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people were debating among themselves "whether one that were chosen by them to be a priest, would not be thereby qualified to do all the things that belong to that character, even though he had no authority derived from the Pope." It was one of the ancient laws of the Utopians that no one should be punished for his religion, but converts were to be made to any faith only "by amicable and modest ways, without the use of reproaches or violence." They made confession, not, to priests, but to the heads of families. Their worship was in temples, in which were no images, and where the forms of devotion were carefully framed in such a way as not to offend the feelings of any class of sincere worshippers. In this work, as in the sermons of Colet, even such as were preached before Henry VIII., there was a plain exposure of the barbarities and impolicy of war. In reference to what we term political and social science, there appear in the teachings of Colet and More, and of their still more famous associate, a humane spirit and a hostility to tyranny and to all oppressive legislation, which are not less consonant with the spirit of the Gospel, than they were in advance of the practice of the times.1

The foremost representative of Humanism, the incarnation, as it were, of its genius, was Erasmus.2 The preeminence which he attained as a literary man is what no other scholar has approached, unless it be Voltaire, whom he resembled in the deference paid to him by the

1 The relations of Colet, More, and Erasmus, and the characteristic work of each, are finely described in the truly interesting work of Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers of 1498 (London, 1869).

2 Opera, xi. vols., folio ed. (Clericus) 1703. There are lives of Erasmus by Le Clerc, Bayle, Knight, Burigny (Paris, 1757), Jortin (1758-60), Hess (Zurich, 1790), Adolf Müller (1828), by Erhard in Ersch und Grüher's Encyclopäd. (xxxvi.), and by others; a sketch by Nisard in his Études sur la Renaissance. These biographies are criticized by Milman in his interesting article on Erasmus, Quart. Rev., No. ccxi., reprinted in his Essays. Notwithstanding the unfavorable judgment of Johnson, Jortin's Life is anything but a “dull book." For a scholar, notwithstanding its want of plan and of symmetry, it is one of the most delightful of biographies.

great in worldly rank. Each was a wit and an iconoclast in his own way, but their characters in other respects were quite unlike.1 The fame of Erasmus was rendered possible, in part, by the universal use of Latin, as the common language of educated men; a state of things of which his want of familiarity with Italian and English, although he had sojourned in Italy and lived long in England, is a curious sign. By the irresistible bent of his mind, as well as by assiduous culture, Erasmus was a man of letters. He must be that, whatever else he failed to be. His knowledge of Greek was inferior to that of his contemporary and rival, Budæus; he took no pains to give his style a classical finish, and laughed at the pedantic Ciceronians, who avoided all phraseology not sanctioned by the best ancient authority, and sometimes all words not found in their favorite author.3 He wrote hastily: "I precipitate," he says, "rather than compose. Yet the wit and wisdom and varied erudition which he poured forth from his full mind, made him justly the most popular of writers. He sat on his throne, an object of admiration and of envy. By his multifarious publications and his wide correspondence with eminent persons, ecclesiastics, statesmen, and scholars, his influence was diffused over all Europe. In all the earlier part of his career Erasmus struggled with indigence. His health was not strong and he thought that he could not live upon a little. His dependence upon patronage and pensions placed fetters upon him, to some extent, to the end of his life; yet he loved independence, frequently chose to receive the attentions of the great at a distance from them, and selected for his place of abode the city of Basel, where he was free alike from secular and ecclesiastical tyranny. Erasmus, by his writings and his entire per

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1 Coleridge has compared and contrasted them, The Friend, First Landing Place: Essay i.

