Reason of the dislike was now re garded. CHAP. VI of St. Paul. And I wish that they were translated in all languages of all people, that they might be read and known, not merely by the Scotch and the Irish, but even by the Turks and the Saracens. I wish that the husbandman may sing parts of them at his plough, that the weaver may chant them when engaged at his shuttle, that the traveller may with their narratives beguile the weariness of the way'. It cannot be doubted that these words were noted and pondered alike by Fisher, More, and Tunstal; there is accordingly but one explanation of the change which had come over their views when, in 1526, they loudly condemned what, in 1516, with which it they had implicitly commended; and that explanation must be, the alarm that Luther's attitude and doctrines had awakened throughout Christendom among all those who yet clung to the theory of a one supreme visible Head and of a one universal and undivided Church. In exact correspondence with this change of sentiment, we find Erasmus himself, at the earnest entreaty of Tunstal, entering Libero Arbi- the lists against Luther, and maintaining, in opposition to the doctrine of predestination so inexorably asserted by the Reformer, that counter theory which, while plainly supported by the teaching of the Greek fathers, was far from being altogether uncountenanced by the great lights of the western communion. It is not impossible indeed that, as he witnessed the progress of events, Erasmus might have even wished to recall some of the sentiments to which he had given exHis enemies pression in his Paraclesis. His enemies were now never tired him as the of pointing out, not altogether without reason but with much Reformation. unfairness, the undeniable connexion between the new Erasmus writes De trio against Luther. denounce cause of the doctrines and the new learning. In the opinion of not a few he had sown the wind and was reaping the whirlwind; or, in the homelier metaphor of the day, 'he had laid the egg and Luther had hatched it.' It was in vain that the alarmed scholar protested and disclaimed,-declaring that he had laid only a harmless hen's egg, while that which Luther had hatched was of an altogether different bird',—the monks and 1 Opera, Iv 104-1. 2 Ego peperi ovum, Lutherus ex clusit. Mirum vero dictum Minoritarum istorum magnaque et bona friars only reiterated their assertions yet more loudly, and at CHAP. VI. Louvain, it would appear, he was at one time even reported to be the author of the De Captivitate Babylonica. William d. 1556. But whatever might have been Erasmus's later sentiments, the noble sentences above quoted had been given to the world past recall; they had been read by Bilney at Cambridge, and it is in every way probable that they had been pointed out by Bilney to the notice of William Tyndale. It has been supposed by some writers that Tyndale was one of Erasmus's pupils at the university; but this supposition rests b. 1486 (?) on very insufficient evidence, and other facts would rather incline us to believe that Tyndale did not go to Cambridge until after Erasmus had left'. It is certain that nothing in the latter's correspondence, or in the manner in which Tyndale afterwards spoke of him, in any way implies the existence of intimate or even of friendly relations between the two. We only know that for a certain period,—from about Probably a 1514 to 1521,-Tyndale was resident in the university; and Croke but it may safely be inferred that he was among the number of mus. those who listened to Croke's inaugural oration and subsequently profited by his teaching. He had originally been a student at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he had already performed the office of lecturer, when he decided on removing to the sister university. His reasons for this step are not pulte dignum. Ego posui ovum gallinaceum, Lutherus exclusit pullum longe dissimillimum.' Opera, 111 840. 1 Canon Westcott, Hist. of the English Bible, p. 31; Demaus, Life of William Tyndale, p. 29; Mr Demaus himself assigns the period of Tyndale's residence at Cambridge to between the years 1514 and 1521; and Erasmus, as we have already seen, left at the close of 1513. 2 The sole reference to Tyndale in the Epistole of Erasmus with which I am acquainted, is the following passage in a letter from More, written about 1533;-Rex videtur adversus hæreticos acrior quam episcopi ipsi. Tyndalus, hæreticus nostras, qui et nusquam et ubique exsulat, scripsit huc nuper Melanchthonem esse apud regem Galliæ; semet collo cutum cum illo, qui illum vidisset rum. Addebat se timere Tyndalus nisi Gallia per illum reciperet verbum Dei, confirmaretur in fide Eucharistica contra Vicleficam sectam. Quam sollicite isti tractant hoc negotium, tanquam illis delegasset Deus instituendum et rudimentis fidei imbuendum orbem!' Opera, ш 1856. There is certainly nothing in this language, nor in the way in which Tyndale speaks of Erasmus (see supra, p. 488, n. 3), that would lead us to infer that the Reformer was an old pupil of the great scholar. As for his statement that he waited on Tunstal because Erasmus had praised the bishop's munificence so highly, it is evident that these encomiums may have reached him by hearsay. pupil of not of Eras CHAP. VI. recorded, and the language of Foxe is hopelessly vague. 