During the first portion of the sixteenth century Erasmus occupied a unique position in Europe. He was beyond question the most remarkable outcome of the renaissance in its literary aspect; and he may fairly be taken as a type of the critical attitude of mind in which many even of the best and the most loyal Catholics of the day approached the consideration of the serious religious problems which were, at that time, forcing themselves upon the notice of the ecclesiastical authorities. Such men held that the best service a true son of the Church could give to religion was the service of a trained mind, ready to face facts as they were, convinced that the Christian faith had nothing to lose by the fullest light and the freest investigation, but at the same time protesting that they would suffer no suspicion to rest on their entire loyalty of heart to the authority of the teaching Church.

Keenly alive to the spiritual wants of the age, and to what he, in common with many others of the time, considered crying abuses in the government of the Church, resulting from the excessive temporal grandeur of ecclesiastics engaged in secular sovereignty and government, Erasmus, like many of his contemporaries, is often perhaps injudicious in the manner in which he advocated reforms. But when the matter is sifted to the bottom, it will commonly be found that his ideas are just. He clamoured loudly and fearlessly for the proper enforcing of ecclesiastical discipline, and for a complete change in the stereotyped modes of teaching; and he proclaimed the need of a thorough literary education for Churchmen as the best corrective of what he held to be the narrowing formalism of mediÆval scholastic training. It is, perhaps, hardly wonderful that his general attitude in these matters should have been misunderstood and exaggerated. By many of his Catholic contemporaries he was looked upon as a secret rebel against received authority, and in truth as the real intellectual force of the whole Lutheran movement. By the Reformers themselves, regarded as at heart belonging to them, he was upbraided as a coward, and spoken of as one who had not the courage of his convictions. Posterity has represented him now in the one aspect, now in the other, now as at best a lukewarm Catholic, now as a secret and dangerous heretic. By most Catholics probably he has been regarded as a Reformer, as pronounced even as Luther himself; or to use the familiar phrase founded upon an expression of his own, they considered that “his was the egg which Luther hatched.” Few writers have endeavoured to read any meaning into his seemingly paradoxical position by reference to his own explanations, or by viewing it in the light of the peculiar circumstances of the times in which he lived, and which are, to some extent at least, responsible for it.

Desiderius Erasmus was born at Rotterdam, in the year 1467. His father’s Christian name was Gerhard, of which Desiderius was intended for the Latin, and Erasmus for the Greek, equivalent. Other surname he had none, as he was born out of wedlock; but his father adopted the responsibility of his education, for which he provided by placing him first as a chorister in the cathedral of Utrecht, and subsequently by sending him to Deventer, then one of the best schools in Northern Europe. Deventer was at that time presided over by the learned scholar and teacher Alexander Hegius, and amongst his fellow-students there, Erasmus found several youths who subsequently, as men, won for themselves renown in the learned world. One of them, under the title of Adrian VI., subsequently occupied the Papal chair.

His father and mother both died of the plague whilst Erasmus was still young. At the age of thirteen he was taken from Deventer by the three guardians to whose charge he had been committed, and sent to a purely ecclesiastical school, meant to prepare those intended only for a life in the cloister. Here he remained for three years, and after having for a considerable time resisted the suggestions of his masters that he should join their Order, he finally entered the novitiate of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine at Stein, near Gouda. Here he was professed at the age of nineteen, and after the usual interval was ordained priest.

Much obscurity and many apparent contradictions prevent us fully understanding Erasmus’s early life, and in particular the portion spent by him in the cloister. One thing, however, would seem to be quite clear; he could never have had any vocation for the religious life. His whole subsequent history shows this unmistakeably; and the ill-judged zeal of those who practically forced him into a state for which he was constitutionally unfitted, and for which he had no aptitude or inclination, must, if we take his account of the facts as correct, be as strongly condemned by all right-thinking people as by himself. He, however, appears not to have understood that this may have been a special case, and not the usual lot of youths entering religion. One evident result of his experience is the bitter feeling created in his heart towards the religious Orders and the uncompromising hostility he ever after displayed towards them. In the celebrated letter he wrote to the papal secretary, Lambert Grunnius, which was intended for the information of the Pope himself, and which is supposed to describe his own case, Erasmus justly condemns in the strongest language the practice of enticing youths into the cloister before they were fully aware of what they were doing. If we are to believe the statements made in that letter, Erasmus did not think that his was by any means a singular case. Agents of the religious Orders, he declared, were ever hanging about the schools and colleges, endeavouring to entice the youthful students into their ranks by any and every method. But he is careful to add, “I do not condemn the religious Orders as such. I do not approve of those who make the plunge and then fly back to liberty as a licence for loose living, and desert improperly what they undertook foolishly. But dispositions vary; all things do not suit all characters, and no worse misfortune can befall a youth of intellect than to be buried under conditions from which he can never after extricate himself. The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian because he was neither a liar nor a scamp nor a gambler, but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant, he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he destined to Dominic and Francis and Benedict.”[158]

Without any taste for the routine of conventual life, and with his mind filled by an ardent love of letters, which there seemed in the narrow circle of his cloister no prospect of ever being able to gratify, the short period of Erasmus’s stay at Stein must have been to him in the last degree uncongenial and irksome. Fortunately, however, for his own peace of mind and for the cause of general learning, a means was quickly found by which he was practically emancipated from the restraints he ought never to have undertaken. The Bishop of Cambray obtained permission to have him as secretary, and after keeping him a short time in this position he enabled him to proceed to the University of Paris. From this time Erasmus was practically released from the obligations of conventual life; and in 1514, when some question had been raised about his return to the cloister, he readily obtained from the Pope a final release from a form of life for which obviously he was constitutionally unfitted, and the dress of which he had been permitted to lay aside seven years previously.

The generosity of his episcopal patron did not suffice to meet all Erasmus’s wants. To add to his income he took pupils, and with one of them, Lord Mountjoy, he came to England in 1497. He spent, apparently, the next three years at Oxford, living in the house which his Order had at that University; whilst there he made the acquaintance of the most learned Englishmen of that time, and amongst others of Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet. He also at this time took up the study of the Greek language, with which previously he had but a slender acquaintance, and his ardour was so great that the following year, 1498, whilst at work on the Adagia, he could write, “I am giving my whole soul to the study of Greek; directly I get some money I shall buy Greek authors first, and then some clothes.” From 1499 to 1506 he was continually moving about in various learned centres of France and Holland, his longest stay being at the University of Louvain.

In the April of 1506 he was again in England, first with Archbishop Warham and Sir Thomas More in London, and subsequently at Cambridge; but in a few months he was enabled to carry out the plan of visiting Italy which he had long contemplated. He engaged to escort the two sons of Sebastian Boyer, the English court physician, as far as Bologna, and by September he was already in Turin, where he took his doctor’s degree in divinity. The winter of the same year he passed at Bologna, and reached Venice in the spring of 1507.

His main object in directing his steps to this last-named city was to pass the second and enlarged edition of his Adagia through the celebrated Aldine printing-press. Here he found gathered together, within reach of the press, a circle of illustrious scholars. Aldus himself, a man, as Erasmus recalled in a letter written in 1524, “approaching the age of seventy years, but in all matters relating to letters still in the prime of his youth,” was his host. In 1508 Erasmus removed to Padua, and the following year passed on to Rome, where he was well received. His stay in the eternal city at this time was not prolonged, for a letter received from Lord Mountjoy announcing the death of Henry VII., and the good affection of his youthful successor to learning, determined him to turn his face once more towards England. He had left the country with keen regret, for, as he wrote to Dean Colet, “I can truly say that no place in the world has given me so many friends—true, learned, helpful, and illustrious friends—as the single city of London,” and he looked forward to his return with pleasurable expectation.

For a brief period on his arrival again in this country Erasmus stayed in London at the house of Sir Thomas More, where, at his suggestion, he wrote the Enconium MoriÆ, one of the works by which he is best known to the general reader, and the one, perhaps, the spirit of which has the most given rise to many mistaken notions as to the author’s religious convictions.

