Church authorities thought only of crushing what opposed them, especially of crushing talent, because talent was dangerous. Wolsey's noble anxiety was to court talent, and if possible to win it.
The young Cambridge students, however, ill repaid his confidence (so, at least, it must have appeared to him), and introduced into Oxford the rising epidemic. Clark, as was at last discovered, was in the habit of reading St Paul's Epistles to young men in his rooms; and a gradually increasing circle of undergraduates, of three or four years' standing,[1] from various colleges, formed themselves into a spiritual freemasonry, some of them passionately insisting on being admitted to the lectures, in spite of warnings from Clark himself, whose wiser foresight knew the risk which they were running, and shrank from allowing weak giddy spirits to thrust themselves into so fearful peril.[2]
This little party had been in the habit of meeting for about six months,[3] when at Easter, 1527, Thomas Garret, a fellow of Magdalen,[4] who had gone out of residence, and was curate at All Hallows Church, in London, re-appeared in Oxford. Garret was a secret member of the London Society, and had come down, at Clark's instigation, to feel his way in the University. So excellent a beginning had already been made, that
