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A letter from Erasmus to Laurentius, Dean of St. Donatian at Bruges, fell in his way. In this letter Erasmus endeavoured still to maintain his stately neutrality, disclaimed all connexion with Luther, did honour to Luther's merits, to the truth of much of his censures, and to his services to true religion, but reproved his vehemence and violence; and at the same time he protested against being enrolled among the adversaries of reform. This letter contained a hasty, and not quite accurate account of Hutten's visit to Basil. The busy Eppendorf rode to and fro between Basil and Mulhausen, and was not the mediator to conciliate men irreconcilably opposed in views and temper. The conclusion, the melancholy conclusion, was the Expostu lation' of Hutten, in which in fury of invective, in bitterness of satire, in the mastery of vituperative Latin, Hutten outdid himself only, perhaps, to be outdone in all these qualities by the Sponge' of Erasmus. Luther himself stood aghast, and expressed his grave and sober condemnation of both.*

This unseemly altercation was not likely to maintain Erasmus in his dignified position of neutrality; it rendered his mediation next to impossible, if it had ever been possible to stem or to quiet two such furious conflicting currents. But worse trials followed; worse times came darkening over the man of books, the man of peace. The peasant war broke out, desolating Southern Germany with atrocities, only surpassed, and far surpassed, by the atroci ties perpetrated in their suppression. The Peasant insurrections were not religious wars; they were but the last, the most terrible in a long succession of such insurrections, to which the down-trodden cultivators of the soil had, from time to time, been goaded by the intolerable oppressions of their feudal lords. Luther denounced them with all his vehement energy. Luther held, according to his views of Scripture, the tenet of absolute submission to the higher powers in all temporal concerns. Some of the most abject of the English clergy under the Stuarts might have found quotations from the writings of Luther to justify the extremest doctrines of passive obedience. Still, with the desperate struggles for social freedom were now unavoid

He writes in a lighter tone, Equidum Huttenum nollum expostulasse, multo minus Erasmnum extersisse.-Epist. ad Hausman; De Wette, ii. 411. † A.D. 1523. In one of the letters of Erasmus it is said that 100,000 human beings had perished in these wars. See Epist. 803. See also Luther's letters; De Wette, iii. 22.

*

ably mingled aspirations after religious freedom. Among the articles exhibited by the insurgents was a demand for the free choice of their religious pastors.* Some of the Reformed Clergy were among the fautors, some perhaps more deeply concerned in the revolt; many more were the victims of the blind, savage indiscriminating massacre which crushed the rebellion. How to the quiet Erasmus might seem to be accomplished his gloomy and fearful forebodings, that the tenets of Luther, breaking loose from authority, must lead to civil tumults! The Peasant wars had not ended, or hardly ended, when the Anabaptists,f the first Anabaptists, arose, threw off at once all civil and religious obedience, with a fanaticism which had all the excesses, the follies, the cruelties, the tyranny of popular insurrection, without any of the grandeur, the noble self-sacrifice, the patriotic heroism of a strife for freedom. The voice of Luther was heard louder and louder, protesting, denouncing the monstrous wickedness, the monstrous impiety, the monstrous madness of these wild zealots; he repudiated them in the name of Christian faith and Christian morals, and called on all rulers and magistrates to put down with the severest measures, as they did without remorse, those common enemies of Christ and of mankind. Still these frantic excesses, notwithstanding this just and iterated disclaimer, could not but have some baneful effect on the progress of religious freedom; they affrighted the frightened, raised a howl of triumph from the extreme bigots, and, on those who, like Erasmus, loved peace above all things, seemed to enforce the wisdom of their cautious and prophetic timidity

During all this time every influence, every kind of persuasion, was used to induce Erasmus to take the part of the established order of things-flatteries, promises, splendid offers, gifts; prelates, princes, kings, the Pope himself condescended to urge, to excite, almost to implore. Would the most learned man in Christendom stand aloof in sullen dignity? would he whose voice alone could allay the tumult, maintain a cold and suspicious silence? Would he who had received such homage, such favours, such presents, persist in ungrateful disregard for the cause of Order? Would the lover of peace do nothing to promote peace? His silence

*See Sartorius. Bauern Krieg, Berlin, 1795.

The great outburst of Anabaptism under John of Leyden was later, 1529.