From London, in 1510, he was invited by Bishop Fisher to come and teach at Cambridge, where by his influence he had been appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Regius Reader of Greek. “Unless I am much mistaken,” Erasmus writes, “the Bishop of Rochester is a man without an equal at this time, both as to integrity of life, learning, or broad-minded sympathies. One only do I except, as a very Achilles, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Warham), who alone keeps me in London, though I confess not very unwillingly.”[159]

In estimating the spirit which dictated the composition of the MoriÆ, it is well to remember not only that it represented almost as much the thought and genius of Sir Thomas More as of Erasmus himself, but that, at the very time it was taking definite shape in More’s house at Chelsea, the author’s two best friends were the two great and devout churchmen, Archbishop Warham and the saintly Bishop Fisher. Moreover, Sir Thomas More himself denies that to this work of Erasmus there can justly be affixed the note of irreverence or irreligion; he answers for the good intention of the author, and accepts his own share of responsibility for the publication of the book.

The period of Erasmus’s stay at Cambridge did not extend beyond three years. The stipend attached to his professorships was not large, and Erasmus was still, apparently, in constant want of money. Archbishop Warham continued his friend, and by every means tried continually to interest others directly in the cause of learning and indirectly in the support of Erasmus, who is ever complaining that his means are wholly inadequate to supply his wants. The scholar, however, remained on the best of terms with all the chief English churchmen of the day, until, as he wrote to the Abbot of St. Bertin, “Erasmus has been almost transformed into an Englishman, with such overwhelming kindness do so many treat me, and above all, my special MÆcenas, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He indeed is not only my patron, but that of all the learned, amongst whom I but hold a low place. Immortal gods! how pleasant, how ready, how fertile is the wit of that man! What dexterity does he not show in managing the most complicated business! What exceptional learning! What singular courtesy does he not extend to all! What gaiety and geniality at interviews! so that he never sends people away from him sad. Added to this, how great and how prompt is his liberality! He alone seems to be ignorant of his own great qualities and the height of his dignity and fortune. No one can be more true and faithful to his friends; and, in a word, he is truly a Primate, not only in dignity, but in everything worthy of praise.”[160]

Erasmus returns to this same subject in writing to a Roman Cardinal about this time. When I think, he says, of the Italian sky, the rich libraries, and the society of the learned men in Rome, I am tempted to look back to the eternal city with regret. “But the wonderful kindness of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, to me mitigates my desire to return. Had he been my father or brother he could not have been more kind and loving. I have been accorded, too, the same reception by many other bishops of England. Amongst these stands pre-eminent the Bishop of Rochester, a man who, in addition to his uprightness of life, is possessed of deep and varied learning, and of a soul above all meanness, for which gifts he is held here in England in the highest estimation.”[161]

Erasmus certainly had reason to be grateful to Warham and his other English friends for their ready attention to his, at times importunate, requests. Warham, he writes at one time, “has given me a living worth a hundred nobles and changed it at my request into a pension of one hundred crowns. Within these few years he has given me more than four hundred nobles without my asking. One day he gave me one hundred and fifty. From other bishops I have received more than one hundred, and Lord Mountjoy has secured me a pension of one hundred crowns.” In fact, in the Compendium VitÆ, a few years later, he says that he would have remained for the rest of his life in England had the promises made to him been always fulfilled. This constant and importunate begging on the part of the great scholar forms certainly an unpleasant feature in his life. He gets from Dean Colet fifteen angels for a dedication, and in reference to his translation of St. Basil on the Prophet Isaias, begs Colet to find out whether Bishop Fisher will be inclined “to ease his labours with a little reward,” adding himself, “O this begging! I know well enough that you will be laughing at me.”[162] Again, whilst lamenting his poverty and his being compelled to beg continually in this way, he adds that Linacre has been lecturing him for thus pestering his friends, and has warned him to spare Archbishop Warham and his friend Mountjoy a little. In this same letter, written in October 1513, there are signs of friction with some of the Cambridge teachers of theology, which may have helped Erasmus in his determination once more to leave England. Not that he professed to care what people thought, for he tells Colet he does not worry about those whom he calls in derision “the Scotists,” but would treat them as he would a wasp. Nevertheless, he is still half inclined by the opposition to stop the work he is engaged on; confessing, also, that he is almost turned away from the design of thus translating St. Basil, as the Bishop of Rochester is not anxious for him to do it, and—at least so a friend has told him—rather suspects that he is translating, not from the original Greek, but is making use of a Latin version.

Almost immediately after writing this letter Erasmus again bade farewell to England, and passed up the Rhine to Strasburg, where he made the acquaintance of Wimpheling, Sebastian Brant, and others. The following year, 1515, he went on to Basle, attracted by the great reputation of the printing-press set up in that city by Froben. He was there eagerly welcomed by the bishop of the city, who had gathered round him many men imbued with the true spirit of learning; and Erasmus soon became the centre of this brilliant group of scholars. From this time Basle became Erasmus’s home, although, especially in the early years, he was always on the move. He paid a flying visit once more, in 1517, to England, but he had learnt to love his independence too much to entertain any proposals for again undertaking duties that would tie him to any definite work in any definite place. Even the suggestions of friends that he would find congenial and profitable pursuits in England were unheeded, and he remained unmoved even when his friend Andrew Ammonius wrote to say the king himself was looking for his return. “What about Erasmus?” Henry had asked. “When is he coming back to us? He is the light of our age. Oh that he would return to us!”[163]

From England, however, he continued to receive supplies of money; although his circumstances improved so much with the steady circulation of his books, that he was not at this second period of his life so dependent upon the charity of his friends. About the year 1520 Erasmus settled permanently at Basle as literary superintendent of Froben’s press. What, no doubt, induced him to do so, even more than the offer of this position, was the fact that Basle had then become, by the establishment of printing-presses by Amberbach and Froben, the centre of the German book-trade. Froben died in 1527, and that circumstance, as well as the religious troubles which, separating Basle from the empire and making it the focus of civil strife, ended in wrecking learning there altogether, put an end to Erasmus’s connection with the press which for eight years had taken the lead of all the presses of Europe. Not only was the literary superintendence of the work completely in the hands of Erasmus during this period which he described as his “mill,” but all the dedications and prefaces to Froben’s editions of the Fathers were the distinct work of his own pen. His literary activity at this period was enormous, and only the power he had acquired of working with the greatest rapidity could have enabled him to cope with the multiplicity of demands made upon him. Scaliger relates that Aldus informed him Erasmus could do twice as much work in a given time as any other man he had ever met. This untiring energy enabled him to cope with the immense correspondence which, as he says, came pouring in “daily from almost all parts, from kings, princes, prelates, men of learning, and even from persons of whose existence I was, till then, ignorant,” and caused him not infrequently to write as many as forty letters a day.

On Froben’s death in 1527, the fanatical religious contentions forced him to remove to Freiburg, in Breisgau, where he resided from 1529 to 1535. The need for seeing his Ecclesiastes through the press, as well as a desire to revisit the scenes of his former activity, took him back to Basle; but his health had been giving way for some years, and, at the age of sixty-nine, he expired at Basle on July 12, 1536.

Such is a brief outline of the life of the most remarkable among the leaders of the movement known as the renaissance of letters. Without some general knowledge of the main facts of his life and work, it would be still more difficult than it is to understand the position he took in regard to the great religious revolution during the later half of his life. With these main facts before us we may turn to a consideration of his mental attitude towards some of the many momentous questions which were then searching men’s hearts and troubling their souls.

In the first place, of course, comes the important problem of Erasmus’s real position as regards the Church itself and its authority. That he was outspoken on many points, even on points which we now regard as well within the border-line of settled matters of faith and practice, may be at once admitted, but he never appears to have wavered in his determination at all costs to remain true and loyal to the Pope and the other constituted ecclesiastical authorities. The open criticism of time-worn institutions in which he indulged, and the sweeping condemnation of the ordinary teachings of the theological schools, which he never sought to disguise, brought him early in his public life into fierce antagonism with many devoted believers in the system then in vogue.

