‘What is this, I ask, but to act as a father to all your children and fellow-citizens? You rob yourself to make them rich; you strip yourself to clothe them. You wear yourself out with toil, that they may be quickened into life in Christ. In a word, you spend yourself away that you may gain them for Christ!
‘He must be envious, indeed, who does not back with all his might the man who engages in a work like this. He must be wicked, indeed, who can gainsay or interrupt him. That man is an enemy to England who does not care to give a helping hand where he can.’
Which words in praise of Colet’s self-sacrificing work were not merely uttered within hearing of those who might hang upon the lips of the aged Fitzjames or the bishop who had ‘blasphemed’ the school; they passed, with edition after edition of the ‘Copia’ of Erasmus, into the hands of every scholar in Europe, until they were known and read of all men![416]
Colet charged with heresy by his bishop.
But Bishop Fitzjames, whose unabating zeal against heretics had become the ruling passion of his old age, no longer able to control his hatred of the Dean, associated with himself two other bishops of like opinion and spirit in the ignoble work of making trouble for Colet. They resorted to their usual weapon—persecution. They exhibited to the Archbishop of Canterbury articles against Colet extracted from his sermons. Their first charge was that he had preached that images ought not to be worshipped. The second charge was that he had denied that Christ, when He commanded Peter the third time to ‘feed his lambs,’ made any allusion to the application of episcopal revenues in hospitality or anything else, seeing that Peter was a poor man, and had no episcopal revenues at all. The third charge was, that in speaking once from his pulpit of those who were accustomed to read their sermons, he meant to give a side-hit at the Bishop of London, who, on account of his old age, was in the habit of reading his sermons.[417]
But the Archbishop, thoroughly appreciating as he did the high qualities of the Dean, became his protector and advocate, instead of his judge. Colet himself, says Erasmus, did not deign to make any reply to these foolish charges, and others ‘more foolish still.’[418] And the Archbishop, therefore, without hearing any reply, indignantly rejected them.
Proceedings quashed by Warham.
What the charges ‘more foolish still’ may have been Erasmus does not record. But Tyndale mentions, as a well known fact, that ‘the Bishop of London would have made Dean Colet of Paules a heretic for translating the Paternoster in English, had not the [Arch]bishop of Canterbury helped the Dean.’[419] Colet’s English translation or paraphrase of the Paternoster still remains to show that he was open to the charge.[420] But for once, at least, the persecutor was robbed of his prey!