§ 71. HUMANISM IN ENGLAND. 653
and upright lives for, of a surety, he said, " to do mercy and justice is more pleasant to God, than to pray or do sacrifice to Him." 1 What higher tribute could be paid than the one paid by Donald Lupton in his History of Modern Protestant Divines, 1637, " This great dean of St. Paul's taught and lived like St. Paul." 2
Sir Thomas More, 1478-153^ajiot only died in the Catholic Church, butjdied a martyr's death, refusing To ac^knowledgetlie English king's supremacy so far as to impugn the pope's authority. After studying in Oxford, he practised law in London, rising to be chg,nc_ellor~cif the reaim. It is not for us here to follow his services in his profession and to the state, but to trace his connection with the revival of learning and the religious movement in England. More was a pattern of a devout and intelligent layman. He wore a hair shirt next to his skin and yet he laughed at the superstition of his age. On taking office, he stipulated that " he should first look to God and after God to the king." At the same time, he entered heartily with his close friends, Erasmus and Colet, into the construction of a new basis for education in the study of the classics, Latin and Greek. He was_firmlY bound to the Churgh. with the pope as its head, and yet in his Utopia he presented a picture of an ideal society in which religion was to be in large part a matter of the family, and confession was not made to the priest nor absolution given by the priest.
With the exception of the Utopia^ all of More's genuine works were religious and the most of them were controversial treatises, intended to confute the new doctrines of the Reformation which had found open advocates in England long before More's death. More was beheaded in 153^ and, if we recall that Tyndale's English New Testament was published in 1526, we shall have a standard for measuring the duration of More's contact with the Protestant upheaval. Tyndale himself was strangled and burnt to death a year after More's execution. In answer to
^ A Right Fruitful Admonition concerning the Order of a Good Christian Man's Life. A tract by Colet reprinted in Lupton's Life, p. 305 sqq., from an ed. of 1534.
2 Lupton : Life of Colet, p. 143.
654 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Simon Fish's work, The Supplication of Beggars^ a bitter attack against purgatory, More sent forth the Supplication of Souls or Poor Seely (^simple) Souls pewled out of Purgatory. Here souls are represented as crying out not to be left in their penal distress by the f orgetf ulness of the living. Fish was condemned to death and burnt, 1533. As the chief controversialist on the old side. More also wrote against. John Fryth, who was condemned to the stake 1533, and against Tyndale, pronounciiig his translation of the New Testament " a false English translation newly forged by Tyndale." He also made the strange "Seclaration that " Wyclif, Tyndale and Friar Barnes and such others had been the original cause why the Scripture has been of necessity kept out of lay people's hands." ^ More said heretical books were imported from the Continent to England " in vats full." He called Thomas Hylton, a priest of Kent, one of the heretics whom he condemned to the flames, " the devil's stinking pot." Hylton's crime was the denial of the five sacraments and he was burnt 1530. ^ As was the custom of the time, More's controversial works abound in scurrilous epitliets. His opponents he distinguishes by such terms as "swine,"" "hellhounds that the devil hath in his kennel," " apes that dance for the pleasure of Lucifer." ^ In his works against Tyndale and Fryth, he commended pilgrimages, image-worship and indulgences. Tieliimself, so the chancellor wrote, had been present at Barking, 1498, when a number of relics were discovered which "must have been hidden since the time when the abbey was burnt by the infidels," and he declared that the main
1 See Gasquet : Eve of the Beform., p. 215 sqq.
2 What estimate was put upon the life of a heretic in some quarters in England may be gathered from a letter written to Erasmus, 1511, by Ammonias, Latin secretary to Henry VIIL The writer said, he did " not wonder wood was so scarce and dear, the heretics necessitated so many holocausts." At the convocation of 1512, an old priest arguing for the burning of heretics repeated the passage louder and louder hcercticum hnminem denita (avoid) and explained it as if it were cle vita tolli, to be removed from life, and thus turned the passage into a positive command to execute heretics. For More's denial of having used cruelty towards heretics, see his Engl. Works, p. 901 sqq. The martyrologist, Foxe, pronounced More " a bitter persecutor of good men and a wretched enemy against the tnith of the Gospel."
8 Dr. Lindsay in Cambr. Hist, of Engl. Lit., IIL 19.