Of More himself it is difficult to speak without using language which seems extravagant. His character was so beautiful, his life so simple and so pure, his conscientiousness so complete, his end so heroic, that he stands out among the sordid meannesses of the sixteenth century like a single star in the darkness of the world. Sinful popes and wicked kings, greedy statesmen and timid clergy, who will accept the king's supremacy one day and then burn what once they adored--among these More has no place. His is a steadfast soul, happy in prosperity and triumphant in the furnace of affliction. "O ye holy and humble men of heart, O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him for ever." And the position of More in the age of the Reformation is the more remarkable because he belonged so clearly to the new as well as to the old. He was, in the best sense, a Humanist. He was a scholar and a bitter foe of all obscurantism. He fought the battle of Greek, and so gave to England the scholarship of the succeeding generation to which true religion and sound learning owe so great a debt. He could take no part with those who could defend the old faith only with the rusty weapons of a philosophic system which had failed to meet the aspirations of the new age. No one laughed more readily than he at the sallies of Erasmus against ignorant monks and illiterate clergy. _Encomium Moriæ, Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, spoke his sentiments as well as those of their authors. But while he loved the new learning and adopted the new methods, he saw that there remained something among the old things that was priceless and imperishable. It may be that he did not clearly distinguish between the essentials and the mere offshoots of a divine faith. It may be--we should say it must be--that if he had lived a hundred years later, or in our own day, he would have thought differently on some matters. The cause of intellectual freedom was presented to him in its worst aspect, and the command to cast away the childish things of mediævalism came in a revolting form from the lips of a coarse and brutal tyrant. Had Colet lived, or Erasmus been a stronger man, all might have been different. As it was, More saw but one side of the new world, and that the worst, and he said, "The old is better."