ophocles, or the orations of
Demosthenes. The ladies of the Court caught the royal fashion and were
found poring over the pages of Plato. Widely as Henry's ministers differed
from each other, they all agreed in sharing and fostering the culture
around them. The panic of the scholar-group therefore soon passed away.
Colet toiled on with his educational efforts; Erasmus forwarded to England
the works which English liberality was enabling him to produce abroad.
Warham extended to him as generous an aid as the protection he had
afforded to Colet. His edition of the works of St. Jerome had been begun
under the Primate's encouragement during the great scholar's residence at
Cambridge, and it appeared with a dedication to the Archbishop on its
title-page. That Erasmus could find protection in Warham's name for a work
which boldly recalled Christendom to the path of sound Biblical criticism,
that he could address him in words so outspoken as those of his preface,
shows how fully the Primate sympathized with the highest efforts of the
New Learning. Nowhere had the spirit of enquiry so firmly set itself
against the claims of authority. "Synods and decrees, and even councils,"
wrote Erasmus, "are by no means in my judgement the fittest modes of
repressing error, unless truth depend simply on authority. But on the
contrary, the more dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in
producing heresies. Never was the Christian faith purer or more undefiled
than when the world was content with a single creed, and that the shortest
creed we have." It is touching even now to listen to such an appeal of
reason and of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was soon to
flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions and Creeds of Pope Pius and
Westminster Catechisms and Thirty-nine Articles.

[Sidenote: The New Testament of Erasmus]

But the principles which Erasmus urged in his "Jerome" were urged with far
greater clearness and force in a work that laid the foundation of the
future Reformation, the edition of the Greek Testament on which he had
been engaged at Cambridge and whose production was almost wholly due to
the encouragement and assistance he received from English scholars. In
itself the book was a bold defiance of theological tradition. It set aside
the Latin version of the Vulgate which had secured universal acceptance in
the Church. Its method of interpretation was based, not on received
dogmas, but on the literal meaning