r system of doctrine just as elaborate
and claiming precisely the same infallibility. To degrade human nature
was to attack the very base of the New Learning; and his attack on it
called the foremost of its teachers to the field. But Erasmus no sooner
advanced to its defence than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved
by original sin and incapable, through any efforts of his own, of
discovering truth or of arriving, at goodness.

Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the classic
past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger views of life and
of the world; it trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument
by which More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and
religion. To More especially, with his keener perception of its future
effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit,
severing Christendom into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union
and tolerance, was especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had
seemed so "endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His reply
to Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it
answered; and though that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and more
argumentative, the divorce of the New Learning from the Reformation
seemed complete.

But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the new
movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger world where men are
stirred rather by emotion than by thought. There was an England of which
even More and Colet knew little, in which Luther's words kindled a fire
that was never to die. As a great social and political movement
Lollardry had ceased to exist, and little remained of the directly
religious impulse given by Wycliffe beyond a vague restlessness and
discontent with the system of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the
life of Lollardry the prosecutions whose records lie scattered over the
bishops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here
and there to read "in a great book of heresy all one night certain
chapters of the Evangelists in English," while transcripts of Wycliffe's
tracts passed from hand to hand.

The smouldering embers needed but a breath to fan them into flame, and
the breath came from William Tyndale. Born among the Cotswolds when
Bosworth Field gave England to the Tudors, Tyndale passed from Oxford to
Cambridge to feel the full impulse given by the appearance there of the
New Testament