The publication of his translation of the New Testament from the Greek brought matters to an issue. The general feeling in England and amongst those best able to judge had been favourable to the undertaking, and on its first appearance Erasmus was assured of the approval of the learned world at the English universities.[164] More wrote Latin verses addressed to the reader of the new translation, calling it “the holy work and labour of the learned and immortal Erasmus,” to purify the text of God’s Word. Colet was warm in its praises. Copies, he writes to Erasmus, are being readily bought and read. Many approved, although, of course, as was to be expected, some spoke against the undertaking. In England, as elsewhere, says Colet, “we have theologians such as you describe in your MoriÆ, by whom to be praised is dishonour, to be blamed is the highest praise.” For his part, Colet has, he says, only one regret that he did not himself know Greek sufficiently well to be able fully to appreciate what Erasmus had done, though “he is only too thankful for the light that has been thrown upon the true meaning of the Holy Scripture.” Archbishop Warham writes what is almost an official letter, to tell Erasmus that his edition of the New Testament has been welcomed by all his brother bishops in England to whom he has shown it. Bishop Tunstall was away in Holland, where, amidst the insanitary condition of the islands of Zeeland, which he so graphically describes, he finds consolation in the study of the work. He cannot too highly praise it—not merely as the opening up of Greek sources of information upon the meaning of the Bible, but as affording the fullest commentary on the sacred text.[165] Bishop Fisher was equally clear as to the service rendered to religion by Erasmus in this version of the Testament; and when, in 1519, Froben had agreed to bring out a second edition, Erasmus turned to Fisher and More to assist in making the necessary corrections.[166]

More defended his friend most strenuously. Writing to Marten Dorpius in 1515, he upbraided him with suggesting that theologians would never welcome the help afforded to biblical studies by Erasmus’s work on the Greek text of the Bible. He ridicules as a joke not meriting a serious reply the report that Erasmus and his friends had declared there was no need of the theologians and philosophers, but that grammar would suffice. Erasmus, who has studied in the universities of Paris, Padua, Bologna, and Rome, and taught with distinction in some of them, is not likely to hold such absurd ideas. At the same time, More does not hesitate to say that in many things he thinks some theologians are to be blamed, especially those who, rejecting all positive science, hold that man is born to dispute about questions of all kinds which have not the least practical utility “even as regards the pietas fidei or the cultivation of sound morals.”

At great length More defends the translation against the insinuations made by Dorpius, who evidently regarded it as a sacrilege to suggest that the old Latin editions in use in the Church were incorrect. St. Jerome, says More, did not hesitate to change when he believed the Latin to be wrong, and Dorpius’s suggestion that Erasmus should have only noted the errors and not actually made any change would, had the same principle been applied, have prevented St. Jerome’s work altogether. If it was thought proper that the Latin codices should be corrected at that time by Greek manuscripts, why not now? The Church had then an equally recognised version before the corrections of St. Jerome.[167]

There were, indeed, as might be expected, some discordant notes in the general chorus of English praise. For the time, however, they remained unheeded, and, in fact, were hardly heard amid the general verdict of approval, in which the Pope, cardinals, and other highly-placed ecclesiastics joined. Erasmus, however, was fully prepared for opposition of a serious character. Writing to Cambridge at the time, he says that he knows what numbers of people prefer “their old mumpsimus to the new sumpsimus,” and condemn the undertaking on the plea that no such work as the correction of the text of Holy Scripture ought to be undertaken without the authority of a general Council.[168]

It is easy to understand the grounds upon which men who had been trained on old methods looked with anxiety, and even horror, at this new departure. Scholarship and literary criticism, when applied to the pagan classics, might be tolerable enough; but what would be the result were the same methods to be used in the examination of the works of the Fathers, and more especially in criticism of the text of the Holy Scripture itself? Overmuch study of the writings of ancient Greece and Rome had, it appeared to many, in those days, hardly tended to make the world much better: even in high places pagan models had been allowed to displace ideals and sentiments, which, if barbarous and homely, were yet Christian. Theologians had long been accustomed to look upon the Latin Vulgate text as almost sacrosanct, and after the failure of the attempt in the thirteenth century to improve and correct the received version, no critical revision had been dreamt of as possible, or indeed considered advisable. Those best able to judge, such as Warham and More and Fisher, were not more eager to welcome, than others to condemn and ban, this attempt on the part of Erasmus to apply the now established methods of criticism to the sacred text. Not that the edition itself was in reality a work of either sound learning or thorough scholarship. As an edition of the Greek Testament it is now allowed on all hands to have no value whatever; but the truth is, that the Greek played only a subordinate part in Erasmus’s scheme. His principal object was to produce a new Latin version, and to justify this he printed the Greek text along with it. And this, though in itself possessing little critical value, was, in reality, the starting-point for all modern Biblical criticism. As a modern writer has said, “Erasmus did nothing to solve the problem, but to him belongs the honour of having first propounded it.”

It must, however, be borne in mind that the publication of Erasmus’s New Testament was not, as is claimed for it by some modern writers, a new revelation of the Gospel to the world at large, nor is it true that the sacred text had become so obscured by scholastic theological disquisitions on side issues as almost to be forgotten. According to Mr. Froude, “the New Testament to the mass of Christians was an unknown book,” when Erasmus’s edition, which was multiplied and spread all over Europe, changed all this. Pious and ignorant men had come to look on the text of the Vulgate as inspired. “Read it intelligently they could not, but they had made the language into an idol, and they were filled with horrified amazement when they found in page after page that Erasmus had anticipated modern critical corrections of the text, introduced various readings, and re-translated passages from the Greek into a new version.”[169] The truth is that the publication of the New Testament was in no sense an appeal ad populum, but to the cultivated few. A writer in the Quarterly Review, commenting upon Mr. Froude’s picture of the effect of the new edition on the people generally, is by no means unjust when he says, “Erasmus beyond all question would have been very much astonished by this account of the matter. Certain it is that during the Middle Ages the minds of the most popular preachers and teachers (and we might add of the laity too) were saturated with the sacred Scriptures.”[170]

Loud, however, was the outcry in many quarters against the rash author. His translations were glibly condemned, and it was pointed out as conclusive evidence of his heterodoxy that he had actually changed some words in the Our Father, and substituted the word congregatio for ecclesia.[171]

The year 1519 witnessed the most virulent and persistent attacks upon the good name of Erasmus. Of these, and the malicious reports being spread about him, he complains in numerous letters at this period. One Englishman in particular at this time, and subsequently, devoted all his energies to prove not only that Erasmus had falsified many of his translations, but that his whole spirit in undertaking the work was manifestly uncatholic. This was Edward Lee, then a comparatively unknown youth, but who was subsequently created Archbishop of York. In February 1519, Erasmus wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, complaining of these continued attacks upon his work, although so many learned men, including bishops, cardinals, and even the Pope Leo X. himself, had given their cordial approval to the undertaking. Those who were at the bottom of the movement against the work, he considered, were those who had not read it, though they still had no shame in crying out against it and its author. He was told that in some public discourses in England he had been blamed for translating the word verbum in St. John’s Gospel by sermo, and about this matter he addressed a letter to the Pope defending himself.[172] To the Bishop of Winchester he wrote more explicitly about his chief opponent. “By your love for me,” he says, “I beg you will not too readily credit those sycophants about me, for by their action all things seem to me at present infected by a deadly plague. If Edward Lee can prove that he knows better than I do, he will never offend me. But when he, by writing and speech, and by means of his followers, spreads rumours hurtful to my reputation, he is not even rightly consulting his own reputation. He has openly shown a hostile spirit against me, who never, either in word or deed, have done him harm. He is young, and lusts for fame.… Time will bring all to light. Truth may be obscured; overcome it cannot be.”[173] To the English king he writes that in all he had published he had been actuated by the sole desire to glorify Christ, and in this particular work had obtained the highest approval, even that of the Pope himself. Some people, indeed, have conspired to destroy his good name. They are so pleased with their “old wine,” that “Erasmus’s new” does not satisfy them. Edward Lee had been instigated to become their champion, and Erasmus only wished that Lee were not an Englishman, since he owed more to England than to any other nation, and did not like to think ill even of an individual.[174]

