of St. John's Gospel or St. Paul's Epistles." Thus the Bible had become a dead book, and Colet, feeling that the purity of the Christian faith demanded its separation from scholasticism, made it his first object in his lectures on St. Paul's Epistles to strike a direct blow at the method of scholastic interpretation of the Scriptures. He displayed in them no analytical skill; he did not propound problems, and, after the manner of the Schoolmen, instead of finding solutions, find distinctions; he felt with Bacon that the strength of any train of thought depends on viewing all the facts together, in treating all as parts of a whole; that weakness comes when the parts are considered separately. Thus he treated St. Paul's Epistles as a whole, endeavouring to bring out their central meaning and their direct bearing on practical life; and by tracing as far as possible the workings of the mind that prompted the words and thoughts, to communicate as much as possible of his spirit, and so to give that sympathy which makes understanding simpler. In dealing with the Epistle to the Romans he naturally touched on the question of freewill, the great question with the Wittenberg Reformers; but he touched on it with a vagueness which came from his anti-philosophic tendencies; his great spiritual enthusiasm, which made minor moral problems dim to him, caused him to pass over it lightly, offering only a mystic solution, which could be satisfactory to none save those who shared his spiritual temperament. "The soul is won over to God by love, and as so, willingly, and yet by no merit of its own." This was the same theory by which Savonarola, according to Villari, explained to a certain extent the mystery of human liberty and divine omnipotence. Colet says: "Grace is nothing but the love of God towards men, towards those, i.e. whom He wills to love, and in loving to inspire with the Holy Spirit which itself is love and the love of God. and when we speak of men as being called, justified, and glorified by grace, we mean nothing else than that men love in return God who loves them."

The men of the new learning were essentially practical men, not busied over the speculative solution of moral problems,scholars indeed, but anxious above all to communicate the truths and the light which they esteemed themselves to have gained by study; and to Colet the great question of ecclesiastical reform, which was naturally raised by the influence he had come under, and by his mode of thought, became a vital burning subject, engrossing the principal share of his attention, dwarfing in its importance the dogmatic questions of original sin and freewill.

The personality of St. Paul himself was a rebuke to ecclesiastics of the day: "The priests of our time might well be admonished to set such an example as this amongst their own parishioners, as, for example, St. Paul, who chose to get his living with his hands at the trade of tent-making, so as to avoid over-suspicion of avarice or scandal to the Gospel." It would be well if "those lost fools," as he at one time called the clergy, would bestir themselves and cultivate that energy which comes only from temperate and unselfish living. It was from the study of the pseudo-Dionysian writers that he received the most powerful stimulus to his efforts for Church reform. These writings were supposed to be the productions of Dionysius, the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul, and as such were read and studied by Colet; and he was much grieved when Grocyn-superior to him as a Greek scholar-in 1498, gave it as his firm opinion, grounded on study and examination of them, that they must belong to a much later date. The Florentine school had studied them much, because of the mixture they contained of Neo-Platonism and Christianity; but while the Florentine drew most from the philosophic element, Colet made most of the Christian element which was derived from the purer Christianity of the early Church, and in its purity of observance and simplicity of doctrine gave a severe rebuke to the ecclesiastical scandals of the day, while it claimed to show the sacred and apostolic origin of the monarchical system and its sacraments. It assumed that any priesthood laying claim to apostolic origin must above all things lay stress on the pure and personal holiness of its members. Sacraments were nothing apart from the purity and reality of the spiritual meaning they bore to those who received and those who administered them. "It is because these most holy traditions have been superseded and neglected, and men have fallen away from the spirit of God to their own inventions, that beyond all doubt all things have been wretchedly disturbed and confounded, and, as I said before, unless God shall have mercy upon us, all things will go to ruin." Stimulated by "these holy traditions," he put his greatest energy into efforts, then so full of risk, towards religious reform. In 1504 he was made doctor and Dean of St. Paul's, and in 1512 he was appointed to preach the sermon before the members of Convocation assembled nominally for the extirpation of heresy really because the King wanted money for his expedition to France. He had to preach to bishops who had received their benefices as the reward of purely secular services, or because they had interest in high

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places, little or sometimes no regard being paid to their culture or merit. There was one bishop of whom Erasmus speaks, a youth so illiterate that he offered to Erasmus a benefice and a large sum of money if he would undertake his tuition for a year— a bribe which Erasmus refused; there were foreign bishops who only resided for a short time in their dioceses: the Bishop of Bath and Wells was a foreigner, and lived almost entirely abroad; the Bishop of Winchester was appointed by the Pope, and lived and died at Rome. Lastly, there was that churchman of gigantic ability and secular aims, who was as conspicuous among the political school of ecclesiastics as Julius II. was among those popes of the secularised Church of the fifteenth century, viz. Wolsey, who, high in royal favour, always engaged in affairs of state, lately promoted to the deanery of Lincoln, waiting for a vacant bishopric, and already possessing two rectories, a prebend, and a canonry, rose eventually from a bishop to be an archbishop, a legate, and a cardinal, and failed only to obtain the Papal crown. It was to such an audience that Colet spoke with great frankness, laying bare the fact that "the Church had become foul and deformed," describing its condition, exhorting them to reform it, and showing what the necessary measures must be. "If by chance," he says in conclusion, "I should seem to have gone too far in this sermon,-if I have said anything with too much warmth,—forgive it me, and pardon a man speaking out of zeal, a man sorrowing for the ruin of the Church; and passing by any foolishness of mine, consider the thing itself.' This humility was not copied from Savonarola: the Italian burnt too much with the sense of wrong to think or even to care what others thought. But probably Colet's success was due to the tact he showed in his personal dealings with the authorities, whose conduct he so desired to reform. The young King Henry VIII. was on the whole favourably inclined to the New Learning, holding in great respect its secular work, its study and teaching of the classics. And well it was that he felt kindly towards it, that he encouraged it, hoping "it would reform the corrupt morals of the age," for Colet was carried by his enthusiasm so far as to preach against the Continental wars, against the aim and the means of Henry VIII.'s cherished ambition, “the recovery of his lost inheritance and patrimony, France." The interview in which the King's resentment was soothed after it had been provoked by the attack on his policy, does perhaps more credit to the King's magnanimity than to Colet's behaviour, which savours rather of weakness in its vague statements and recriminations.

