He came back to Oxford utterly untouched by the Platonic mysticism or the semi-serious infidelity which characterized the group of scholars round Lorenzo the Magnificent.

He was hardly more influenced by their literary enthusiasm.

The knowledge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive end for him, and this was a religious end.

Greek was the key by which he could unlock the Gospels and the New Testament, and in these he thought that he could find a new religious standing-ground.

It was this resolve of Colet to throw aside the traditional dogmas of his day and to discover a rational and practical religion in the Gospels themselves which gave its peculiar stamp to the theology of the Renascence.