Hence we find Justin the Martyr, a
Platonic philosopher, but who was afterwards one of the earliest
Christian writers after the Apostles, and other learned men after him
down to Chrysostom, laying aside their learning and their philosophy for
the school of Christ. The first authors also of the reformation,
contended for this doctrine. Luther and Calvin, both of them, supported
it. Wickliffe, the first reformer of the English church, and Tyndal the
Martyr, the first translator of the Bible into the English language,
supported it also. In 1652, Sydrach Simpson, Master of Pembroke-Hall in
Cambridge, preached a sermon before the University, contending that the
Universities corresponded with the schools of the prophets, and that
human learning was an essential qualification for the priesthood. This
sermon, however, was answered by William Dell, Master of Caius College
in the same University, in which he stated, after having argued the
points in question, that the Universities did not correspond with the
schools of the prophets, but with those of Heathen men; that Plato,
Aristotle, and Pythagoras, were more honoured there, than Moses or
Christ; that grammar, rhetoric, logic, ethics, physics, metaphysics, and
the mathematics, were not the instruments to be used in the promotion or
the defence of the Gospel; that Christian schools had originally brought
men from Heathenism to Christianity, but that the University schools
were likely to carry men from Christianity to Heathenism again.
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