II. BOOK monachism and the celibacy of the clergy, caused the persecution of many; while a few censured the property of the church, and fewer objected to tithes."5 The dislike of the religious worship paid to saints, and the union of their names with the Divinity by the close and equalizing association of the immediately connecting particle, dissatisfied more and more the cultivated mind." The apprehended and destroyed persons were mostly priests, and the others were private and obscure individuals; but all were peaceable and unoffending as subjects. From the accession of Edward IV. to the death of Henry VIII. no reforming spirit attempted to realize its wishes in England by conspiracy, insurrection or warfare. It was the Roman see and its partisans, See the opinions of those who are noticed with the references in the preceding note 36. 96 The canonization of saints in the Catholic church seems to me to have been taken from the Roman custom of deifying their friends and sovereigns. Cicero gives us in his own conduct a remarkable instance of this practice, which is so analogous to the Papal beatification of saints, that it deserves our recollection. His daughter Tullia died in child-bed. He rejects the common mode of perpetuating her remembrance by a sepulchral monument, and resolved to build a temple to her, and erect her into a sort of deity. In his fragments on Consolation, he says, 'As we see many men and women raised by men among the number of the Gods, and venerate their most august temples in cities and fields, the same honor shall be devoted to her. I will consecrate thee, O best of all, with the approbation of the Gods themselves; and place thee in their assembly, for the reverence of all mortals.' To Atticus, he writes, I will have a fane made and finished this summer. It shall be of Chian marble, with columns by a Chian artist. It shall be a fane, not a sepulchre, that I may effect her apotheosis. Groves and remote places are proper only for deities of an established name, but for the deification of mortals, public situations are necessary, to strike the eye, and attract the notice of the people.' Therefore he wished to buy some public gardens, to attract a resort of votaries to his new temple. See his Letters to Atticus, 12, 18, 19, 22, 35, 36, 37, 41; and Midd. Cicero, v. 2. p. 174-6. If we substitute shrine for fane, we have a Catholic saint. Cicero was also a priest and augur. III. which made revolt and civil violences their instru- CHAP. ments, to embarrass and overthrow the governments which resisted its domination; as our own experience has seen its priesthood repeating lately such practices in Portugal, Spain and elsewhere. Its moral code appears to omit treason from its catalogue of social crimes, whenever it chooses to be in hostility with any sovereign or with his administration. CHAP. IV. THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF LUTHER, AND THE INTRODUC- BOOK WHILE the mind was thus every where ripening be averted, tho it might be delayed, an obscure man of literature imperceptibly grew into an intellectual activity and influence, which made him an unexpected precursor and promoter of the advancing change, without having any direct or distinct intention, or foresight, of producing it. This individual, who, while Luther was a contented monk and academical preceptor, began to open the public eye to the perception of the errors and absurdities in its most venerated order; and whose improved opinions had a rapid and extensive, tho tranquil and noiseless, operation in England, was the humbly born, the mild, the acute and persuasive ERASMUS. A keen perception of the moral incongruities in the cloisters,' and of the depravities in the general hierarchy, became united in his mind with a gradual conception of better characters and doctrines. He listened to imbibe the most enlightened notions and criticisms of his contemporaries; he enlarged them so much by his own reflections and studies, and expressed his cultivated ideas with such taste and elegance, and easy yet eloquent fluency, that no lettered mind 1 See Hist. Hen. VIII. v. 1. p. 26. IV. in any part of Europe, from the king on his throne, CHAP. or the pope in his tiara, to the reclusest scholar in his poverty, could read them without an approving sympathy and personal admiration, which no one sought to conceal. Both Henry VIII. and his Spanish Catherine were delighted by his works, as well as the English court and clergy. No man of literature has in any age gained a wider fame among the great and cultivated of all orders, or, without proposing to himself any revolutionary effect, has acted with more convincing influence, than this mild, unambitious and unostentatious scholar. Kings, cardinals and prelates were emulous to become his patrons. His edition of the Greek New Testament was received as an invaluable present by the piety, which loves to add exact knowlege to its devout sensibility.* To the monks, from personal disgust and youthful Such was his popularity, that it has been said, 'If Erasmus had favored Luther, all Germany would have revolted from the church of Rome.' 2 Jortin's Eras. p. 174. But Erasmus shrunk from Luther's violence of temper, and repeatedly felt its coarse invectives on himself. He also wrote to a friend, Si Lutherus omnia vere scripsisset, mihi tamen magnopere displicuerit, seditiosa libertas.' Ep. 26. 1. 17. p. 769. His opinions were not in many points so sound, but his spirit was more Christian than Luther's when he said, ' Ego vel falli malim in nonnullis, quam tanto orbis tumultu pro veritate digladiare.' ib. 3 Charles V. Henry VIII. and Francis I. then befriended Erasmus and archbishop Wareham; and on 1st December 1516, the bishop of Baiusa wrote from France, I have offered Erasmus, that if he will come to live with me, I will give him yearly 200 ducats, and the expense of two horses and two servants, and as much leisure for study as he wishes.' Lett. Princ. 1. p. 18. • Until Erasmus published it with a Latin translation in 1516, it had not appeared in a separate form. It had only been printed in the Polyglot of Ximenes in 1514. It was this work which drew Luther's praise of Erasmus as the reviver of good literature, by means of which the Scriptures had been read and examined in the original. 1 Jortin's Eras. 316. Before this edition, a MS. Greek Testament in Germany was worth II. BOOK experience, he had contracted an early antipathy; but without premeditating any other innovations, his gentle and benevolent wisdom began that reformation without clamor or contest, which others afterwards pursued and often injured by both. His unoffending voice penetrated to the interior heart, and raised a desire to amend what his moderate representations evinced to be improper. As the natural progress of this silent improvement was intercepted, by the turbulent commotions which arose after Luther took the field, he has lost the full credit of what he really effected." By his three visits to England, and by his residence at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as by his valuable works, he increased largely the number of those able, wise and good men, in England and elsewhere, who were quietly and privately withdrawing their minds from all the papal superstitions, which his own spirit disliked and pri See his Christian Soldier's Enchiridion, published in 1501, on the whole, the best book on the Christian morality and devotion which had then appeared. He states, that he wrote it to cure the vulgar error of those who placed religion in ceremonies, and in the observance of bodily things.' 1 Jortin, p. 18. Every thing he afterwards published contained some valuable ideas, which became the parents of others in the minds of his readers. "Bishop Stillingfleet justly says, 'It was not Luther or Zuinglius that contributed so much to the reformation, as Erasmus, especially among us in England. For Erasmus was the man who awakened men's understandings, and brought them from the friar's divinity to a relish of general learning. He by his wit laughed down the imperious insolence of the monks, and made them the scorn of Christendom; and by his learning he brought most of the Latin fathers to light, and published them in excellent editions, with useful notes, by which means men of parts set themselves to consider the antient church from the writings of the fathers themselves, and not from the canonists and schoolmen. So that the most learned and impartial men were prepared for the doctrines of the Reformation before it broke forth.' Second Confor. of Idolatry. 7 He reached Dover at the end of 1497, and soon went to Oxford, where he continued his Greek studies. Vitellius, an Italian from Tuscany, first taught Greek at Oxford. Polyd. Virg. 1. 26. Grocyn was his |