kind who need the authority of dogma for their guidance in life.

It was not its mission to carry through the Reformation. It was too literary in its tendencies, too tolerant, too inclined to comprehension, too undogmatic. The Calvinists and the followers of Luther, who could meet dogma by dogma, and thus give an intelligible rallying-ground to the mass, were the people who finally broke the fetters of the Church. the divergence of the English school of the New Learning from At first, however, the Reformers in Europe was not perceptible. The notion of the Oxford Reformers was that the Church should be broadtolerant that it should not too strictly define doctrine and enforce dogma; "it was to afford a practical bond of union whereby Christians might be united in a Christian brotherhood in spite of differences of minor matters of creed." The New Learning "in the mouth of Erasmus hinted that the doctrine of original sin was of no more importance than the problems of astrology, and treated questions of freewill as insoluble. the Augustinian system of which Luther was the exponent .. But treated these questions as practically decided, and that by the judgment of a Church based upon a verbally inspired and infallible Bible. Luther's attitude was therefore dogmatic and occasionally inconsistent. He asserted the right of private judgment as a weapon against the Pope and Papal theory; but he was not willing that Scripture should be left to the private judgment of the individual; he recognised, as opposed to the corrupt ecclesiastical authority of the Romish Church, the existence of an ecclesiastical authority of some kind, which had established these theological hypotheses of original sin and justification by faith." Thus the Reformation in England was a movement distinct from that of the Oxford Reformers, not altogether a continuation of their work. They had agreed with Luther when, in 1517, he put up his thesis against indulgences on the church door of Wittenberg. Erasmus himself had spoken of the crimes of false pardons, Colet of the "sins of that first bishop we call the Pope.' But they did not go with Luther when, in 1519, at the Diet of Worms, he practically appealed to Germany to throw off the whole of the Papal yoke in doctrine as well as in corrupt practice. The New Learning wished for no change in doctrine and pure ecclesiastical observance: it wished merely for the reform of the Church, and for the purer spirit that must come with it.

The movement of the New Learning may be said to have begun in 1496. In the Michaelmas term of this year at Oxford, John

Colet, a late student at the University, recently returned from Italy, announced his intention of delivering a course of public lectures on St. Paul's Epistles. He had left the university in 1494, and had then commenced his studies at Florence, and while there had come into contact with three of the greatest men of the period, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Savonarola. Marsilio Ficino, at the head of the Florentine Academy, had made it the object of his life to fuse religion and philosophy; in his study burnt two lamps, one before the image of the Virgin, the other before the bust of Plato. In his book, De Religione Christianæ, dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, he grounds religion on expediency, and supports it by the authority of the classics. All religions, he says, being natural to man, contain in them some good-in particular the Christian religion; and the fact that Christianity passes the human comprehension is a sign of its divine character; "if these things be divine they must exceed the capacity of any human mind.” To the support of his faith he brings the testimony of the great names of the past: faith, according to Aristotle, is the foundation of knowledge: by faith alone, as the Platonists prove, do we ascend to God. But a stronger and more inspiring influence than that of Ficino and Pico, with their endeavours to fuse Neo-Platonism and Christianity, was that of Savonarola, an influence purely spiritual and Christian. Colet was in Italy when the Papacy spiritually was at its lowest ebb. Alexander VI. and Cesar Borgia had brought it to the greatest degradation, and Savonarola, with his burning enthusiasm for the reform of the Church, with his great and irresistible personality, was heading a purer religious movement. For two years and more he "had been preaching that a scourge was at hand, that the world was certainly not framed for the lasting convenience of hypocrites, libertines, and oppressors. From the midst of those smiling heavens he had seen a sword hanging— the sword of God's justice-which was speedily to descend with purifying punishment on the Church and the world. In brilliant Ferrara, seventeen years before, the contradiction between men's lives and their professed beliefs had pressed upon him with a force that had been enough to destroy his appetite for the world, and at the age of twenty-three had driven him into the cloister. He believed that God had committed to the Church the sacred lamp of truth for the guidance and salvation of men, and he saw that the Church in its corruption had become as a sepulchre to hide the lamp. As the years went on scandals increased and multiplied, and hypocrisy seemed to have given place to impu

