Fryth, having declined the brilliant offers the king had made to him through Cromwell and Vaughan, joined Tyndale in translating and publishing the Holy Scriptures in English. While laboring thus for England, an irresistible desire came over him to circulate the Gospel there in person. He therefore quitted the Low Countries, returned to London, and directed his course to Reading, where the prior had been his friend. Exile had not used him well, and he entered that town miserably clothed, and more like a beggar than one whom Henry VIII. had desired to place near him. This was in August 1532. His writings had preceded him. Having received, when in the Netherlands, three works composed in defence of purgatory by three distinguished men—Rastell, Sir Thomas More’s brother-in-law, More himself, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester—Fryth had replied to them: ‘A purgatory! there is not _one_ only, there are _two_. The first is the _Word of God_, the second is the _Cross of Christ_: I do not mean the cross of wood, but the cross of tribulation. But the lives of the papists are so wicked that they have invented a third.’[293] Sir Thomas, exasperated by Fryth’s reply, said with that humorous tone he often affected, ‘I propose to answer the good young father Fryth, whose wisdom is such that three old men like my brother Rastell, the Bishop of Rochester, and myself are mere babies when confronted with Father Fryth alone.’[294] The exile having returned to England, More had now the opportunity of avenging himself more effectually than by his jokes. [Sidenote: Fryth In The Stocks.] Fryth, as we have said, had entered Reading. His strange air and his look as of a foreigner arriving from a distant country attracted attention, and he was taken up for a vagabond. ‘Who are you?’ asked the magistrate. Fryth, suspecting that he was in the hands of enemies of the Gospel, refused to give his name, which increased the suspicion, and the poor young man was set in the stocks. As they gave him but little to eat, with the intent of forcing him to tell his name, his hunger soon became insupportable.[295] Knowing the name of the master of the grammar-school, he asked to speak with him. Leonard Coxe had scarcely entered the prison, when the pretended vagabond all in rags addressed him in correct latinity, and began to deplore his miserable captivity. Never had words more noble been uttered in a dungeon so vile. The head-master, astonished at so much eloquence, compassionately drew near the unhappy man and inquired how it came to pass that such a learned scholar was in such profound wretchedness. Presently he sat down, and the two men began to talk in Greek about the universities and languages. Coxe could not make it out: it was no longer simple pity that he felt, but love, which turned to admiration when he heard the prisoner recite with the purest accent those noble lines of the _Iliad_ which were so applicable to his own case: