Dean of St. Paul’s, and founder of St. Paul’s School (1512); born at London, 1466; died there Sept. 16, 1519, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was one of the “Reformers before the Reformation.” He took his M.A. at Oxford (1490), and went abroad (1493) to study Greek and Latin. On his return, in 1497, he publicly expounded Paul’s Epistles at Oxford, and there became acquainted with Erasmus, with whom he maintained an intimate friendship. He was promoted to various positions,—made D.D. 1504, and Dean of St. Paul’s 1505. His great reform was to introduce expository preaching, and a perpetual divinity-lecture on three days in each week, in St. Paul’s Church. By his well-known disapproval of auricular confession, celibacy of the clergy, and other Roman practices, he was considered by the faithful little short of a heretic: hence he was subject to a variety of persecutions. He wrote “Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione Libellus,” London, 1530; “Rudimenta Grammatices,” London, 1510 (a book designed for use in St. Paul’s School, and dedicated to its first master, the famous George Lilly); “Daily Devotions, or the Christian’s Morning and Evening Sacrifice” (Darling mentions only the edition of 1693).

  Let every man have his own doctor, and every one follow his liking; but this is the doctor for me.

  It was but a very small portion of this religious spirit that he owed to nature. For he was gifted with a temper singularly high and impatient of affront; he was, as he himself confessed to me, naturally prone to incontinence, luxuriousness, and indulgence in sleep; overmuch disposed to jests and raillery; and he was besides not wholly exempt from the taint of covetousness. But these tendencies he combated so successfully by philosophy and sacred studies, by watching, fasting, and prayer, that he led the whole course of his life free from the pollutions of the world. As far as I could gather from my intimate acquaintance and conversations with him, he kept the flower of chastity even unto death. His fortune he spent on charitable uses. Against his high temper he contended with the help of reason, so as to brook admonition even from a servant. Incontinence, love of sleep, and luxuriousness, he vanquished by an uniform abstinence from supper, by constant sobriety, by unwearied exertions in study, and by religious conversation. Yet if an occasion had ever presented itself, either of conversing with ladies, or being a guest at sumptuous repasts, you might have seen some traces of the old nature in him. And on that account he kept away, as a rule, from laymen’s society, and especially from banquets. If forced at times to attend them, he would take me or some similar companion with him; in order, by talking Latin, to avoid worldly conversation. Meanwhile he would partake sparingly of one dish only, and be satisfied with a single draught or two of ale. He was abstemious in respect of wine; appreciating it, if choice, but most temperate in the use of it. Thus, keeping a constant watch upon himself, he carefully avoided everything by which he might cause anyone to stumble; not forgetting that the eyes of all were upon him. I never saw a more highly-gifted intellect. But though he felt a peculiar pleasure, on this account, in kindred intellects, he liked better to bend his mind to such things as fitted it for the immortality of the life to come. If at times he sought relaxation in sprightlier talk, he would still philosophize on every topic. He took a delight in the purity and simplicity of nature that is in children; a nature that Christ bids His disciples imitate; and he was wont to compare them to angels.

  For generations we have not had amongst us any one man more learned or holy.

  He should have bin burnt if God had not turned the King’s heart to the contrarie.

  This Colet had travelled through France and Italy, and upon his return he settled for some time at Oxford, where he read divinity lectures, without any obligation or reward for it. His readings brought him all the learned and studious persons in the University. He read not according to the custom that prevailed universally at that time, of commenting on Thomas Aquinas, or on Scotus; but his readings were upon St. Paul’s Epistles.

  So exquisitely Learned, that all Tully’s Works were as familiar to him, as his Epistles. He was also no Stranger to Plato and Plotinus, whom he not only read, but conferred and paralelled, perusing the one, as a Commentary on the other. And as for the Mathematicks, there was scarce any part thereof wherein he was not seen above his years.

  We see a full reformation of moral and religious truth serenely and quietly accomplished in the mind of Dr. Colet, before the name of Luther had passed beyond his own threshold.

  The very boldness of the lecturer and the novelty of the subject were enough to draw an audience at once. Doctors and abbots, men of all ranks and titles, flocked with the students into the lecture hall, led by curiosity doubtless at first, or it may be, like the Pharisees of old, bent upon finding somewhat whereof they might accuse the man whom they wished to silence. But since they came again and again, as the term went by, bringing their notebooks with them, it soon became clear that they continued to come with some better purpose…. They were in almost every particular in direct contrast with those of the dominant school. They were not textarian. They did not consist of a series of wiredrawn dissertations upon isolated texts. They were no “thread of nine days long drawn from an antitheme of half an inch.” Colet began at the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, and went through with it to the end, in a course of lectures, treating it as a whole, and not as an armoury of detached texts. Nor were they on the model of the Catena aurea, formed by linking together the recorded comments of the great Church authorities. There is hardly a quotation from the Fathers or Schoolmen throughout the exposition of the Epistle to the Romans. Instead of following the current fashion of the day, and displaying analytical skill in dividing the many senses of the sacred text, Colet, it is clear, had but one object in view, and that object was to bring out the direct practical meaning which the apostle meant to convey to those to whom his epistles were addressed. To him they were the earnest words of a living man addressed to living men, and suited to their actual needs. He loved those words because he had learned to love the apostle—the man—who had written them, and had caught somewhat of his spirit. He loved to trace in the epistles the marks of St. Paul’s own character.

  He was a man of some eccentricity, over-confident in argument, and not so deeply learned in theology as some writers have taken for granted. But of his truthfulness and earnest desire to promote holy living there can be no doubt; and his testimony to the need of reformation in the Church of England is that of a witness whose character makes it worth while to give his words in some detail.

  By the new method of interpretation of scripture, and the new style of preaching which he initiated, he was a benefactor to his own age; by the school which he founded he has been a benefactor to all succeeding ages. But although his love of learning was great, his love of Christ was greater.

  Some Catholics have denounced Colet as a “heretic,” and Anglican writers assert that he was “a hidden Protestant.” He was neither, but rather an austere man, who wished to see churchmen living according to the discipline of primitive Christianity.

  The great name of John Colet deserves something more than the mere passing notice which I can give it here. He deserves honor, especially in these times of ours, as having fought, amid circumstances immeasurably more trying and oppressive, the same battle which is now being waged under obloquy, against the vicious principles and methods of scholasticism.

  Colet’s achievements seem slight compared with his posthumous fame. On education alone, where he diminished the ecclesiastical control at the same time that he increased the religious tone, did he exert a practical influence. He printed very few of his books, and their effect must have been consequently small. “As for John Colet,” wrote Harding to Jewell, “he hath never a word to show, for he wrote no workes.” His knowledge of Greek—the chief source of the New Learning—was slight. Hearne contended on slender grounds that he knew nothing of it till he was fifty. His Latin style is neither elegant nor correct; his English is not distinctive. His scriptural exegesis often takes refuge in mystical subtleties. His practical efforts of church reform were confined to the reissue of old rules of discipline to prevent the clergy from neglecting their duties. He was, however, among the first not only to recognise the necessity of making the scriptures intelligible to the masses in vernacular translations, but to criticise their subject-matter with any approach to scholarly method. Yet his chief strength lay in the overwhelming force of his personal conviction that the church had lost its primitive purity, and that the schoolmen had contributed less to the advantage of piety or of human intelligence than the early fathers or the classics, a conviction which impressed itself on all with whom he came into close contact, stirring active antagonism in the slow-witted or self-interested, but stimulating men of Erasmus’s or More’s intelligence into effective thought and action.

  In what sense was Colet a reformer? It cannot be said that Colet distinctly repudiated any of the dogmas of the Church of his time. He simply shelved them in favor of the simple declarations of the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed. A standpoint so liberal and yet intensely Christian makes Colet a kind of standard bearer for all, a man around whom the Churches may rally in this age of Christian union. His latest biographer and successor in St. Paul’s School, London, which he founded, calls attention to this aspect of Colet. Even if we cannot trace the great Reformation movement to him, an instinctive feeling remains that in Colet we have a strong connecting link between the old and the new. In his many-sided character there is something in which all may claim a share. The Roman Catholic must honor one of whom More declares that “none more learned or more holy had lived among them for many ages past.” The High Churchman will probably find but little in his extant writings from which he would feel bound to dissent.