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sixteenth-century debate. Some of these scholars, with all the ardour of youth, were attracted to new and potentially subversive doctrines. Reform was in the air. Some of them wished to return to the simple piety of the movements known as the Poor Catholics or the Humiliati; they wished to eschew the pomp and ceremony of the medieval Church, and to cultivate what was called
devotio moderna
, ‘modern devotion’. Others wished to return to the word of the Scriptures, and in particular of the New Testament.
    The published work of Desiderius Erasmus had already brought a purer spirit into theological enquiry. While Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he completed a Greek and Latin translation of the New Testament which seemed destined to supersede the old ‘Vulgate’ that had been in use for a thousand years. Erasmus, by an act of historical scholarship, brought back something of the air of early Christian revelation.
    He believed that the rituals and the formal theology of the Church were less important than the spiritual reception of the messageof the Scriptures; an inward faith, both in God’s grace and in the redemptive power of His Son, was of more efficacy than conformity to external worship. ‘If you approach the Scriptures in all humility,’ he wrote, ‘you will perceive that you have been breathed upon by the Holy Will.’ By means of satire he also attacked the excessive devotion to relics, the too frequent resort to pilgrimages, and the degeneration of the monastic orders. He rarely mentions the sacraments that were part of the divine machinery of the orthodox faith.
    He never advanced into heretical doctrine, but he was as much a dissolvent of conventional piety as Luther or Wycliffe. Without Erasmus, neither Luther nor Tyndale could have translated the Greek testament. He also entertained the hope that the Scriptures would be freely available to everyone, an aspiration that, at a later date, would be deemed almost heretical. One of the scholars who attended the meetings in the White Horse tavern, Thomas Bilney, declared that on reading Erasmus ‘at last I heard of Jesus’. Bilney was later to be burned at the stake.
    Erasmus has conventionally been described as a ‘humanist’, although the word itself did not appear in this sense until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In general terms humanism, or the ‘new learning’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century, concerned itself with a renovation of education and scholarship by the pursuit of newly found or newly translated classical models. It brought with it a profound scepticism of medieval authority, and of the scholastic theology that supported it. The new learning opened the windows of the Church in search of light and fresh air. The somewhat commonplace anti-clericalism of the Lollards had become outmoded in an age of constructive criticism and renovation, and it seemed likely that the universal Church would be able to renew itself.
    In the autumn of 1517 Martin Luther spoke out, lending a more fiery and dogmatic charge to the general calls for reform. He was close to Erasmus in many respects, but he quickly moved beyond him in his assertion of justification by faith alone. Faith comes as a gift from God to the individual without the interference of rituals and priests. The Church cannot, and should not, come between Christ and the aspiring soul. A person saved by thesacrifice of Christ will be granted eternal life. Grace will lift the soul to heaven. For those not saved by faith, the only destination is the everlasting fire.
    In a series of pamphlets Luther attacked the beliefs and hierarchies of the orthodox faith. The pope in Rome was the Antichrist. There were only two sacraments, those of baptism and holy communion, rather than the seven adumbrated by the Church. Every good Christian man was already a priest. Grace and faith were enough for salvation. The words of Scripture should stand alone. ‘I will