When men are thoroughly alarmed, they do not stop to reason or count the cost; and so those, who saw in the work of Erasmus nothing but danger to the Church, at once jumped to the conclusion that the root of the danger really lay in the classical revival itself, of which he was regarded as the chief exponent and apostle. The evil must be attacked in its cause, and the spread of the canker, which threatened to eat into the body of the Christian Church, stayed before it was too late. From the theologians of Louvain, with which university Erasmus was then connected, he experienced the earliest and most uncompromising opposition. He was “daily,” to use his own words, “pounded with stones,” and proclaimed a traitor to the Church.[175] His opponents did not stop to inquire into the truth of their charges too strictly, and Erasmus bitterly complains of the damaging reports that are being spread all over Europe concerning his good name and his loyalty to religion. To him all opposition came from “the monks,” who were, in his eyes, typical of antiquated ecclesiastical narrowness and bigotry. In a letter written in 1519, at the height of “the battle of the languages,” as it was called, he gives several instances of this attitude towards himself at Louvain when he suggested some alteration in a text of Holy Scripture. A preacher told the people that he had declared the Gospel “to be merely a collection of stupid fables,” and at Antwerp, a Carmelite attacked him in a sermon, at which he happened to be present, and denounced the appearance of his New Testament as a sign of the coming of Antichrist. On being asked afterwards for his reasons, he confessed that he had never even read the book himself. “This,” says Erasmus sadly, “I generally find to be the case: that none are more bitter in their outcry than they who do not read what I write.” In this same letter, Erasmus describes the ferment raised in England against the study of languages. At Cambridge, Greek was making progress in peace, “because the university was presided over by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a theologian of learning and uprightness of life.” At Oxford, however, fierce public attacks were made in sermons on Greek studies; “but the king,” continues Erasmus, “as one not unlearned himself, and most favourable to the cause of letters, happened to be in the neighbourhood, and hearing of the matter from More and Pace, ordered that all wishing to study Greek literature should be encouraged, and so put a stop to the business.”

The contest was not confined to the schools. “A theologian preaching in the royal palace before the king took this opportunity to inveigh boldly and uncompromisingly against Greek studies and the new methods of interpretation. Pace, who was present, glanced at the king to see how he took it, and Henry smiled at Pace. After the sermon the theologian was bidden to the king, and to More was assigned the task of defending Greek learning against him, the king himself desiring to be present at the discussion. After More had spoken for some time most happily, he paused to hear the theologian’s reply; but he, on bended knees, asked pardon for what he had said, asserting that whilst talking he was moved by some spirit to speak about Greek as he had done. Thereupon the king said, ‘And that spirit was not that of Christ, but of folly!’ Then Henry asked him whether he had read Erasmus’s works—he admitted that he had not. Then said the king, ‘By this you prove your folly, in condemning what you have not read.’ Finally the king dismissed him, and ordered that he should never be allowed to preach in the royal presence again.”

Those who desired to carry on the campaign to extremities, endeavoured, and even with temporary success, to influence Queen Katherine against Erasmus and the party for the revival of letters which he represented. Her confessor, a Dominican bishop, persuaded her that in correcting St. Jerome, Erasmus had perpetrated a crime which admitted of no excuse.[176] It was but another step to connect the renaissance of letters generally with the revolt now associated with the name of Luther. In England, however, it was not so easy to persuade people of this, since, among the chief supporters of the movement were to be numbered the best and wisest of churchmen and laymen whose entire orthodoxy was not open to suspicion. Abroad, however, the cry once started, was quickly taken up. A theologian at Louvain, writes Erasmus, who up to this time had been noted for his sober judgment, before a large audience, after having spoken of Lutheranism, attacked “the teaching of languages and polite letters, joining the two together, and asserting that heresy came from these springs, as if experience had shown eloquence to be a mark rather of the heretics than of the orthodox, or that the Latin authors of heresy were not mere children so far as languages went, or that Luther had been schooled by those masters and not rather by the scholastics, according to scholastic methods.”[177]

Erasmus puts the position even more clearly in a letter to Pope Leo X. on the publication of the revised version of his New Testament in August 1519. The book is now in people’s hands, he says, and as it has appeared under the direct auspices of the Holy Father himself, it may be regarded as his work. Some foolish people, he understands, have been trying to get the Pope to believe that a knowledge of languages is detrimental to the true study of theology, whereas, in reality, the very contrary is obviously the case. Such people will not reason, they cry out and will not listen. They suggest damning words, such words for example as “heretics,” “antichrists,” &c., as appropriate to their opponents. They call out that even the Christian religion is imperilled, and beg the Pope to come forward and save it. On his part Erasmus hopes that the Pope will believe that all his work is for Christ alone, and His Church. “This only reward do I desire, that I may ever seek the glory of Christ rather than my own. From boyhood I have ever endeavoured to write nothing that savoured of impiety or disloyalty. No one has ever yet been made blacker by my writings; no one less pious, no one stirred up to tumult.”[178] Again, writing to Cardinal Campeggio, when sending him a copy of the New Testament “which Pope Leo had approved by his Brief,” Erasmus tells him that, to his great regret, many at Louvain were doing their best not to allow good letters to flourish. As for himself, his only real desire was to serve Christ and increase the glory of His Church; though, he adds, “I am a man, and as such liable to err.” No one has ever succeeded in pleasing every one, and he, Erasmus, will not try to do the impossible. Still he wishes to be judged by what he really has said and written; whereas all kinds of things, letters, books, &c., are attributed to him, about which he knows nothing: “even Martin Luther’s work, amongst the rest,” whilst the truth is, he does not know Luther, and certainly has never read his book.[179]

At the end of the following year, 1520, Erasmus again writes to Cardinal Campeggio at great length. After telling him that he had hoped to have passed the winter in Rome to search in the libraries for Greek manuscripts, he informs him that in Louvain those who prefer the old barbarism are now rampant. Some think to please the people by opposition to learning, and amongst the aiders and abettors of the Lutheran movement they place Erasmus in the forefront. The Dominicans and Carmelites, he says, will regard him only as their enemy. Why, he does not know, for in reality he reverences true religion under “any coloured coat.” If on occasion he has said something about the vices of the monks, he does not think it were more right for the religious, as a body, to turn against him, than it would be for priests as a body, when their vices were spoken against. He does not in the least wish to be thought opposed to the religious life, as such. The condemnation of Luther had been interpreted by many as a condemnation of learning, and had been turned against Reuchlin and Erasmus. As for himself, he has never, he declares, even seen Luther, who has certainly never been famous for good letters or for any knowledge of ancient tongues, and hence the revival of letters has no connection whatever with the Lutheran movement. The prefaces of some of Luther’s books, because written in good Latin, are considered sufficient proof of his (Erasmus’s) connection with the matter, and it is asserted openly that he was working cordially with the Reformer; whereas, as a fact, he had not suggested even so much as a full stop or comma for his writings. He had, he admitted, written to Luther, and this and another letter to the Cardinal of Mentz were pointed to as proof positive of his Lutheran leanings. For these he has been denounced to bishops as a heretic and delated to the Pope himself, while all the time, in truth, he has never read two pages of Luther’s writings. Certainly, indeed, he recognised in Luther considerable power, but he was not by any means alone in doing so. Men of undoubted faith and uprightness had congratulated themselves on having fallen in with Luther’s works. For himself, he adds, “I have always preferred to look for the good rather than to search for the evil, and I have long thought that the world needed many changes.” Finally, before passing from the subject, he begs Cardinal Campeggio to look at the letter in question himself, and see whether it could justly be said to favour Luther in any way.[180]