*

would be more than suspicious; it would justify the worst charges that could be made against him; irrefragably prove his latent heresies, and show the just sagacity of his most violent adversaries, according to whom Luther had but hatched the egg which Erasmus had laid. Erasmus protested, but protested in vain, that he might have laid an egg, but that Luther had hatched a very different brood. From both sides came at once the most adulatory invitations and the most bitter reproaches. The extreme Reformers taunted him as a cowardly apostate, the Romanists as a cowardly hypocrite. Neither party would believe that a man might with reason condemn both. There was no longer an inch of ground on which the moderate could be permitted to take his stand. Even now it is thought almost impossible that a wise, sincere, and devout Christian may deprecate the excesses of both parties in this great controversy, and strive to render impartial justice to the virtues as well of Luther and of some of his adversaries; still less of those who hovered, in their time, in the midway over the terrible conflict. Erasmus, too, suffered one of the inevitable penalties of wit: his sharp say ings were caught up, and ran like wildfire through the world-such sayings as are not only galling for the time, but are ineffaceable, and rankle unforgotten and unforgiven in the depth of the heart. In his interview with the Elector of Saxony he threw out carelessly the fatal truth-after all, Luther's worst crime is, that he attacked the crown of the Pope and the belly of the Monks. At a later period, after Luther's marriage, he gave as deep offence to the Reformers-So the Tragedy has ended like a Comedy, in a wedding t

It is doubtless right, it is noble, it is Christian to lay down life for faith; but it was hard upon Erasmus to be called upon to hazard his comfort, his peace, even his life, for what he did not believe. That the Monks would have burned him, who doubts? he expresses once and again fear of the more fanatic Lutherans. Is it absolutely necessary, is it the undeniable duty of every Christian man, not only to have made up his mind on the essential

Romæ quidem me faciunt Lutheranum, in Germania sum Anti-Lutheranissimus, nec in quenquam magis fremunt quam in me, cui uni improbant, quod non triumphant.-Epist. 667. See, among many other passages, Epist. 824, 6.

Erasmus was on the whole favourable to the marriage of the clergy.-Epist. 725.

Epist. 586, 657. In 660, 715, 718, he says no printer dares to print a word against Luther.

truths of the faith, but on all the lesser and subsidiary truths, especially in a period. of transition? That religious truths are revealed with different degrees of clearness, revealed differently perhaps to different minds, who can question? The theory of Erasmus (and who shall persuade us that Erasmus was not a sincere Christian ?) rested in a simpler faith (he would have been contented, as Jeremy Taylor after him, with the Apostles' creed), observances far less onerous and Judaical, superstitions cast aside, the Scriptures opened to the people, above all, more pure, more peaceful lives, which would have given time and tranquillity for the cultivation of letters. Some subjects, as the Eucharist, he had not profoundly investigated. On the supremacy of the Pope, on what is called the Consent of the Church, he acquiesced in the common opinions: how long was it that Luther had emancipated himself from the universal creed? But on this point all were agreed, who were agreed on nothing else, that Erasmus must take his line; set his hand to the plough in one furrow or the other, and never look back. He was paying a fearful penalty for his fame.

Slowly, with much hesitation, Erasmus screwed up his courage to the point of entering the arena. He was himself conscious of his own unfitness for such a conflict, embarrassed by his own former career, even by his hard-won fame. He had managed the defensive arms of controversy with skill-resentment at personal injuries had given dexterity to his hand; nor was he sparing, as his strife with Lee, with Stunica, with Egmont, and with Hutten, will show, in merciless recrimination. So important a resolution could not but transpire. Luther addressed a letter to him, a noble letter, with too much of that supercilious assumption of the exclusive and incontestable possession of Christian truthwithout which he had not been Luther, nor had the Reformation changed the world-but in all other respects calm, dignified, Christian, not deigning to avert his assault, nor defying it with disdainful indifference :

'Grace and peace from our Lord Jesus Christ. I have been long silent, most excellent Erasmus, and although I expected that you would first have broken silence, as I have expected so long, charity itself impels me to begin. I shall not complain of you for having behaved yourself as a man estranged from us, to keep fair with the papists, my enemies. Nor did I take it very ill, that in your printed books, to gain their favour or mitigate their fury, you censured us

