While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, John Colet, son of a wealthy London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there, we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of him and of his work. Colet’s whole future life in England bears evidence that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently such English classics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine. When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim was to find out the _personal_ message which the writer (St. Paul) had sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in proving doctrines or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen,—methods abundantly used by Savonarola,—and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediæval theologian