To Pope Leo X. Erasmus also wrote, protesting against the cause of letters generally being made the same as that of Reuchlin and Luther. With the former movement he was identified heart and soul; with Luther and his revolt he had, he declared, no part nor sympathy. “I have not known Luther,” he says, “nor have I ever read his books, except perhaps ten or a dozen pages in various places. It was really I who first scented the danger of the business issuing in tumults, which I have always detested.” Moreover, he declares that he had induced the Basle printer, Johann Froben, to refuse to print Luther’s works, and that by means of friends he had tried to induce Luther to think only of the peace of the Church. Two years previously, he says, Luther had written to him, and he had replied in a kindly spirit in order to get him, if possible, to follow his advice. Now, he hears, that this letter has been delated to the Pope in order to prejudice him in the Pontiff’s eyes; but he is quite prepared to defend its form and expression. “If any one,” he says, “can say he has ever heard me, even at the table, maintain the teaching of Luther, I will not refuse to be called a Lutheran.” Finally, he expresses the hope that, if the opponents of letters have been trying to calumniate him, he may rely on the Pope’s prudence and the knowledge of his own complete innocence. “I, who do not wish to oppose even my own bishop, am not,” he writes, “so mad as to act in any way against the supreme Vicar of Christ.”[181]

As time went on, the position of Erasmus did not become more comfortable. Whilst the Lutherans were hoping that sooner or later something would happen to compromise the outspoken scholar and force him to transfer the weight of his learning to their side, the champions of Catholicity were ill satisfied that he did not boldly strike out in defence of the Church. To this latter course many of his English friends had strongly urged him, and both the king, Fisher, and others had set him an example by publishing works against Luther’s position, which they invited him to follow. The Pope, too, had on more than one occasion personally appealed to him to throw off his reserve and come to the aid of orthodoxy. They could not understand how he was able to talk of peace and kindness amidst the din of strife, and plead for less harsh measures and less bitter words against Luther and his adherents, when the battle was raging, and cities and peoples and even countries were being seduced by the German Reformer’s plausible plea for freedom and liberty. Those who believed in Erasmus’s orthodoxy, as did the Pope and his English friends, considered that no voice was more calculated to calm the storm and compel the German people to listen to reason than was his. Whilst the Reforming party, on the other hand, were doing their best to compromise him in the eyes of their opponents, Erasmus was most unwilling to be forced into action. “Why,” he writes, “do people wish to associate me with Luther? What Luther thinks of me, where it is a question of matters of faith, I care very little. That he doesn’t think much of me he shows in many letters to his friends. In his opinion I am ‘blind,’ ‘miserable,’ ‘ignorant of Christ and Christianity,’ ‘thinking of nothing but letters.’ This is just what I should expect,” he says, “for Luther has always despised the ancients.” As for himself, he (Erasmus) has always tried his best to inculcate true piety along with learning.[182]

To Œcolampadius, in February 1525, he wrote a letter of protest against the way some of Luther’s followers were doing all they could to associate his name with their movement. He does not wish, he says, to give his own opinion on the questions at issue; but he can tell his correspondent what the King of England, Bishop Fisher, and Cardinal Wolsey think on these grave matters. He objects to Œcolampadius putting Magnus Erasmus noster—“our great Erasmus”—in a preface he wrote, without any justification. “This naturally makes people suppose,” he adds, “that I am really on your side in these controversies,” and he begs that he will strike out the expression.[183]

This was no new position that Erasmus had taken up in view of the ever-increasing difficulties of the situation. Six years before (in 1519) he had written fully on the subject to the Cardinal Archbishop of Mentz. It was this letter which had been much misunderstood, and even denounced to the Pope as the work of a disloyal son of the Church. He, on the other hand, declared that he was not committed in any way to the cause of Reuchlin or Luther. “Luther is perfectly unknown to me, and his books I have not read, except here and there. If he had written well it would not have been to my credit; if then the opposite, no blame should attach to me. I regretted his public action, and when the first tract, I forget which, was talked about, I did all I could to prevent its being issued, especially as I feared that tumults would come out of all this. Luther had written me what appeared to my mind to be a very Christian letter, and, in replying, I, by the way, warned him not to write anything seditious, nor to abuse the Roman Pontiff, &c., but to preach the Gospel truly and humbly.” He adds that he was kind in his reply purposely, as he did not wish to be Luther’s judge. And, as he thought that there was much good in the man, he would willingly do all he could to keep him in the right way. People are too fond, he says, of crying out “heretic,” &c., and “the cry generally comes from those who have not read the works they exclaim against.”[184]

“I greatly fear,” he writes shortly after, “for this miserable Luther; so angry are his opponents on all sides, and so irritated against him are princes, and, above all, Pope Leo. Would that he had taken my advice and abstained from these hateful and seditious publications. There would have been more fruit and less rancour.”[185]

Testimonies might be multiplied almost indefinitely from Erasmus’s writings to show that with Lutheranism as such he had no connection nor sympathy. Yet his best friends seem to have doubted him, and some, in England, suspected that Erasmus’s hand and spirit were to be detected in the reply that Luther made to King Henry’s book against him. Bishop Tunstall confesses that he is relieved to hear by the letter Erasmus had addressed to the king and the legate that he had had nothing to do with this violent composition, and, moreover, that he was opposed to Lutheran principles. In his letter on this subject, the bishop laments the rapid spread of these dangerous opinions which threaten disturbances everywhere. When the sacred ceremonies of the Church and all pious customs are attacked as they are, he says, civil tumults are sure to follow. After Luther’s book De abroganda Missa, the Reformer will quickly go further, and so Tunstall begs and beseeches Erasmus, by “Christ’s Passion and glory” and “by the reward” he expects; “yea, and the Church itself prays and desires you,” he adds, “to engage in combat with this hydra.”[186]

At length, urged by so many of his best friends, Erasmus took up his pen against Luther and produced his book De libero Arbitrio, to which Luther, a past master in invective, replied in his contemptuous De servo Arbitrio, Erasmus rejoining in the Hyperaspistes. Sir Thomas More wrote that this last book delighted him, and urged Erasmus to further attacks. “I cannot say how foolish and inflated I think Luther’s letter to you,” he writes. “He knows well how the wretched glosses into which he has darkened Scripture turn to ice at your touch. They were, it is true, cold enough already.”[187]

Erasmus’s volume on Free-will drew down on him, as might be expected, the anger of the advanced Lutherans. Ulrich von Hutten, formerly a brilliant follower of Erasmus and Reuchlin in their attempts to secure a revival of letters, was now the leader of the most reckless and forward of the young German Lutherans, who assisted the Reformer by their violence and their readiness to promote any and all of his doctrinal changes by stirring up civil dissensions. Von Hutten endeavoured to throw discredit upon Erasmus by a brilliant and sarcastic attack upon it. In 1523, Erasmus published what he called the Spongia, or reply to the assertions of von Hutten on his honour and character. The tract is really an apology or explanation of his own position as regards the Lutherans, and an assertion of his complete loyalty to the Church. The book was in Froben’s hands for press in June 1523, but before it could appear in September von Hutten had died. Erasmus, however, determined to publish the work on account of the gravity of the issues. It is necessary, if we would understand Erasmus’s position fully, to refer to this work at some considerable length. After complaining most bitterly that many people had tried to defame him to the Pope and to his English friends, and to make him a Lutheran whether he would or no; and after defending his attitude towards Reuchlin as consistent throughout, he meets directly von Hutten’s assertion that he had condemned the whole Dominican body. “I have never,” he says, “been ill disposed to that Order. I have never been so foolish as to wish ill to any Order. If it were necessary to hate all Dominicans because, in the Order, there were some bad members, on the same ground it would be needful to detest all Orders, since in every one there are many black sheep.” On the same principle Christianity itself would be worthy of hatred.[188] The fact really is that the Dominicans have many members who are friendly to Erasmus, and who are favourable to learning in general, and Scripture study and criticism in particular.

In the same way, von Hutten had mistaken Erasmus’s whole attitude towards the Roman Church. He had charged him with being inconsistent, in now praising, now blaming the authorities. Erasmus characterises this as the height of impudence. “Who,” he asks, “has ever approved of the vices of the Roman authorities? But, on the other hand, who has ever condemned the Roman Church?”

Continuing, he declares that he has never been the occasion of discord or tumult in any way, and appeals with confidence to his numerous letters and works as sufficient evidence of his love of peace. “I love liberty,” he writes; “I neither can aid, nor desire to aid, any faction.” Already many confess that they were wrong in taking a part; and he sees many, who had thrown in their lot with Luther, now drawing back, and regretting that they had ever given any countenance to him.[189] His (Erasmus’s) sole object has been to promote good letters, and to restore Theology to its simple and true basis, the Holy Scripture. This he will endeavour to do as long as he has life. “Luther,” he says, “I hold to be a man liable to err, and one who has erred. Luther, with the rest of his followers will pass away; Christ alone remains for ever.”

