We look in vain for any indication that those Christian Humanists perceived that they were actually living in a time of revolution, and were really standing on the edge of a crater which was about to change European history by its eruption. Sir Thomas More’s instincts of religious life were all mediæval. Colet had persuaded him to abandon his earlier impulse to enter a monastic order, but More wore a hair shirt next his skin till the day of his death. Yet in his sketch of an ideal commonwealth, he expanded St. Paul’s thought of the equality of all men before Christ into the conception that no man was to be asked to work more than six hours a day, and showed that religious freedom could only flourish where there was nothing in the form of the mediæval Church. The lovable and pious young Englishman never imagined that his academic dream would be translated into rude practical thoughts and ruder actions by leaders of peasant and artisan insurgents, and that his _Utopia_ (1515), within ten years after its publication, and ten years before his own death (1535), would furnish texts for communist sermons, preached in obscure public-houses or to excited audiences on village greens. The satirical criticisms of the hierarchy, the monastic orders, and the popular religious life, which Erasmus flung broadcast so recklessly in his lighter and more serious writings, furnished the weapons for the leaders in that “tumult” which he had dreaded all his days; and when he complained that few seemed to care for the picture of a truly pious life, given in his _Enchiridion_, he did not foresee that it would become a wonderfully popular book among those who renounced all connection with the See of Rome to which the author had promised a life-long obedience. The Christian Humanists, one and all, were strangely blind to the signs of the times in which they lived.