It seems to have been taken for granted that the ‘new learning’ was now to make rapid progress, having Henry VIII. for its royal patron, and Erasmus for its professor of Greek at Cambridge.
CHAPTER VI.
I. COLET FOUNDS ST. PAUL’S SCHOOL (1510).
Fully as Colet joined his friends in rejoicing at the accession to the throne of a king known to be favourable to himself and his party, he had drunk by far too deeply of the spirit of self-sacrifice to admit of his rejoicing with a mere courtier’s joy.
Colet inherits his father’s fortune.
Fortune had indeed been lavish to him. His elevation unasked to the dignity of Doctor and Dean; the popular success of his preaching; the accession of a friendly king, from whom probably further promotion was to be had for the asking; and, lastly, the sudden acquisition on his father’s death of a large independent fortune in addition to the revenues of the deanery;—here was a concurrence of circumstances far more likely to foster habits of selfish ease and indulgence than to draw Colet into paths of self-denial and self-sacrificing labour. Had he enlisted in the ranks of a great cause in the hasty zeal of enthusiasm, it had had time now to cool, and here was the triumphal arch through which the abjured hero might gracefully retire from work amidst the world’s applause.
But Colet, in his lectures at Oxford, had laid great stress upon the necessity of that living sacrifice of men’s hearts and lives without which all other sacrifices were empty things, and it seems that after he was called to the deanery he gave forth ‘A right fruitfull Admonition concerning the Order of a good Christian Man’s Life,’[366] which passed through many editions during the sixteenth century, and in which he made use of the following language:—