dence. Had the world then ceased to have a righteous ruler? Was the Church finally forsaken ? No, assuredly; in the Sacred Book there was a record of the past, in which might be seen as in a glance what would be in the days to come, and the book showed that when the wickedness of the chosen people, type of the Christian Church, had become crying, the judgments of God had descended on them. . . . But the real force of demonstration for Girolamo Savonarola lay in his own burning indignation at the sight of wrong, in his fervent belief in an unseen justice which would put an end to the wrong, and in an unseen Purity to which lying and uncleanness were an abomination. To his ardent power-loving soul, believing in great ends, and longing to achieve those ends by the exertion of its own strong will, the faith in a supreme and righteous ruler became one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition that would punish and reclaim." And this man had a power, rarely equalled, of impressing his belief on others, of swaying very various minds. Lorenzo de Medici tried in vain to gain his friendship; in vain on his deathbed he asked for absolution. Savonarola refused to grant his friendship and his spiritual offices to one who was the enemy of reform, the supporter of corruption in Church and State. Pico della Mirandola, though he clung to his NeoPlatonism, became at his death a half-acknowledged disciple of the Frate; he was buried in the robes of Savonarola's order and within the precincts of Savonarola's church. Marsilio Ficino, more purely pagan in his tendencies, was certainly influenced, though not for long, by his powerful enthusiasm. Colet must have heard him preach in the Duomo at Florence. He must have heard at least one of those powerful appeals to the religious world, the first of which was given in 1491—the call to rally against tyranny in Church and State, to fight against idolatry of philosophy and neglect of the Bible. Colet, an Englishman with a profound moral sense, could not but be influenced by a teaching appealing so strongly to his moral sympathies. Here was a man who had a faith, not merely speculative and philosophic, but a faith which stimulated and supported a burning enthusiasm for right, and a glowing indignation against wrong. And thus Colet gave himself up to the study of the sources from whence Savonarola claimed to draw his inspiration-to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and of the works of the Fathers of that purer Church to which Savonarola pointed as the model of its degenerate child. He studied classics indeed, but only as a means to improve his style, only to enable him to make his teaching of the Gospel

more acceptable to the English people,—a work which he was now to consider as his mission. His attitude is that of Erasmus in his preface to the Novum Instrumentum: "In times like these, when men are pursuing with such zest all branches of knowledge, how is it that the philosophy of Christ should alone be derided by some, neglected by many, treated by the few who devote themselves to it with coldness, not to say insincerity? Whilst in all other branches of learning the human mind is straining its genius to master all subtleties, and toiling to overcome all difficulties, why is it that this one philosophy alone is not pursued with equal earnestness at least by those who profess to be Christians? Platonists, Pythagoreans, and the disciples of all other philosophers, are well instructed and ready to fight for their sect. Why do not Christians with yet more abundant zeal espouse the cause of their Master and Prince? Shall Christ be put in comparison with Zeno and Aristotle,-his doctrine with their insignificant precepts? Whatever other philosophers may have been, He alone is a teacher from heaven; He alone was able to teach certain and eternal wisdom; He alone taught things pertaining to salvation, because He alone is its author; He alone absolutely practised what He preached, and is able to make good what He promised. The philosophy of Christ, moreover, is to be learned from its few books with far less labour than the Aristotelian philosophy is to be extracted from its multitude of ponderous and conflicting commentaries. Nor is anxious preparatory learning needful to the Christian. Its viaticum is simple and at hand to all,-only bring a pious and open heart, imbued above all things with a pure and simple faith." With these views, with the enthusiasm given by a "pure and simple faith," Colet came back to England; his strength lay in no dogma, but "in the conviction that the food for all spiritual craving was to be found in the Bible; that its inspired words were to be interpreted simply and directly without the intervention of ecclesiastic and scholastic dogma." Again, the words of Erasmus can be used as expressing his opinion: "The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the gospel-should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step." To hold these views, and to act on them, was to strike at the very root of

mediæval religion and medieval scholasticism. "Keep firmly to the Bible and to the Apostle's Creed, and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest," said Colet, and thus expressed in these few words his freedom from the oppressive yoke of ecclesiastic and scholastic authority, and his contempt of the great structure of medieval divinity, with its six or seven hundred propositions, considered so vital by the medieval mind, forty-three propositions concerning the nature of God, forty-five propositions concerning the nature of man. He did not consider human ingenuity worthily employed on such questions, as to whether God can be in more than one place at one and the same time, as how many angels can stand on the point of a needle, whether they have local motion or not. All these problems of scholastic divinity laid down by Aquinas in Summæ Theologiæ, Colet with that independence of mind which could belong only to a man of the Renaissance put aside with scorn. He refused to recognise the two Molochs before which his predecessors had bowed, the dogma of the Church and the dogma of Aristotle's logic, the latter debased by these so-called disciples, employing itself on the material allowed by the Church, till the human mind seemed to lose itself in a series of intellectual gymnastics, acquiring a profound indifference to facts, and an extraordinary subtlety in dealing with barren and useless problems.

Secondly, Colet had to attack that theory, necessarily upheld by the Schoolmen, but a fatal obstacle to those who wished for the simple and direct interpretation of the Bible, viz. that belief held by every orthodox divine, "in the plenary and verbal inspiration of the Bible, considered as an arsenal of texts, each text capable of several meanings, and capable of being severed from their context and interpreted to suit the convenience of ecclesiastic dogma." "Inasmuch," says Aquinas, "as God is the author of the Holy Scriptures, and all things were at one time present to His mind, therefore under a single text several meanings can be expressed; the literal sense is manifold; the spiritual sense threefold: allegorical, moral, anagogical." Thus a single text may mean several different things, and an instance of their hopeless want of simplicity was their belief that the literal sense profited nothing; "it is hurtful, noisome, and killeth the soul;" and St. Paul was quoted: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” In the words of a scholar contemporary with Colet, "They were wont to look on no more Scripture than they found in their Duns. some of them will prove a point of faith as well out of a fable of Ovid or out of any other poet as out