'If our friendship, most learned Colet, had been of a common-place kind, or your habits those of the common run of men, I should indeed have been somewhat fearful lest it might have been extinguished, or at least cooled, by our long and wide separation.... But I prefer to believe that the cause of my having received no letter from you now for _several years_, lies rather in your press of business, or ignorance of my whereabouts, or even in myself, than in your forgetfulness of an old friend....
'I am much surprised that you have not yet given to the world any of your commentaries on St. Paul and the Gospels. I know your modesty, but surely you ought to conquer that, and print them for the _public good_.
[Sidenote: Erasmus congratulates Colet on his preferment.]
'As to the title of Doctor and Dean, I do not so much congratulate _you_ about these--for I know well they will bring you nothing but labour--as those for whose good you are to bear them.
[Sidenote: Wants to devote himself to Scripture studies.]
'I cannot tell you, dearest Colet, how, by hook and by crook, I struggle to devote myself to the study of sacred literature--how I regret everything which either delays me or detains me from it. But constant ill-fortune has prevented me from extricating myself from these hindrances. When in France, I determined that if I could not conquer these difficulties I would cast them aside, and that once freed from them, with my whole mind I would set to work at these sacred studies, and devote the rest of my life to them. Although three years before I had attempted something on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,[302] and had completed four volumes at one pull, I was nevertheless prevented from going on with it, owing chiefly to the want of a better knowledge of Greek. Consequently, for nearly these three years past, I have buried myself in Greek literature; nor do I think the labour has been thrown away. I began also to dip into Hebrew, but, deterred by the strangeness of the words, I desisted, knowing that one man's life and genius are not enough for too many things at a time. I have read through a good part of the works of Origen, under whose guidance I seemed really to get on, for he opened to me, as it were, the springs and the method of theological science.