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.

[Sidenote: Tyndale]

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 Wyclif 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 Wyclif'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 of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart.
He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the
lay people in any truth except the scripture were plainly laid before
their eyes in their mother-tongue." "If God spare my life," he said to a
learned controversialist, "ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth
the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost." But he was a
man of forty before his dream became fact.