To degrade human nature was to attack the very base of the New Learning; and his attack on it called the foremost of its teachers to the field.

But Erasmus no sooner advanced to its defence than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved by original sin and incapable through any efforts of his own of discovering truth or of arriving at goodness.
Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the classic past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger views of life and of the world; it trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument by which More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and religion.
To More especially, with his keener perception of its future effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing Christendom into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union and tolerance, was especially hateful.

The temper which hitherto had seemed so "endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way.

His reply to Luther's attack upon the king sank to the level of the work it answered; and though that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and more argumentative the divorce of the New Learning from the Reformation seemed complete.
[Sidenote: Tyndale] But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the new movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger world where men are stirred rather by emotion than by thought.

There was an England of which even More and Colet knew little in which Luther's words kindled a fire that was never to die.