In more than one place of this Spongia, Erasmus complains bitterly that what he had said in joke, and as mere pleasantry at the table, had been taken seriously. “What is said over a glass of wine,” he writes, “ought not to be remembered and written down as a serious statement of belief. Often at a feast, for example, we have transferred the worldly sovereignty to Pope Julius, and made Maximilian, the emperor, into the supreme Pontiff. Thus, too, we have married monasteries of monks to convents of nuns; we have sent armies of them against the Turks, and colonised new islands with them. In a word, we turn the universe topsy-turvy. But, such whims are never meant to be taken seriously, as our own true convictions.”

Von Hutten had complained that Erasmus had spoken harshly about Luther, and hinted that he was really actuated by a spirit of envy, on seeing Luther’s books more read than his own. Erasmus denies that he has ever called Luther by any harsh names, and particularly that he has ever called him “heretic.” He admits, however, that he had frequently spoken of the movement as a “tragedy,” and he points to the public discords and tumults then distracting Germany as the best justification of this verdict.[190]

Von Hutten having said that children were being taught by their nurses to lisp the name Luther, Erasmus declares that he cannot imagine whose children these can be; for, he says, “I daily see how many influential, learned, grave, and good men have come to curse his very name.”

The most interesting portion, however, of the Spongia is that in which, at considerable length, Erasmus explains his real attitude to Rome and the Pope. “Not even about the Roman See,” he says, “will I admit that I have ever spoken inconsistently. I have never approved of its tyranny, rapacity, and other vices about which of old common complaints were heard from good men. Neither do I sweepingly condemn ‘Indulgences,’ though I have always disliked any barefaced traffic in them. What I think about ceremonies, many places in my works plainly show.… What it may mean ‘to reduce the Pope to order’ I do not rightly understand. First, I think it must be allowed that Rome is a Church, for no number of evils can make it cease to be a Church, otherwise we should have no Churches whatever. Moreover, I hold it to be an orthodox Church; and this Church, it must be admitted, has a Bishop. Let him be allowed also to be Metropolitan, seeing there are very many archbishops in countries where there has been no apostle, and Rome, without controversy, had certainly SS. Peter and Paul, the two chief apostles. Then how is it absurd that among Metropolitans the chief place be granted to the Roman Pontiff?”[191]

As to the rest, Erasmus had never, he declares, defended the excessive powers which for many years the popes have usurped, and, like all men, he wishes for a thorough apostolic man for Pope. For his part, if the Pope were not above all things else an apostle, he would have him deposed as well as any other bishop, who did not fulfil the office of his state. For many years, no doubt, the chief evils of the world have come from Rome, but now, as he believes, the world has a Pope who will try at all costs to purify the See and Curia of Rome. This, however, Erasmus fancies is not quite what von Hutten desires. He would declare war against the Pope and his adherents, even were the Pope a good Pope, and his followers good Christians. War is what von Hutten wants, and he cares not whether it brings destruction to cities and peoples and countries.

Erasmus admits that he knows many people who are ready to go some way in the Lutheran direction; but who would strongly object to the overthrow of papal authority. Many would rather feel that they have a father than a tyrant: who would like to see the tables of the money-changers in the temple overthrown, and the barefaced granting of indulgences and trafficking in dispensations and papal bulls repressed: who would not object to have ceremonies simplified, and solid piety inculcated: who would like to insist on the sacred Scriptures as the true and only basis of authoritative teaching, and would not give to scholastic conclusions and the mere opinions of schools the force of an infallible oracle. With those who think thus, says Erasmus, “if (as is the case) there is no compact on my part, certainly my old friendly feeling for them remains cemented by the bond of learning, even if I do not agree with them in all these things.”

But, he continues, it is not among these well-wishers of reform that von Hutten and Luther will find their support. This is to be found among the “unlettered people without any judgment; among those who are impure in their own lives, and detractors of men; amongst those who are headstrong and ungovernable. These are they who are so favourable to Luther’s cause that they neither know nor care to examine what Luther teaches. They only have the Gospel on their lips; they neglect prayer and the Sacraments; they eat what they like; and they live to curse the Roman Pontiff. These are the Lutherans.” From such material spring forth tumults that cannot be put down. “It is generally in their cups,” adds Erasmus, “that the Evangelical league is recruited.” They are too stupid to see whither they are drifting, and “with such a type of mankind I have no wish to have anything to do.” Some make the Gospel but the pretext for theft and rapine; and “there are some who, having squandered or lost all their own property, pretend to be Lutherans in order to be able to help themselves to the wealth of others.” Von Hutten wants me, says Erasmus, to come to them. “To whom? To those who are good and actuated by the true Gospel teaching? I would willingly fly to them if any one will point them out. If he knew of any Lutherans, who in place of wine, prostitutes, and dice, have at any time delighted in holy reading and conversation; of any who never cheat or neglect to pay their debts, but are ready to give to the needy; of any who look on injuries done to them as favours, who bless those who curse them—if he can show me such people, he may count on me as an associate. Lutherans, I see; but followers of the Gospel, I can discover few or none.”

Von Hutten had, in his attack, with much bitterness condemned Erasmus for not renouncing connection with those who had written strongly against Luther. Erasmus refused to entertain the notion. “There is,” he says, “the reverend Father John, Bishop of Rochester. He has written a big volume against Luther. For a long period that man has been my very special friend and most constant patron. Does von Hutten seriously want me to break with him, because he has sharpened his pen in writing against Luther? Long before Luther was thought of,” he says, “I enjoyed the friendship of many learned men. Of these, some in later years took Luther’s side, but on that account I have not renounced outwardly my friendship for them. Some of these have changed their views and now do not think much of Luther, still I do not cease to regard them as my friends.”

Towards the close of his reply, Erasmus returns to the question of the Pope. Von Hutten had charged him with inconsistency in his views, and Erasmus replies, “He who most desires to see the apostolic character manifested in the Pope is most in his favour.” It may be that one can hate the individual and approve of the office. Whoever is favourable to, and defends, bad Popes does not honour the office. He (Erasmus) has been found fault with for saying that the authority of the Pope has been followed by the Christian world for very many ages. What he wrote is true, and as long as the work of Christ is done may it be followed for ever. Luther wants people to take his ipse dixit and authority, but he (Erasmus) would prefer to take that of the Pope. “Even if the supremacy of the Pope was not established by Christ, still it would be expedient that there should be one ruler possessing full authority over others, but which authority no doubt should be free from all idea of tyranny.… Because I have criticised certain points in the See of Rome, I have not for that reason ever departed from it. Who would not uphold the dignity of one who, by manifesting the virtues of the Gospel, represents Christ to us?” The paradoxes of Luther are not worth dying for. “There is no question of articles of faith, but of such matters as ‘Whether the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff was established by Christ:’ ‘whether cardinals are necessary to the Christian Church:’ ‘whether confession is de jure divino:’ ‘whether bishops can make their laws binding under pain of mortal sin:’ ‘whether free will is necessary for salvation:’ ‘whether faith alone assures salvation,’ &c. If Christ gave him grace,” Erasmus hopes that “he would be a martyr for His truth, but he has no desire whatever to be one for Luther.”

This last point was immediately taken up by the Lutherans. Von Hutten, as it has already been said, had died before the publication of the Spongia, and the reply to Erasmus was undertaken by Otto Brunfels. He rejected Erasmus’s suggestion that nearly all that the Lutherans were fighting for were matters of opinion. They were matters of faith, he says, and no uncertainty could be admitted on this point. In order to make the matter clear, he enumerates a great number of tenets of Lutheranism which they hold to as matters of revealed certainty. For instance: that Christ is the only head of the Church; that the Church has no corporate existence; that the mass is no sacrifice; that justification comes by faith alone; that our works are sins and cannot justify; that good men cannot sin; that there are only two Sacraments; that the Pope’s traditions are heretical and against Scripture; that the religious state is from the devil; and several score more of similar points more or less important.

