Colet and More always showed themselves conspicuously free. Colet's most
vigorous exhortations were addressed to prelates and persons in high
places; More never throughout his career hesitated to oppose Chancellors,
or even Tudor Kings, when a principle was involved. We are therefore
entitled to assume that they neither over-coloured nor deliberately toned
down the prevalent conditions. A decade later, when fanaticism had broken
loose, the anathemas hurled at the clergy by irresponsible pamphleteers, or
zealots who were sheltered in the Lutheran States of Germany, were of a
much more sweeping character. Later, again, the reports of the
Commissioners for the suppression of monasteries formed an appalling
indictment. Later still, when the Protestant party won the upper hand after
a season of relentless and embittering persecution, the pictures they
painted of the past were lurid in the extreme. But the evidence of such
witnesses could not be other than passionately biassed, just as the
evidence of persecuted monks and nuns must have been biassed on the other
side: whereas the evidence of Colet, of More in his earlier days, and, with
certain reservations, of Erasmus, is that of honest and high-minded men of
great intellectual capacity, speaking without prejudice of conditions with
which they were in direct contact. Their assertions, and the fair
inferences from their assertions, are a safe basis from which we can
ascertain both the gravity and the limits of the corruption which existed
in England.

[Sidenote: Dean Colet]

John Colet was appointed to the Deanery of St. Paul's four or five years
before the death of Henry VII., being transferred thither from Oxford,
where he had won high repute, not merely for character and learning, but as
the initiator of a new and rational method of Scriptural study in place of
the old scholasticism. At St. Paul's the Dean proved himself a great