Erasmus in England found his better self awakening to renewed courage and exertion. Even before he came over, he had begun to see that perhaps a solution of his life-problem might be found in a deliberate rejection of the mediæval method in theology by throwing it all away and going straight back, first to the original documents of Christianity themselves, and then to the early commentators on Christianity who had expounded these documents under the direct influence of the classic culture. Jerome, especially, seemed to him worthy of the most careful study and of a new and scientific edition. This was the "great work" to which he refers in his correspondence with Battus as being interrupted by Battus's trivial demands for some show-pieces to please their patroness. Underneath all his thought there lay continually this purpose to apply his learning to making clearer the ways of God to man. The Oxford friends were eminently men to strengthen his intention, and we may feel sure that here was the real source of Erasmus' higher content in England. Let us try to make acquaintance with them through Erasmus' own words; and first with Colet, beginning at the point of their first meeting. In a long letter bearing date 1519, just twenty years later, and written under the first shock of Colet's death, Erasmus gives a short but feeling sketch of his friend's life. This sketch[42] forms the basis of all subsequent treatment of Colet. [42] iii.¹, 451. "On his return from Italy he chose to leave his home and go to Oxford, and there publicly, and without pay, he expounded all the epistles of Paul. There I began his acquaintance, sent thither by some divine leading. He was then about thirty years old, two or three months younger than I. He had never taken nor tried for a degree in theology and yet there was no doctor in the place, either of theology or of law, and no abbot or person of any rank whatever, who did not go to hear him and even take his note-book along,--a credit alike to the learning of Colet and to the interest of those hearers, that old men were not ashamed to learn of a younger one and doctors from one who was not a doctor. The doctor title was voluntarily offered him afterward and he accepted it rather to please his friends than because he really cared for it.