around him here in London, as he had done at Oxford, an inner circle of personal friends.[238] These were wont often to meet at his table and to talk on late into the night, conversing sometimes upon literary topics, and sometimes speaking together of that invisible Prince whom Colet was as loyally serving now in the midst of honour and preferment as he had done in an humbler sphere.[239] Colet’s loyalty to Him seemed indeed to have been deepened rather than diminished by contact with the outer world. The place which St. Paul’s character and writings had once occupied in his thoughts and teaching, was now filled by the character and words of St. Paul’s Master and his.[240] He never travelled, says Erasmus, without reading some book or conversing of Christ.[241] He had arranged the sayings of Christ in groups, to assist the memory, and with the intention of writing a book on them.[242] His sermons, too, in St. Paul’s Cathedral bore witness to the engrossing object of his thoughts. It was now no longer St. Paul’s Epistles but the ‘Gospel History,’ the ‘Apostles’ Creed,’ the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’[243] which the Dean was expounding to the people. And highly as he had held, and still held, in honour the apostolic writings, yet, as already mentioned, they seemed to him to shrink, as it were, into nothing, compared with the wonderful majesty of Christ himself.
Colet’s sermons at St. Paul’s.
The same method of teaching which he had applied at Oxford to the writings of St. Paul he now applied in his cathedral sermons in treating of these still higher subjects. For he did not, we are told, take an isolated text and preach a detached discourse upon it, but went continuously through whatever he was expounding from beginning to end in a course of sermons.[244] Thus these cathedral discourses of Colet’s were continuous expositions of the facts of the Saviour’s life and teaching, as recorded by the Evangelists, or embodied in that simple creed which in Colet’s view contained the sum of Christian theology. And thus was he practically illustrating, by his own public example in these sermons, his advice to theological students, to ‘keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, letting divines, if they like, dispute about the rest.’
II. MORE CALLED TO THE BAR—IN PARLIAMENT—OFFENDS HENRY VII.—THE CONSEQUENCES (1500-1504).
After the departure of Erasmus, More worked on diligently at his legal studies at Lincoln’s Inn. A few more terms and he received the reward of his industry in his call to the bar.
More’s legal studies.
Grocyn, Linacre, and More all in London.
More lectures on the ‘De Civitate Dei.’
During the years devoted to his legal curriculum, he had been wholly absorbed in his law books.
Closely watched by his father, and purposely kept with a stinted allowance, as at Oxford, so that ‘his whole mind might, be set on his book,’ the law student had found little time or opportunity for other studies. But being now duly called to the bar, and thus freed from the restraints of student life, his mind naturally reverted to old channels of thought. Grocyn and Linacre in the meantime had left Oxford and become near neighbours of his in London. Thus the old Oxford circle partially formed itself again, and with the renewal of old intimacies returned, if ever lost, the love of old studies. For no sooner was More called to the bar than he commenced his maiden lectures in the church of St. Lawrence,[245] in the Old Jewry, and chose for a subject the great work of St. Augustine, ‘De Civitate Dei.’
His object, we are told, in these lectures was not to expound the theological creed of the Bishop of Hippo, but the philosophical and historical[246] arguments contained in those first few books in which Augustine had so forcibly traced the connection between the history of Rome and the character and religion of the Romans, attributing the former glory of the great Roman Commonwealth to the valour and virtue of the old Romans; tracing the recent ruin of the empire, ending in the sack of Rome by Alaric, to the effeminacy and profligacy of the modern Romans; defending Christianity from the charge of having undermined the empire, and pointing out that if it had been universally adopted by rulers and people, and carried out into practice in their lives, the old Pagan empire might have become a truly Christian empire and been saved,—those books which, starting from the facts of the recent sack of Rome, landed the reader at last in a discussion of the philosophy of free-will and fate.