of Christ--though these charges were pressed home relentlessly; not at all
of that rampant immorality and vice of which the clergy were so freely
accused in later years. From what Colet did _not_ say, we may fairly
infer a reasonable average of respectability among them.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

If, in the _Encomium Moriae_ or _Praise of Folly_, which Erasmus
wrote at about the same period (1511), the vices and follies of the Church
were lashed with a mockery still more unsparing, we have to note, first,
that the great scholar drew his picture less from England than from the
Continent; next, that it had no injurious effect on his appointment to the
professorship of Greek at Cambridge. The patronage extended to him by the
Primate, and by Fisher of Rochester, the most orthodox and saintly of the
English bishops, is a sufficient proof that the authorities were not
bigoted enemies of all reform; a proof borne out by the enthusiastic
welcome extended to his edition of the Greek Testament in 1518, by Fox of
Winchester amongst others.

[Sidenote: The _Utopia_, 1516]

From the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More we derive precisely the same
impression. In 1516, when the work was published, Luther had not yet defied
the Pope; the German Peasants' War had not yet broken out, nor the spread
of new ideas been associated with Anarchism under the name of Anabaptism.
Persecution, which fifteen years later More advocated and practised as the
unavoidable remedy for the spread of doctrines which he had come to regard
as actively pernicious, was alien to his instincts; in his ideal
Commonwealth, men might expound whatever they honestly held, provided they
did not deny God and the Future Life. More's nature was tolerant and