with too much acrimony. We saw that the Lord had not bestowed on you the courage and the resolution to join with us freely and confidently in opposing those monsters, nor would we exact from you that which surpasses your strength and your capacity. We have eveu borne with your weakness, and honoured the measure which God has given you; for the whole world cannot deny the magnificent and noble gifts of God in you, for which we should all give thanks, that through you letters flourish and reign, and we are enabled to read the Holy Scriptures in their purity. I never wished that, forsaking or neglecting your own measure of grace, you should enter into our camp. You might have aided us much by your wit and by your eloquence, but since you have not the disposition and courage for this, we would have you serve God in your own way. Only we feared lest our adversaries should entice you to write against us, and that necessity should compel us to oppose you to the face. We have held back some amongst us, who were disposed and prepared to attack you; and I could have wished that the "Complaint" of Hutten had never been published, and still more that your "Sponge" in answer to it had never appeared, from which you may see and feel at present, if I mistake not, how easy it is to say fine things about the duty of modesty and moderation, and to accuse Luther of wanting them, and how difficult and even impossible it is to be really modest and moderate, without a special gift of the Holy Spirit. Believe me, or believe me not, Christ is my witness, that from my very heart I condole with you, that the hatred and the zeal of so many eminent persons has been excited against you, a trial too great for mere human virtue like yours. To speak freely, there are amongst us who, having this weaknes about them, cannot endure your bitterness and dissimulation, which you wish should pass for prudence and moderation. They have just cause for resentment, and yet would not feel resent ment if they had more greatness of mind. I also am irascible, and when irritated have written with bitterness, yet never but against the obstinate and hardened. My conscience bears me witness, the experience of many bears witness, I believe, to my clemency and mildness towards many sinners and many impious men, however frantic and iniquitous. So far have I restrained myself towards you, though you have provoked me, and I promised, in letters to my friends, still to restrain myself, unless you should come forward openly against us. For although you think not with us, and many pious doctrines are condemned by you through irreligion or dissimulation, or from a sceptical turn, yet I neither can nor will ascribe stubborn perverseness to you. What can I do now? Things are exasperated on both sides: I could wish if it were possible to act as mediator between you, and that they would cease to assail you with such animosity, and suffer your old age to sleep in peace in the Lord; and thus they would act according to my judgment, if they either considered your weakness or the greatness of the cause, which has so long been beyond your capacity; more especially, since our affairs are so advanced, that our cause is in no peril, even

should Erasmus attack it with all his might, with all his acute points and strictures. On the other hand, my dear Erasmus, you should think of their weakness, and abstain from those sharp and bitter figures of rhetoric; and if you cannot, and dare not assert our opinions, let them alone and treat on subjects more suited to you. Our friends, yourself being judge, do not easily bear your biting words, because human infirmity thinks of and dreads the authority and the reputation of Erasmus; and it is a very different thing to be attacked by Erasmus than by all the papists in the world."*

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He further urges him to be only a spectator of the tragedy, not to write books against him and his friends, to think of the Lutherans as of brethren, who should bear,' according to St. Paul, each other's burthens. It would be a miserable spectacle if both should be eaten up by their common foes. It is certain that neither party wishes anything but well to true religion. Pardon my childishness (infantiam), and farewell in the Lord.'t

But Erasmus was either too deeply committed, or too far advanced in his work, to be deterred from the fatal step. He chose what might seem an abstract question of high theology, or of abstruse philosophy; that question which philosophy had in vain attempted to solve, and on which revelation maintains an inscrutable mystery, the Freedom of Will, that question not set at rest, we say it with due respect, by Sir W. Hamilton and Mr. Mansel. Later Romish controversialists, as Möhler in his able Symbolik, have, in like manner, endeavoured to represent the controversy of the Reformed Churches with Rome, as resting on that sole question, as if the Protestants uniformly denied the freedom of the will, which was asserted by the wiser Roman Catholics. But it has been said, and we think truly said, that all reformers and founders of sects are predestinarians; calmer established religions admit in some form the liberty of the will; the sterner doctrine is still that of sections or of sects. It survives and comes to life again under every form of faith, as with Augustine in the early Church, with Jansenius in the Church of Rome, with a powerful school among ourselves. To Luther, to men who work the works of Luther, the strong, firm, undoubting conviction of truth is the discernible voice of God within; it is the divine grace, which, as divine, must God is imperilled. This and this alone is be irresistible, if not, the sovereignty of

*This is mainly Jortin's version, slightly altered. The letter is most correct in De Wette, ii. p.