'Spying his time,' says that writer, 'he removed from thence to the university of Cambridge.' It is however at least a reasonable hypothesis, that he quitted Oxford from the same motives that probably weighed with Erasmus when he gave the preference to Cambridge,-in order to escape the persecutions of the 'Trojan' party'. In after years we find him referring to persecution of this kind in terms that could only apply to Oxford, and which are evidently the vivid recollecHis reminis- tions of a painful personal experience. Remember ye not,' cences of Oxford. he says in his famous 'Answer' to Sir Thomas More, written in 1530 (and More, we may well believe, must have remembered very well indeed), 'how within this thirty years and far less, and yet dureth to this day, the old barking curs, Duns' disciples and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew? And what sorrow the schoolmasters, that taught the true Latin tongue, had with them; some beating the pulpit with their fists for madness, and roaring out with open and foaming mouth, that if there were but one Terence or Virgil in the world, and that same in their sleeves, and a fire before them, they would burn them therein, though it should cost them their lives; affirming that all good learning decayed and was utterly lost, since men gave them unto the Latin tongue'.' At Cambridge, according to Foxe, Tyndale 'further ripened in knowledge of God's Word.' Though his writings contain no reference to the fact, it is not improbable that he witnessed the burning of Luther's writings in the university in 1521. But in the same year, under the constraint of 1 See supra, pp. 487, 524-6. Works, III 75. D'Aubigné assures us that Oxford 'where Erasmus had so many friends' (at this time he had scarcely one there left) was 'the city in which his New Testament met with the warmest welcome.' Hist. of the Reformation (transl. by White), v 220. Some notion of the correctness of this writer's account of the Reformation in England may be formed, when we state that, in one short chapter, he represents Bilney as a fellow of Trinity College thirty years before its foundation,-Tyndale as lecturing at Oxford on Erasmus's New Testament years before the first edition appeared, and as converting Frith at Cambridge three years after the former had left the university. Cambridge little Sod poverty, for he appears to have belonged to no college and to CHAP. VI. have held no fellowship, he went down to his native county He leaves of Gloucester, to be tutor in the family of Sir John Walsh. circ. 1521. We hear of him there as bringing forward for discussion, among the neighbouring clergy who assembled at Sir John's His life at hospitable board, the questions he had learned to handle at bury. Cambridge, and as winning easy victories over well-beneficed divines whose learning was of another century, and incurring of course their dislike and suspicion. It was there that he conceived and perhaps commenced his great design of translating the New Testament into the English vernacular'. From thence, after about two years' residence, we trace him to London; where in citizen Humphrey Monmouth he found so generous a friend, and where from his fellow university man, Cuthbert Tunstal, he experienced such different treatment. The memorable interview between these two eminent Cambridge men has often been the subject of comment, and affords perhaps as striking an illustration as any incident of the kind, of the widely different spirit and aims by which at this critical period the mere Humanist and the Reformer were actuated. Tunstal. d. 1559. Cuthbert Tunstal, who was some ten years Tyndale's Cuthbert senior, had originally been a student of Balliol College, but the b. 144. outbreak of the plague having compelled him to quit Oxford, he had migrated to King's Hall,-at that time one of the most aristocratic and exclusive of the Cambridge foundations, and had subsequently completed his student career at Padua. On his return to England his talents and learning attracted the attention of Warham, who made him his chancellor, and from that time his rise in life was rapid and continuous. For that kind of success which depends on personal popularity and social advancement, he was, no doubt, eminently qualified. He had a stately presence3, a winning courtesy of manner, and consummate tact. His virtues, if not of an heroic His chara: order, stood often in favorable contrast to the passions of 1 See the interesting sketch of this period in Tyndale's history in Mr. Demaus's second chapter. 2 Cooper, Athenæ, i 199. 3 'A man right meet and convenient, as Warham assures Wolsey, to ter. rising policy. CHAP. VI. that tempestuous age. Naturally averse to violence and contention, he was equitable, humane and merciful; his bitterest enemies could not deny that his feet were never swift to shed blood; while among all his contemporaries the character of none stood higher for prudence and moderation. But all these advantages, natural and acquired, were marred His tempo- by an excess of caution ill-suited for stirring times; and precisely at those junctures when his influence might have been exerted with appreciable benefit to the state, he was to be seen himself drifting with the current. He wrote in favour of the divorce, and then sought to conciliate its opponents by pleading the queen's cause; he preached against the Act of Supremacy, and subsequently gave it his unqualified support; foremost among the patrons of Erasmus's Greek Testament, His writings. he gave Tyndale's translation to the flames. His literary performances were characteristic of the man,-of that safe and respectable kind which, while earning for an author a certain reputation, neither expose him to envy nor involve him in controversy. He published hymns and sermons, a small volume of devotional exercises, a synopsis of the Ethics of Aristotle,-of whose doctrine of the Mean he was himself so eminent an example, and lastly, though not least, an admirable Arithmetic. By this last work indeed there can be no doubt that Tunstal rendered a genuine service to his age. The science of numbers was then still in its infancy, and in an age familiar with the knotty questions of Duns Scotus, a teacher like Melanchthon found it necessary, in order to incite his scholars to the study, to reassure them, on the one hand, with respect to its difficulty, and, on the other hand, to allure them by pointing out its uses with reference to astrology! The treatise De Arte Supputandi has been entertain ambassadors and other 1 For this amusing oration see dete quam late pateat usus arithmetices in œconomia et in Republica. Aristoteles scribit Thraces quosdam esse qui numerando non possunt progredi ultra quattuor; quæso te, an talibus putes commendandam esse gubernationem, non dico magni mercatus aut venarum metallicarum sed alicujus mediocris œconomia? Exis |