However, the abhorrence of the Jew was that which is inspired by a repulsive abstraction rather than by a concrete individual. The Jew in the flesh was practically an unknown creature to the ordinary English man and woman of the age. If he was hated as a blood-sucking ghoul, he was not more real than a ghoul. But scarcely had the generation that hissed Barabas and Shylock on the stage passed away, when the Jew reappeared as a human reality upon the soil which his fathers had quitted more than three centuries before. Meanwhile a great change had come over England. The protest against authority, both in its intellectual and in its spiritual form, had crossed the Channel and been welcomed by responsive souls on our shores. When Erasmus came to England in 1498, he found here more than he brought with him. Grocyn had learnt his Greek in Italy, and Colet had returned from that country breathing scorn for the “ungodly refinements” of theology. In these scholars, and scholars like these, Erasmus found kindred spirits; hearty allies in the struggle for light. Colet enchanted him with his Platonic eloquence, and Sir Thomas More with the sweetness of his temper. And the band of these three noble men--Colet, Erasmus and More--all eager for reform and for purification of mind and soul, sowed the seed from which was to spring a plant that even they little dreamed of. The characteristic compromise between the new and the old under Henry VIII., grew into the purer Protestantism of Elizabeth and James I., and, though in Shakespeare we still see a world essentially Catholic in tone and ideas, it is a world that is fast dying away. Yet a few years more and Protestantism, under its most militant and morose aspect, has banished the last vestiges of mediaeval Catholicism and merriment from Merry England. King Charles is gone, and Oliver Cromwell has inherited the realities, if not the pomp, of royalty. CHAPTER XVIII RESETTLEMENT