Wolsey, as we have seen, had taken some steps towards establishing public lectureships in the University. But he provided no permanent endowment for these chairs. His designs developed into a grander scheme. He determined to found a college which, in splendour and resources, should eclipse even the noble foundations of Wykeham and Waynflete, a college where the secular clergy should study the New Learning and use it as a handmaid of Theology and in the service of the old Church. And as Wykeham had established in connection with his college a school at Winchester, so Wolsey proposed to found at his birth-place, Ipswich, and at Oxford, two sister-seats of learning and religion. Through the darkness and stagnation of the fifteenth century a few great men had handed on the torch of learning and of educational ideals. The pedigree of Christ Church is clearly traceable through Magdalen and New College back to Merton. Wolsey at Magdalen had learnt to appreciate, in the most beautiful of all the homes of learning, something of the aims of the great school-master bishop, Waynflete. And Waynflete himself, can we doubt? had caught from Wykeham the enthusiasm for producing "rightly and nobly ordered minds and characters." At Oxford, at Winchester and at Windsor he had lived under the shadow of the great monuments of Wykeham's genius, and learned to discern "the true nature of the beautiful and graceful, the simplicity of beauty in style, harmony and grace." So that in the architecture of his college--and Architecture, as Plato tells us, as all the other Arts, is full of grace and harmony, which are the two sisters of goodness and virtue--he was enabled to fulfil the Platonic ideal and to provide the youth whom he desired to benefit with a home where they might dwell "in a land of health and fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything, and where beauty, the effluence of fair works, might flow into the eye and ear like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason." Inspired by such examples, Wolsey set himself to build a college which should eclipse them, "Though unfinished, yet so famous, So excellent in art and yet so rising, That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue." Indeed, says Fuller, nothing mean could enter into this man's mind.