hes, from the
point of view, not of the ecclesiastic, but of the layman, although, as
a good Catholic, he is willing to acknowledge that in certain respects
the Empire must submit to the Church. The beginning and end of all his
noble reflections and of his arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration
'that in this little plot of earth belonging to mortal man life may pass
in freedom and peace.' So inextricably is his vision of the future bound
up with the beliefs and circumstances of his own age.

The 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius,
and shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries. The book was
written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous
sentiments of youth. He brings the light of Plato to bear upon the
miserable state of his own country. Living not long after the Wars of
the Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is
indignant at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility
and gentry, at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by
war. To the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay;
and side by side with the misery and oppression which he has described
in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the ideal
state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The times were full
of stir and intellectual interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation
was beginning to be heard. To minds like More's, Greek literature was
a revelation: there had arisen an art of interpretation, and the New
Testament was beginning to be understood as it had never been before,
and has not often been since, in its natural sense. The life there
depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths,
in which 'he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring
their own commodities under the name and title of the Commonwealth.'
He thought that Christ, like Plato, 'instituted all things common,' for
which reason, he tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more willing
to receive his doctrines ('Howbeit, I think this was no small help and
furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted
among his, all things common, and that the same community doth yet
remain in the rightest Christian communities' (Utopia).). The community
of property is a fixed idea with him, though he is aware of the
arguments which may be urged on the other side ('These t