himself to letters alone;[196] and when at last he was moved to take an active part against the Gospellers, as they were called, it seems to have been in some measure from a notion that the Reformation was absorbing every other question, and that in consequence of it the study of profane authors was unreasonably neglected.[197] Erasmus, however, as we have already hinted, was alarmed at the commotions which Luther’s innovations threatened. When the tug of war came, he showed that he had only been for a reformation on paper; he would detect abuses, but not correct them; he was desirous of the end, but afraid of the means; he was for the excision of the pound of flesh, but then it must be done without shedding one drop of blood. Sir Thomas More, though a person of much greater courage, both moral and physical, than Erasmus, herein partook of his feelings; he saw the evil, but could not see his way through it. His Utopia, written about the year 1513, when he was yet young, is the work of a man alive to the corruptions of a church of which he lived to be the champion, the inquisitor, and the martyr. He could then, through the medium of his ideal republic, and by the mouth of an imaginary speaker, pass censure upon the monks as the drones of society[198]--reduce the number of the priests to the number of the churches[199]--remove images[200]--advocate the right of private judgment[201]--exhort that the work of conversion should be done by persuasion, but not coercion, holding the faith of a man to be not always an affair of volition;[202] he could banish from his imaginary kingdom those who condemned all heretics to eternal torments as bigots,[203] and extend his principles of concession even far beyond those afterwards adopted by the author of the Liberty of Prophesying, and to a degree incompatible with the existence of any religious establishment whatever.[204] It is true, that a salvo is added in conclusion[205] (just as Erasmus would have added it under similar circumstances), that Sir Thomas More, for his part, thought much of this visionary; but if so, why agitate such questions and unsettle the minds of men to no purpose? Their author might indeed be disposed to shut his eyes when he pulled the trigger, but it is pretty clear that he aimed his piece at the church. But when that work was published, More little thought what he should live to witness, or that a Luther was nigh, even at the door--five years later, and probably Utopia would never have seen the light; for the chancellor was one of the first to take alarm at the progress of the Lutheran heresy, and to prophesy no smooth things concerning it.[206] He wrote against it, attacking Luther, Tindall, and Frith, with great acrimony, and opposing his “Supplication of the Souls in Purgatory,” to a very popular pamphlet by one Fish, published at that time, entitled “The Supplication of Beggars,” in which the latter complained that they were robbed of