Part 3

Luther made his protest at Wittenberg in 1517. For four years after that, Erasmus hoped that the matter might be peaceably adjusted. Luther was personally a stranger to him, but had a great admiration for his work, and wrote to him, as to an intellectual leader of whose sympathy he hoped that he might feel sure; Erasmus wrote back kindly, but guardedly, urging counsels of moderation. When Frederick of Saxony consulted him, he spoke in Luther's favour. But after 1521 all hopes of conciliation were at an end: peace between Rome and Luther was thenceforth impossible. And now both sides began to press Erasmus. The Romanists cried, 'This is all your doing; as the monks say, you laid the egg, and Luther has hatched it: you must now lose no time in speaking out, and making it clear that you are loyal to the Church of which you are a priest.' The Lutherans said: 'You know that you agree with us in your heart; you yourself have made a scathing exposure of the very abuses which we are attacking; be true to yourself, and take your place among our leaders.' Erasmus suffered, but remained silent. At last he decided to write against Luther, and in 1524 published his treatise on Free Will. Luther held that, owing to original sin, divine grace alone can turn man's will to good; Erasmus defended the doctrine of the Church, that, while grace is the indispensable and principal agent, the will is so far free as to allow for some human merit in preferring good to evil. Luther replied, and Erasmus rejoined. Thenceforth the Lutherans regarded Erasmus as an opponent;--some of them, as a traitor; while his own side felt that he had not done them much good. For the question handled by him, however important in itself, was not the question of the hour. And indeed many will feel that this particular controversy was the greatest mistake in the life of Erasmus. Not because he entered the lists against Luther--it is intelligible that he should have felt himself constrained to do so--but because, having decided to fight, he did not raise the main issue. That issue was,--Which is the greater evil,--to endure the corruptions, or to rebel? It was open to him to contend that rebellion was the greater: but, if he was not prepared to enter on that ground, then it would have been better to keep silence.

What were the trains of thought and feeling which determined his course at that great crisis? A careful study of his own utterances will show that the considerations which swayed him were of three distinct kinds; we might describe them as ecclesiastical, intellectual, and personal.

In the first place, it is apparent that Erasmus regarded the prospect of schism, not only from a churchman's point of view, but also as a danger to social order. He thinks of the Roman Church under the image of a temporal State. Grave abuses have indeed crept into the constitution, but the State contains within itself the only legitimate agencies for reform. A citizen is entitled to lift up his voice against the abuses; but his loyalty to the head of the State must remain intact; if that head delays or declines to interfere, the citizen must be patient. And, even in denouncing evils, he must consider whether there is not a point at which denunciation, as tending to excite turbulence, may not do more harm than good. Such a view was the more natural in an age when men's minds had so long been familiar with the conception which was the basis of the Holy Roman Empire. No faults in any grade of the ecclesiastical hierarchy could do away with the feeling that Pope and Emperor were, by divine appointment, the joint guardians of human welfare, and that a revolt against the authority of the Church was an assault on the framework which held society together. The peculiar attitude of Erasmus,--his reluctance to take part in the conflict, and the attacks made on him from both sides,--gave to his conduct the appearance of greater irresolution than can justly be laid to his charge. About one thing--this should be distinctly remembered--he never wavered. He never at any moment contemplated rebellion against the authority of Rome; he was as remote from that as were the two English friends whose views as to the abuses in the Church most nearly agreed with his own, John Colet and Thomas More. The real source of his embarrassment was that he approved, in a large measure, of Luther's objects, while he strongly disapproved of his methods.

Further, he disliked the Lutheran movement as threatening to impede the quiet progress of literature, and this in two ways,--first, by creating a general turmoil,--secondly, by giving the schoolmen and the monks a pretext for saying that the new learning was a source of social disorder. There is a striking letter of his, written to Alberto Pio, Prince of Carpi, in 1525. He points out that the foes of the new learning had been most anxious to identify it with the Lutheran cause, in order to damage two enemies at once. Then, further,--he disliked all appeals to passion, or blind partisanship; his hope for the world was in the growing sway of reason. Two hundred and fifty years afterwards, another gifted mind, in looking back, took much the same view that Erasmus had taken in looking forward. Goethe deplored Luther's violence. But Luther might have quoted Ajax. To dream that such evils could be cured by the gentle magic of literature was indeed to chant incantations over a malady that craved the surgeon's knife.

As might have been expected, some critics of Erasmus ascribed his attitude to worldly motives; but this was unjust, as many details of his life show. When Paul III. wished to make him a Cardinal, and to provide him with the necessary income, he declined. He was ambitious of praise, but not of wealth or rank. Personal considerations influenced him only in this sense, that he knew his own unfitness for the part of a leader or a combatant at such a time. His right place was in his study, and he grudged every hour lost to his proper work. 'I would rather work for a month at expounding St Paul,' he said to a correspondent, 'than waste a day in quarrelling.' In character and temperament he was the most perfect contrast to Luther. We remember the story of Luther being awakened in the night by a noise in his room; he lit a candle, but could find nothing; he then became certain that the invisible Enemy of his soul was present in that room,--and yet he lay down, and went calmly to sleep. There is the essence of the man--the intensely vivid sense of the supernatural, and the instinctive recourse to it as an explanation--and the absolute faith. Erasmus was once in a town where a powder-magazine exploded, and destroyed a house which had harboured evil-doers; some one remarked that this showed the divine anger against guilt; Erasmus quietly answered that, if such anger was indeed there, it was rather against the folly which had built a powder-magazine so near a town. The man who said that could never have fought at Luther's side.

Erasmus was a great literary precursor of the Reformation; he armed the hands of the Lutherans: but to call him, as some have done, a Reformer before the Reformation, seems hardly an appropriate description. If, in our own day, those who are denominated Old Catholics had confined themselves to urging the advisability of certain reforms, without disputing the authority of the Pope or proposing to secede from communion with Rome, their position would have been analogous to that of Erasmus. Viewed as a whole, his conduct was essentially consistent and independent.

His imperishable claim to the gratitude of the world, and especially of the Teutonic peoples, rests on the part which he sustained in a contest of even larger scope than that waged by Luther,--in the great preliminary conflict between the old and the new conception of knowledge, between the bondage and the enfranchisement of the human mind, between a lifeless formalism in religion and the spirit of practical Christianity. From youth to old age, through many trials, he worked with indomitable energy in the cause of light; and it was his great reward, that, before he died, he saw the dawn of a new age beginning for the nations of the north,--not without clouds and storm, but with the assurance that the reign of darkness was past.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.