صفحة 625 من 1391

To minds like More's, Greek literature was a revelation: there

had arisen an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was

beginning to be understood as it had never been before, and has

not often been since, in its natural sense. The life there

depicted appeared to him wholly unlike that of Christian

commonwealths, in which 'he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy

of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and

title of the Commonwealth.' He thought that Christ, like Plato,

'instituted all things common,' for which reason, he tells us,

the citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive his

doctrines ('Howbeit, I think this was no small help and

furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ

instituted among his, all things common, and that the same

community doth yet remain in the rightest Christian communities'

(Utopia).).