Burnet, in his translation, cautiously reminds his readers that he must in nowise be made responsible for the matter of the work which "he ventured" to translate. Others have conceived "the Utopia" dangerous for those speculators in politics who might imagine the author to have been serious. MORE himself has adjudged the book "no better worthy than to lye always in his own island, or else to be consecrated to Vulcan." But assuredly many of the extraordinary principles inculcated in "the Utopia" were not so lightly held by its illustrious author. The sincerity of his notions may be traced in his own simple habits, his opinions in conversation, and the tenor of his invariable life. His contempt of outward forms and personal honours, his voluntary poverty, his fearlessness of death--all these afford ample evidence that the singularity of the man himself was as remarkable as the work he produced. The virtues he had expatiated on, he had contemplated in his own breast. This singular, but great man, was a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in his pleasantry; a politician without ambition; a lord chancellor who entered into office poor, and left it not richer. When his house was to be searched for treasure, which circumstance had alarmed his friends, well did that smile become him when he observed that "it would be only a sport to his family," and he pleasantly added, "lest they should find out my wife's gay girdle and her gold beads." When the clergy, in convention, had voted a donation amounting to no inconsiderable fortune, "not for services to be performed, but for those which he had chosen to do," More rejected the gift with this noble confession--"I am both over-proud, and over-slothful also, to be hired for money to take half the labour and business in writing that I have taken since I began." And when accused by Tyndale and others for being "the proctor of the clergy," and richly fed, how forcible was his expression! "He had written his controversial works only that God might give him thanks." It happened, however, that his after-conduct in life, in regard to that religious toleration which he had wisely maintained in his ideal society, was as opposite as night to noon. Could he then have ever been earnest in his "Utopia?"--he who exults over the burning of a heretic, who "could not agree that before the day of doom there were either any saint in heaven or soul in purgatory, or in hell either," for which horrible heresy he was delivered at last into the secular hands, and "burned as there was never wretch I ween better worth."[11] This harmless and hapless metaphysical theologian did not disagree with More on the existence of saints, of souls, nor of hell. The heretic conceived--and could he change by volition the ideas which seemed to him just?--that no reward or punishment could be inflicted before the final judgment. A conversation of five minutes might have settled the difference, for they only varied about the precise time!