2 Jortin, ii. 74.

8 Ibid., i. 152.

4 Ibid., i. 152.

sonal influence, was the foe of superstition. In his early days he had tasted, by constraint, something of monkish life, and his natural abhorrence of it was made more intense by this bitter recollection and by the trouble it cost him, after he had become famous, to release himself from the thraldom to which his former associates were inclined to call him back. In truth, he conducted a life-long warfare against the monks and their ideas and practices. His "Praise of Folly " and, in particular, the "Colloquies,' in which the idleness, illiteracy, self-indulgence, and artificial and useless austerities of "the religious," were handled in the most diverting style, were read with infinite amusement by all who sympathized with the new studies, and by thousands who did not calculate the effect of this telling satire in abating popular reverence for the Church. The "Praise of Folly " was written in 1510 or 1511, in More's house, for the amusement of his host and a few other friends. Folly is personified, and represented as discoursing to her followers on the affairs of mankind. All classes come in for their share of ridicule. Grammarians and pedagogues, in the fœtid atmosphere of their schoolrooms, bawling at their boys and beating them; scholastic theologians, wrangling upon frivolous and insoluble questions, and prating of the physical constitution of the world as if they had come down from a council of the gods "with whom and whose conjectures nature is mightily amused;" monks, "the race of new Jews," who are surprised at last to find themselves among the goats, on the left hand of the Judge, faring worse than common sailors and wagoners; kings who forget their responsibilities, rob their subjects, and think only of their own pleasures, as hunting and the keeping of fine horses; popes who, though infirm old men, take the sword into their hands, and "turn law, religion, peace, and all human affairs upside down such are some of the divisions of mankind who are held up to ridicule.

At this time Julius II. filled the papal chair, and all readers of Erasmus must have recognized the portrait which he drew of the warlike old pontiff. Erasmus did not spare the legends of the saints, which formed so fair a mark for the shafts of wit; and by his observations on the stigmata of St. Francis, offended the order of which he was the almost adored founder. When re

quested by a cardinal to draw up the lives of the Saints, he begged to be excused; they were too full of fables.1 His comments on misgovernment in the Church, on the extortions and vices of the clergy, from the Pope downwards, were not the less biting and effective, for the humorous form in which they were generally cast. Indeed, as Coleridge has said, it is a merit of the jests of Erasmus that they can all be translated into arguments. There was what he called a " Pharisaic kingdom," and he would never write anything, he said, that would give aid and comfort to the defenders of it.2 In his own mind, he distinguished between the Church and the "Popish sect,' as he designated, even in a letter to Melancthon, the supporters of ecclesiastical abuses and tyranny.3 There were, in his judgment, two evils that must be cut up by the roots before the Church could have peace. The one was hatred for the court of Rome, occasioned by her intolerable avarice and cruelty; the other was the yoke of human constitutions, robbing the people of their religious liberty. He would have made the creed a very short one, limited to a few "plain truths contained in Scripture," and leaving all the rest to the individual judgment. He thought that many things should be referred, not according to the popular cry, to "the next general council," but to the time when we see God face to face. Partly from the natural kindness of his temper, partly from his liberal culture, and still more, perhaps, from a personal appreciation of the difficulties and uncertainties of religious 1 Jortin, i. 294, ii. 34. 2 Ibid., i. 284. 3 Ibid., i. 313. 4 lbid., i. 265.

THE WRITINGS OF ERASMUS.

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doctrine, he went beyond almost every other eminent man of his age in his liking for religious liberty. He was conscious that without the practice of a pretty wide toleration on the part of rulers in Church and State, he would himself fare ill. He was, in fact, obliged to be constantly on his defense against charges of heresy. He had said things without number which could easily be turned into grounds of accusation. His enemies were numerous and vindictive, and although, in the literary combat, he was more than a match for all of them, he was sensitive to their attacks. He complains that the Spaniard, Stunica, had presented to Leo X. a libel against him, containing sixty thousand heresies extracted from his writings. Notwithstanding all his denials and professions, there lurked in the minds of the ardent adherents of the medieval system, an instinctive feeling that he was a dangerous enemy, and that his influence, so far as it prevailed, could only conduce to their overthrow. In this feeling, whatever may have been true of their specific charges, they were fully justified. Yet it is doubtful whether the condemnation of his " Colloquies" by the University of Paris, and other proceedings of a like nature, which emanated from the monkish party, did not operate to give to his ideas a wider currency.

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But there was a positive work which Erasmus did, the solidity and value of which it is difficult to overestimate. By his editions of Cyprian and Jerome, and his translations from Origen, Athanasius, and Chrysostom, he opened up the knowledge of Christian antiquity, and gave his contemporaries access to a purer and more Biblical theology. His edition of the New Testament, his paraphrases of the New Testament, which were at one time appointed to be read in the churches of England, his commentaries, his treatise on preaching, and various other works, promoted Christian knowledge in a most remarkable degree. In his writings of this sort, along with enlightened views 1 Jortin, i. 269.