p of Rochester, himself one of the foremost scholars of the new
movement, lent it his powerful support. At Oxford the Revival met with a
fiercer opposition. The contest took the form of boyish frays, in which
the youthful partizans and opponents of the New Learning took sides as
Greeks and Trojans. The young king himself had to summon one of its
fiercest enemies to Woodstock, and to impose silence on the tirades which
were delivered from the University pulpit. The preacher alleged that he
was carried away by the Spirit. "Yes," retorted the king, "by the spirit,
not of wisdom, but of folly." But even at Oxford the contest was soon at
an end. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, established the first Greek lecture
there in his new college of Corpus Christi, and a Professorship of Greek
was at a later time established by the Crown. "The students," wrote an
eye-witness in 1520, "rush to Greek letters, they endure watching,
fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." The work was crowned at
last by the munificent foundation of Cardinal College, to share in whose
teaching Wolsey invited the most eminent of the living scholars of Europe,
and for whose library he promised to obtain copies of all the manuscripts
in the Vatican.

[Sidenote: Church Reform]

From the reform of education the New Learning pressed on to the reform of
the Church. It was by Warham's commission that Colet was enabled in 1512
to address the Convocation of the Clergy in words which set before them
with unsparing severity the religious ideal of the new movement. "Would
that for once," burst forth the fiery preacher, "you would remember your
name and profession and take thought for the reformation of the Church!
Never was it more necessary, and never did the state of the Church need
more vigorous endeavours." "We are troubled with heretics," he went on,
"but no heresy of theirs is so fatal to us and to the people at large as
the vicious and depraved lives of the clergy. That is the worst heresy of
all." It was the reform of the bishops that must precede that of the
clergy, the reform of the clergy that would lead to a general revival of
religion in the people at large. The accumulation of benefices, the luxury
and worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The prelates ought
to be busy preachers, to forsake the Court and labour in their own
dioceses. Care should be taken for the ordination and promotion of worthy
ministers, residence should be enforced