Well it was for Colet that his religious efforts were entirely agreeable to royal authority-that he did not clash with the Tudor views in doctrine. Colet's main aim was the reform of ecclesiastical custom : his independent mind had not yet carried him into what his contemporaries called heresy. Yet among those who attended his lectures—so earnest in their thought and so simple in their style as to merit Erasmus's commendation, "Your words having birth in your heart and not on your lips, expressing with ease what others can hardly express with the greatest labour -were many Lollards, attracted no doubt by his absence of formalism, by his attempt to grasp the spiritual meaning of religion. But Colet was no more a Lollard than he was an orthodox follower of the Catholic Church. Neither was he, strictly speaking, a humanist, for there was in his fervent appeal to his hearers to follow the example of Christ, a tinge of the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The secret, he says, of Christ's wonderful example, lay in His keeping Himself as retired as possible from the world, from the lust of the flesh and lust of the eye. "His body He held altogether in obedience and service to His blessed mind, eating after long fasts, sleeping after long watching, caring nothing for what belongs to wealth or fortune." Yet monasticism and its superstitions had no hold on him. He had none of the Catholic reverence for the great monk, Thomas à Becket. His disgust was great when, in 1514, visiting the shrine of the martyr, he was presented with the saint's shoe to kiss.

Colet is one of the most representative men of the Renaissance of Thought in England, belonging to no one Church, to no definite sect or party, widely cultivated and widely tolerant, guided by no authority, but striving always to be true to his own inner light.

Much more decided and definite in his views-much more brilliant- was his contemporary and friend, Erasmus, a man who, though not English, plays an important part in England as a prominent disciple of the New Learning,-specially important, perhaps, as suggesting to More his method of social and political criticism. Erasmus had been educated at Paris among the straitest sect of scholastic logicians; he was well versed in the scholastic subtleties of Duns Scotus, and so celebrated for the almost serpent-like ingenuity of his arguments, that More,—at the conclusion of an argument in which Erasmus, at their first meeting, had, in Scotist fashion, defended the "worser part,"—replying to his query "aut tu es Morus, aut nullus," answered "aut tu es

Erasmus, aut diabolus." Erasmus had at his fingers' ends the knowledge of that great body of medieval science which claimed to embrace the whole field of universal knowledge, its scholars thinking, as Galileo says, that they could arrive at scientific truth, not by the investigation of fact, but by the comparison of ancient manuscripts. These so-called scientific truths were used by the Schoolmen to support their theological system, and it was because men like Bruno and Galileo discovered facts which upset not only their science but their theology, that they were the victims of persecution. Disgusted with this science and this theology, Erasmus came in 1498 to Oxford with Lord Mountjoy in order to learn Greek of Grocyn and Linacre. His intention had been to go on afterwards to Italy, but after a few months' experience of Oxford life he writes "that he had found in England so much polish and learning, not showy, shallow learning, but profound and exact both in Latin and Greek, that now he would hardly care much about going to Italy at all. . . . When I listen to my friend Colet," he says, "it seems to me like listening to Plato himself." In the winter of 1499-1500 Erasmus varied his experiences by a life at Court. In 1500 he returned to Paris, where, in spite of a life spent in struggle with poverty and sickness, he wrote his Adagia. It is in this work, a translation and collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, that he appears specially as a representative of the third age of the Italian Renaissance, of that spirit of criticism and philosophy which followed in Italy on the desire of acquisition; a spirit which Erasmus, as well as the English disciples of the New Learning, combined with the earlier characteristics of the Renaissance-with the strong and enthusiastic reverence for classic culture.

In his religious works-in the Enchiridion, in his Novum Instrumentum-Erasmus shows himself a disciple of Colet: in his Praise of Folly he shows himself a precursor of More. The Praise of Folly, written 1509-1510 to beguile his journey from England to Italy, is the first of a series of works containing, in a more or less disguised form, social and political criticism. Folly is represented as entering the rostrum with cap and bells, expressing with a frank severity her views on the condition of society and of politics. In the ingenious way in which the bold speakers of the time avoided the responsibility of their words, Folly apologises for her speeches as being merely those of Foolishness incarnated, yet at the same time adds, "but a fool speaks oft a reasonable truth." The book is a satire upon follies of all kinds, "on the bookworm, the sportsman, the grammarian,