498.

the primal movement of justifying faith; without this, the will is servile-servile to sin, servile to Satan; and as this grace is Vouchsafed only to the chosen, stern inevitable predestinarianism settled down over the whole, and Luther shrunk not from the desolating consequences. But Erasmus had learned and taught a different interpretation of the Scriptures; he had worked it out from his Biblical studies; he was most familiar with the Greek Fathers who had eluded or rejected, as uncongenial with their modes of thought, all these momentous questions stirred up by Pelagianism. He had a great distaste for Augustine, to whom he preferred Jerome, as little disposed or qualified to plunge into those depths as himself.

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Erasmus doubtless did not fully perceive, but Luther did, how this question lay at the root of his whole system. You struck at the throat of my doctrine,* and I thank you for it from my heart,'-so Luther closed his book on the Slavery of the Will. Luther spoke out his paradox,' as Erasmus called it, in the most paradoxical form; for not only was it his own profound conviction, but he intuitively felt, he knew by daily experience among his followers, that in this lay the secret of his strength; that less than this would not startle mankind from the obstinate torpor, the dull lethargy, the ceremonial servitude, of centuries. This alone would concentrate the whole of Christianity on Christ, or on God through Christ; would make a new religion, not vicarious through the priesthood, but strictly personal; would break for ever the sacerdotal dominion, which had disposed so long, at its despotic arbitrement, of the human soul, and had become a necessity of the religious nature; would inaugurate the manhood of the mind which must outgrow the period of tuition, and think and act for itself, and bear its own responsibility. Some of the best and most pious of the Romanists, Contarini, Sadolet, even for a time Pole, as Ranke has well shown, had embraced justification by faith, but they could not go farther and so be treacherous to their order; they did not see that his doctrine, to be efficacious, must stand alone, and must be severed from priestly authority. Luther was not a man

* Deinde et hoc in te vehementer laudo et prædieo, quod solus præ omnibus rem ipsam es aggressus, hoc est, summam causa, nec me fatigaris alienis illis causis de Papatu, Purgatorio, Indulgentiis ac similibus nugis, potius quam causis in quibus me et solus cardinem rerum vidisti et ipsum jugulum petiisti, pro quo ex animo tibi gratias ago.

hactenus omnes fere venati sunt frustra. Unus tu

to shrink from any extreme; he saw his way, as far as it went, clearly, and would not be embarrassed, even by inevitable and most repulsive difficulties, let what would follow even by logical inference. This doctrine magnified the sovereignty of God, therefore to him it was irrefragible; it was scepticism, impiety, atheism in others to call it in question. Yet even in his own day Melancthon did not follow him to his stern conclusion. Melancthon wrote at first with undissembled praise of the treatise of Erasmus. The later Lutherans have in general on this point deserted their master. It was accepted only in a very mitigated form by the Church of England. Wrought out with more fearless and unhesitating logic by his stern Genevan successor, it prevailed among the Puritans. Later, almost all the most learned, very many of the most pious of our Church, including John Wesley and his disciples, repudiated it. Erasmianism, as soon as the religious world calmed down, and so long as it is not in a state of paroxysmal struggle, usually renews its sway.

Erasmus and Luther therefore in this controversy were as little likely to come to a mutual understanding, as if each had written in a language unknown to the other. On the ear of Luther and the Lutherans the calm, cool philosophy of Erasmus, the plain and perspicuous but altogether passionless scriptural arguments, fell utterly dead. Even to us it must be acknowledged that there is something cold even to chillness, in the treatise of Erasmus-the nice balance of the periods, the elaborate finish of the style, the very elegance of the Latinity, seem to show that the heart of Erasmus had no part in the momentous question. There is something dubious, too, in the prudence with which he chose the subject, and so eluded all those other questions, indulgences, purgatory, pilgrimages, worship of saints, monkery, the power of the clergy and of the Pope, on which he might have been cited against himself, and in which he was the undoubted forerunner of Luther. And all this contrasts most unfavourably with the bold, the vehement, the honest, the profoundly religious tone of his adversary. With all its coarseness, almost its truculence, with all its contemptuous and arrogant dogmatism, with what might seem the study to present everything in the most alarming, almost repulsive, form, the treatise on the Servitude of the Will, though it leaves us unconvinced, rarely leaves us unmoved; there is an infelt and commanding religiousness which by its power over ourselves reveals the

mystery of its wonderful power over his own generation. At all events the cold smooth oil of Erasmus had only made the fire burn more intensely; the intervention of the great scholar, of the first man of letters, of the oracle of Transalpine Christendom, instead of answering the sanguine expectation of the one side, or the awe of the other, was absolutely without effect many Lutherans may have been exasperated, it may be doubted if one was changed in sentiment by the treatise on the Freedom of the Will. Erasmus, in his Hyperaspistes, or rather his two Treatises, answered Luther.* He had lost much of his serene temper, but gained neither fame nor authority. There is a kind of consciousness which involuntarily betrays itself, that he had not improved his position. In truth he had estranged still further his natural allies, the Reformers; the l'apists, who at first hailed their champion with noisy acclamation, revenged their disappointment at his want of success, by the unmitigated rancour with which they fell upon his former works.t

