These are indeed noble words, and one wishes that Erasmus had possessed the courage of his convictions, but his selfishness, weakness, and love of ease prevented him from braving the risks that Luther and Tyndale incurred. He was like the courtier who advised Latimer to remain a papist until “it pleased God to add to Latimer’s opinions converts in such honest number” as to make profession of his belief safe and respectable. Tyndale was of other and of harder material than Erasmus, and therefore he obtained the success that he did. Withes may be useful for making baskets, but heart of oak and iron are required for the construction of warships. “In almost all plans of great enterprise,” says John Foster, “a man must systematically dismiss at the entrance every wish to stipulate with his destiny for his safety. He voluntarily treads within the precincts of danger; and though it be possible he may escape, _he ought to be prepared_ with the fortitude of _a self-devoted victim_. This is the inevitable condition on which ... Reformers must commence their career. Either they must allay their fire of enterprise, or abide the liability to be exploded by it from the world.” Such was William Tyndale; while the character of Erasmus is sketched in the words in which the same writer describes the man without decision of character: “He belongs to whatever can make capture of him. One thing after another vindicates its right to him while he is trying to go on, as twigs and chips floating near the edge of a river are intercepted by every weed and whirled in every little eddy.” At Cambridge, therefore, Tyndale remained, and there he not only began “to smell the Word of God,” but he also made choice of his future profession. During his course at the Universities, Tyndale had at least one pupil to whom he made reference in his last letter to Fryth the martyr. In the year 1521 Tyndale left Cambridge and went to live as chaplain and tutor at the house of Sir John Walsh in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire. The mansion of this local magnate “is charmingly situated on the south-western slope of the Cotswolds, and enjoys a magnificent prospect over the richly wooded vale of the Severn, to the distant hills of Wales. Though somewhat shorn of its former dignity, and only in part inhabited, the house is still, in the main, intact; time indeed has dealt gently with it, and has added to the beauties of its graceful and varied architecture those mellowing touches which delight the eye of the lover of the picturesque.”[2]