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.1

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 deter

mination 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

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 Moria 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 indi. viduals as "6 silly men like worms creeping on the ground," and startling ordinary folk by the variety of their unprac

tical 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 Moria, 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."1

The Pope himself read the Enconium Moria and understood the spirit of the author; at least so Erasmus was told. He wrote at the time "the Supreme Pontiff has read through Moria and laughed; all he said was, 'I am glad to see that friend Erasmus is in the Moria,' and this though I have touched no others so sharply as the Pontiffs" (Ep. p. 1667). What Sir Thomas More thought about it may be given in his own words, written some years later. "As touching Moria, in which Erasmus, under the

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 augur," and the "college of soothsayers," "Pontifices Maximi," "Vestals," "triumphs," &c. Nothing can be more unlike the true

name and person of Moria, which word in Greek signifies' folly,' merely touches and reproves such faults and follies as he found in any kind of people pursuing every state and condition, spiritual and temporal, leaving almost none untouched. By this book, says Tyndale, if it were in English, every man should then well see that I was then far otherwise minded than I now write. If this be true, then the more cause have I to thank God for the amendment. God be thanked I never had that mind in my life to have holy saints' images or their holy relics out of reverence. Nor if there were any such thing in Moria this could not make any man see that I were myself of that mind, the book being made by another man though he were my darling never so dear. Howbeit, that book of Moria doth indeed but jest upon abuses of such things. . . . But in these days, in which men by their own default misconstrue and take harm from the very Scripture of God, until men better amend, if any man would now translate Moria into English, or some work either that I have myself written ere this, albeit there be no harm therein, folks being (as they be) given to take harm of what is good, I would not only my darling's books, but my own also, help to burn them both with my own hands, rather than folk should (though through their own fault) take any harm of them." (English Works, pp. 422-3.)

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.1

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