Yet still while Erasmus grew older and more infirm, the world darkened around him. Event after event took place, which threw him back more forcibly upon the tide of reaction. To all who were not yet disenchanted from the ancient, traditionary, almost immemorial majesty of the Papal See, who still honoured the Pope as the successor of St. Peter, as the Vicar of Christ, as the Head of the august unity of the Church-and this was the case with Erasmus, the friend of more than one pope -what was the effect of the taking of Rome by the Constable Bourbon, with all its unspeakable horrors§-the flight, the

* The Lutherans bitterly complained of its tone; they called it the Aspis, for its venom; but its wearisome prolixity must even in its own day

have checked its malice.

There is a most remarkable admission in a late Letter of Erasmus-all these questions ought only to be discussed, and temperately, by learned men-et quae Lutherus urget, si moderate tractentur, meâ sententiâ propius accedunt ad vigorem Evangelicum.-Epist. 1053, June 1, 1529.

How deeply this awe was rooted in the mind of Christendom, may be best conjectured from the profoundly-reverent tone with which Luther himself wrote of the Pope, but a year or two before his final revolt. See his two letters in De Wette, in 1518 (p. 1119) and 1519 (p. 233).

§ See Epist. 988. Among all its horrors (this is characteristic) Erasmus is most wrathful at the destruction of Sadolet's noble library-O barbariem inauditam! Que fuit unquam tanta Scytharum, Quadorum, Wandalorum, Hunnorum, Gothorum immanitas, ut non contenta quicquid erat opum diripere, in libros, rem sacratissimam, sæviret

incendio.

imprisonment, the abasement of the Pope himself? It is true that in that act of high treason against the spiritual sovereign, with all its insults and cruelties, the Catholic Spaniards of the Constable were as deeply concerned as the Lutheran Germans of George Frondsberg.

But while at Basil Erasmus was sacrificing his peace at the bidding of the Papalists, at Paris his books were proscribed, his followers burned at the stake. Of all the martyrs who suffered for the Reformation, none was more blameless, more noble, more calm and devout in his death, than Louis Berquin. The crime of Berquin was the translation, the dissemination, the earnest recommendation of the writings of Erasmus. His powerful adversary was the enemy of Erasmus-Noel Bedier, or, as he affected to call himself after our venerable bishop, Beda. Berquin was arrested, cast into prison, and the Sorbonne proceeded to issue an edict condemnatory of the writings of Erasmus. But the Queen Mother, Louisa of Savoy, protected Berquin, and on the return of the king to Paris a royal mandate was issued for his release. He remained in Paris for three years (from 1526 to 1529), still openly disseminating the works of Erasmus. It was another of his crimes that he boldly asserted the duty of publishing the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, also a tenet of Erasmus, to whom he was personally unknown, but to whom he wrote, and received a reply urging him to prudence, to flight, and this not only on his own account, for it must be confessed that the selfish fear of Erasmus, lest he too should be emperilled by his manly disciple, seems to be his ruling motive. Unfortunately the profane mutilation of an image of the Virgin, in which Berquin was not even charged as in any way concerned, exasperated the impetuous and versatile Francis. Berquin was abandoned to his persecutors. He was scourged, condemned to see his books publicly burned, to make an abjuration in the Place de Grève, to have his tongue pierced with a hot iron, and to imprisonment for life. Berquin refused to abjure; he aggravated his offence by an appeal to the Pope and to the King. A vain appeal! He was sentenced to the flames. Nothing could surpass the holy serenity of his martyrdom. He seemed, as was reported by an eye-witness to Erasmus, as he marched to the stake, like one in his library absorbed in his studies, or in a church meditating on heavenly things. His mien and gestures, when he went to his death, were easy and quick, with nothing of defiance or sullen obstinacy. Six hundred soldiers were or

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