That Erasmus’s views upon the necessity of the Papacy expressed in the Spongia were not inconsistent with his previous position there is ample evidence in his letters, to which he himself appeals. Replying, for example, to one who had written to him deploring the religious differences in Bohemia, Erasmus declares that, in his opinion, it is needful for unity that there should be one head. If the prince is tyrannical, he should be reduced to order by the teaching and authority of the Roman Pontiff. If the bishop play the tyrant, there is still the authority of the Roman Pontiff, who is the dispenser of the authority and the Vicar of Christ. He may not please all, but who that really rules can expect to do that? “In my opinion,” he adds, “those who reject the Pope are more in error than they who demand the Eucharist under two kinds.” Personally, he would have allowed this, although he thinks that, as most Christians have now the other custom, those who demand it as a necessity are unreasonable and to be greatly blamed. Above all others, he reprobates the position of those who refuse to obey, speak of the Pope as Antichrist, and the Roman Church as a “harlot” because there have been bad Popes. There have been bad cardinals and bishops, bad priests and princes, and on this ground we ought not to obey bishop or pastor or king or ruler.[192] In the same letter he rebukes those who desire to sweep away vestments and ceremonies on the plea that they may not have been used in apostolic times.

Later on, in another letter, he complained that people call him a favourer of Luther. This is quite untrue. “I would prefer,” he says, “to have Luther corrected rather than destroyed; then I should prefer that it should be done without any great social tumults. Christ I acknowledge; Luther I know not. I acknowledge the Roman Church, which, in my opinion, is Catholic. I praise those who are on the side of the Roman Pontiff, who is supported by every good man.”[193]

Again, the following year, writing on the subject of the invocation of Papal authority against Luther, he says: “I do not question the origin of that authority, which is most certainly just, as in ancient times from among many priests equal in office one was chosen as the bishop; so now from the bishops it is necessary to make choice of one Pontiff, not merely to prevent discords, but to temper the tyrannical exercise of authority on the part of the other bishops and secular princes.”[194]

The publication of Erasmus’s book against Luther and of his reply to von Hutten made little change, however, in the adverse feeling manifested against him by those who were most busily engaged in combating the spread of Lutheran opinions. As he wrote to King Henry VIII., the noisy tumults and discords made him long for the end of life, when he might hope at least to find peace.[195] Luckily for him, he still retained the confidence of the Pope and some of the best churchmen in Europe. Had he not done so, the very violence of the attack against his good name might have driven him out of the Church in spite of himself. Kind words, he more than once said, would have done more for the cause of peace in the Church than all the biting sarcasm and unmeasured invective that was launched against Luther, and those who, like Erasmus, either were, or were supposed to be, associated with his cause. Luther was not delicate about the choice of his language when he had an enemy to pelt, but some of the preachers and pamphlet writers on the orthodox side were his match in this respect. In this way Erasmus puts the responsibility for “the tragedy” of Lutheranism upon the theologians, and in part especially upon the Dominicans and Carmelites. “Ass,” “pig,” “sow,” “heretic,” “antichrist,” and “pest of the world,” are terms named by Erasmus as samples of the epithets launched from the pulpit, or more deliberately set up in type, as arguments against Luther and himself.[196]

In writing to one of the cardinals after the publication of his Spongia, there is a touch of sadness in his complaints, that having been forced to do battle with the “Lutherans as against a hydra of many heads,” Catholics should still try and make the world believe that he was really a Lutheran at heart. “I have never,” he declares, “doubted about the sovereignty of the Pope, but whether this supremacy was recognised in the time of St. Jerome, I have my doubts, on account of certain passages I have noted in my edition of St. Jerome. In the same place, however, I have marked what would appear to make for the contrary opinion; and in numerous other places I call Peter ‘Prince of the apostolic order,’ and the Roman Pontiff, Christ’s Vicar and the Head of His Church, giving him the highest power according to Christ.”[197]

Probably a more correct view of Erasmus’s real mind can hardly be obtained than in part of a letter already quoted (Ep. 501) addressed to Bishop Marlianus of Tuy in Galicia, on March 25, 1520. “I would have the Church,” he writes, “purified, lest the good in it suffer by conjunction with the evil. In avoiding the Scylla of Luther, however, I would have care taken to avoid Charybdis. If this be sin, then I own my guilt. I have sought to save the dignity of the Roman Pontiff, the honour of Catholic theology, and to look to the welfare of Christendom. I have, as yet, read no whole work of Luther, however short, and I have never even in jest defended his paradoxes. Be assured that if any movement is set on foot which is injurious to the Christian religion and dangerous to the public peace or the supremacy of the Holy See, it does not proceed from Erasmus.… In all I have written, I have not deviated one hair’s-breadth from the teaching of the Church. But every wise man knows that practices and teachings have been introduced into the Church partly by custom, partly by the canonists, partly by means of scholastic definitions, partly by the tricks and arts of secular sovereigns, which have no sound sanction. Many great people have begged me to support Luther, but I have ever replied that I would be ready to take his part when he was on the Catholic side. They have asked me to draw up a formula of faith; I have said that I know of none save the creed of the Catholic Church, and every one who consults me I urge to submit to the authority of the Pope.”[198]

In many ways Erasmus regarded the rise of Lutheranism as the greatest misfortune. Not only did it tend to make good men suspicious of the general revival of letters, with which without reason they associated it, but the necessity of defending the Catholic position against the assaults of the new sectaries naturally obscured the need of reform within the Church itself, for which far-seeing and good men had long been looking. To Bishop Tunstall he expressed his fears lest in pulling up the tares, some, and perchance much, of the precious wheat might perish. Whilst, undoubtedly, there was in Luther’s work a great deal that he cordially detested, there was also much that would never have been condemned, had the points been calmly considered by learned men, apart from the ferment of revolt. “This, however, I promise you,” he adds, “that for my part I will never forsake the Church.”[199]

This same sentiment he repeats the following year, 1526: “From the judgment of the Church I am not able to dissent, nor have I ever dissented.”[200] Had this tempest not risen up, he said, in another letter from Basle, he had hoped to have lived long enough to have seen a general revival of letters and theology returning more and more to the foundation of all true divinity, Holy Scripture. For his part, he cordially disliked controversy, and especially the discussion of such questions as “whether the Council was above the Pope,” and such like. He held that he was himself in all things a sound Catholic, and at peace with the Pope and his bishop, whilst no name was more hated by the Lutherans than that of Erasmus.[201]

So much with regard to the attitude of mind manifested by Erasmus towards the authority of the teaching Church, which is the main point of interest in the present inquiry. His disposition will probably be construed by some into a critical opposition to much that was taught and practised; but it seems certain that Erasmus did not so regard his own position. He was a reformer in the best sense, as so many far-seeing and spiritual-minded churchmen of those days were. He desired to better and beautify and perfect the system he found in vogue, and he had the courage of his convictions to point out what he thought stood in need of change and improvement, but he was no iconoclast; he had no desire to pull down or root up or destroy under the plea of improvement. That he remained to the last the friend of Popes and bishops and other orthodox churchmen, is the best evidence, over and above his own words, that his real sentiments were not misunderstood by men who had the interests of the Church at heart, and who looked upon him as true and loyal, if perhaps a somewhat eccentric and caustic son of Holy Church. Even in his last sickness he received from the Pope proof of his esteem, for he was given a benefice of considerable value, and it was hinted to him that another honour, as was commonly supposed at the time nothing less than the sacred purple, was in store for him.

Most people are of course chiefly interested in the determination of Erasmus’s general attitude to the great religious movement of the age. In this place, however, one or two minor points in his literary history can hardly be passed over in silence. His attitude to the monks and the religious Orders generally, was one of acknowledged hostility, although there are passages in his writings, some of which have been already quoted, which seem to show that this hostility was neither so sweeping nor so deeply rooted as is generally thought. Still, it may be admitted that he has few good words for the religious Orders, and he certainly brings many and even grave accusations against their good name. There is little doubt, however, that much he had to say on the subject was, as he himself tells us, said to emphasise abuses that existed, and was not intended to be taken as any wholesale sweeping condemnation of the system of regular life. Very frequently the Enconium MoriÆ has been named as the work in which Erasmus hits the monks the hardest. Those who so regard it can hardly have read it with attention, and most certainly they fail to appreciate its spirit. It was composed, as we have seen, at Sir Thomas More’s suggestion, and in his house at Chelsea in 1512, on Erasmus’s return from Italy. It is a satire on the ecclesiastical manners and customs in which all abuses in turn come in for their share of sarcastic condemnation; superstitions of people as to particular days and images, superstitions about “magic prayers and charmlike rosaries,” as to saints set to this or that office, to cure the toothache, to discover stolen goods, &c., in the first place came under the lash of Erasmus’s sarcasm. Then come, in turn, doctors of divinity and theologians, “a nest of men so crabbed and morose” that he has half a mind, he says, to leave them severely alone, “lest perchance they should all at once fall upon me with six hundred conclusions, driving me to recant.” They are high and mighty and look down on other men, thinking of common individuals as “silly men like worms creeping on the ground,” and startling ordinary folk by the variety of their unpractical discussions and questions. “Nowadays,” he says, “not baptism, nor the Gospel, nor Paul, nor Peter, nor Jerome, nor Augustine, nor yet Thomas Aquinas, are able to make men Christians, unless those Father Bachelors in divinity are pleased to subscribe to the same. They require us to address them as Magister noster in the biggest of letters.”

Following upon this treatment of the scholastic theologians come the few pages devoted to monks, those “whose trade and observance were surely most miserable and abject, unless I (Folly) did many ways assist them.” They are so ignorant (at least so says Folly), that they can hardly read their own names. Erasmus makes merry over the office they chant, and the begging practised by the friars, and jeers amusingly at their style of dressing, at their mode of cutting their hair, and at their sleeping and working by rule. “Yea,” he says, “some of them being of a straightened rule are such sore punishers of their flesh, as outwardly they wear nought but sackcloth and inwardly no better than fine holland.” In a word, he laughs at the general observance of regular life, and in one place only passes a hint that some of their lives are not so saintly as they pretend. As a whole, however, the sarcasm is not so bitter as that addressed to other ecclesiastics, and even to the Pope himself. In view of Sir Thomas More’s subsequent explanation about the spirit of the Enconium MoriÆ, there can be no doubt that it was intended mainly as a playful, if somewhat ill-judged and severe, lampoon on some patent abuses, and in no sense an attack upon the ecclesiastical system of the Catholic Church.[202]

One other misunderstanding about Erasmus’s position in regard to the revival of letters may be here noticed. The great scholar has been regarded as the incarnation of the spirit of practical paganism, which, unfortunately, was quickly the outcome of the movement in Italy, and which at this time gave so much colour and point to the denunciations of those of the opposite school. No view can be more unjust to Erasmus. Though he longed anxiously for the clergy to awake to a sense of the importance of studies in general, of classical and scriptural studies in particular, there was no one who saw more clearly the danger and absurdity of carrying the classical revivalist spirit to extremes. In fact, in his Ciceroniana, he expressly ridicules what he has seen in Rome of the classical spirit run mad. Those afflicted by it, he says, try to think that old Rome has returned. They speak of the “Senate,” the “conscript fathers,” the “plebs,” the “chief auger,” and the “college of soothsayers,” “Pontifices Maximi,” “Vestals,” “triumphs,” &c. Nothing can be more unlike the true Ciceronian spirit. Am I, he asks, as a Christian speaking to Christians about the Christian religion to try and suppose I am living in the age of Cicero, and speak as if I were addressing a meeting of the conscript fathers on the Capitol? Am I to pick my words, choose my figures and illustrations from Cicero’s speeches to the Senate? How can Cicero’s eloquence help me to speak to a mixed audience of virgins, wives, and widows in praise of fasting, penance, prayer, almsgiving, the sanctity of marriage, the contempt of the fleeting pleasures of this world, or of the study of Holy Scripture. No, a Christian orator dressed in Cicero’s clothes is ridiculous.[203]

As an illustration of the height of absurdity to which the madness of the classical craze had brought people in Rome in his day, Erasmus relates the story of a sermon he himself once heard in the Eternal City during the pontificate of Pope Julius II. “I had been invited,” he says, “a few days before, by some learned men to be present at this sermon (to be preached on Good Friday). ‘Take care not to miss it,’ they said, ‘for you will at last be enabled to appreciate the tone of the Roman language, spoken by a Roman mouth.’ Hence, with great curiosity, I went to the church, procuring a place near the orator so as not to miss even one word. Julius II. was himself present, a very unusual thing, probably on account of his health. And there were also there many cardinals and bishops, and in the crowd most of the men of letters who were then in Rome.

“The exordium and peroration were nearly as long as the rest of the discourse, and they all rang the changes of praise of Julius II. He called him the almighty Jove, and pictured him as brandishing the trident, casting his thunderbolts with his right hand, and accomplishing all he willed by the mere nod of his head. All that had taken place of late years in Gaul, Germany, Spain, &c., were but the efforts of his simple will. Then came a hundred times repeated, such words as ‘Rome,’ ‘Romans,’ ‘Roman mouth,’ ‘Roman eloquence,’ &c.” But what, asks Erasmus, were all these to Julius, bishop of the Christian religion, Christ’s vicegerent, successor of Peter and Paul? What are these to cardinals and bishops who are in the places of the other apostles?

“The orator’s design,” he continues, “was to represent to us Jesus Christ, at first in the agony of His Passion, and then in the glory of His triumph. To do this, he recalled the memory of Curtius and Decius, who had given themselves to the gods for the salvation of the Republic. He reminded us of Cecrops, of Menelaus, of Iphigenia, and of other noble victims who had valued their lives less than the honour and welfare of their country. Public gratitude (he continued, in tears and in most lugubrious tones) had always surrounded these noble and generous characters with its homage, sometimes raising gilded statues to their memory in the forum; sometimes decreeing them even divine honours, whilst Jesus Christ, for all His benefits, had received no other reward but death. The orator then went on to compare our Saviour, who had deserved so well of His country, to Phocion and to Socrates, who were compelled to drink hemlock though accused of no crime; to Epaminondas, driven to defend himself against envy roused by his noble deeds; to Scipio and to Aristides, whom the Athenians were tired of hearing called the ‘Just one,’ &c.

“I ask, can anything be imagined colder and more inept? Yet, over all his efforts, the preacher sweated blood and water to rival Cicero. In brief, my Roman preacher spoke Roman so well that I heard nothing about the death of Christ.[204] If Cicero had lived in our days,” asks Erasmus, “would he not think the name of God the Father as elegant as Jupiter the almighty? Would he think it less elegant to speak of Jesus Christ than of Romulus, or of Scipio Africanus, of Quintus Curtius, or of Marcus Decius? Would he think the name of the Catholic Church less illustrious than that of ‘Conscript Fathers,’ ‘Quirites,’ or ‘Senate and people of Rome’? He would speak to us of faith in Christ, of the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Trinity?” &c.[205]

At considerable length Erasmus pours out the vials of his scorn upon those who act so foolishly under the influence of the false classical spirit. He points out the danger to be avoided. People, he says, go into raptures over pagan antiquities, and laugh at others who are enthusiastic about Christian archÆology. “We kiss, venerate, almost adore a piece of antiquity,” he says, “and mock at relics of the Apostles. If any one finds something from the twelve tables, who does not consider it worthy of the most holy place? And the laws written by the finger of God, who venerates, who kisses them? How delighted we are with a medal stamped with the head of Hercules, or of Mercury, or of Fortune, or of Victory, or of Alexander the Great, or one of the CÆsars,[206] and we deride those who treasure the wood of the cross or images of the Virgin and saints as superstitious.”[207] If in dealing with his subject Erasmus may appear to exaggerate the evil he condemns, this much is clear, that his advocacy of letters and learning, however strenuous and enthusiastic, was tempered by a sense of the paramount importance of the Christian spirit in the pursuit of science.