Yet Erasmus had been overwhelming the dead Leo, the source of this pestilent flood, with every conceivable kind of flattery. Now he abuses him, in order to make his point that things are all going to be set right by the excellent Adrian. But this way of setting things right is just what Hutten does not hope for, he says.
"Yet there are many reasons for this hope, and charity, according to Paul, 'hopeth all things.' If Hutten were declaring war upon evils, not upon men, he would hasten to Rome and help this pope who is now trying to do the very same things he is himself striving for. But Hutten has declared war upon the Roman pontiff and all his followers.... The Romanists would like always to have such enemies as Hutten."
If there was an honest Erasmus anywhere under this mass of words, it seems pretty clear that he was for Hutten rather than against him. That Erasmus had any such honest side one is tempted to doubt when one reads his defence against the charge of trifling with the truth. Hutten had accused him[147] of saying that the truth ought not always to be spoken, and that a great deal depended upon how it was put forth.
"That blasphemous speech of yours," he had said, "ought to have been thrust down your throat (my cause compels me to speak more angrily than I would) if those had done their duty who are now compelling heretics to recant or throwing them to the flames."
Erasmus could not deny the words, but replies[148]:
"When Christ first sent out the Apostles to preach the Gospel he forbade them to declare that he was the Christ. If, then, the Truth himself ordered that truth to be kept in silence, without the knowledge of which there is no salvation to any man, what is there strange in my saying that the truth ought sometimes to be suppressed?"
Then he gives several similar illustrations of repression of truth by silence on the part of Jesus, and goes on:
"If I had to defend the cause of an innocent man before a powerful tyrant should I blurt out the whole truth and ruin the case of the innocent man, or should I keep many things silent? Hutten, a brave man and most zealous for the truth, would, no doubt, speak thus: 'O most accursed tyrant, you who have murdered so many of your fellow-citizens, is your cruelty not yet sated, that you must tear this innocent man from their midst?' Well, that is about as clever as the way in which some are defending the cause of Luther, by raging against the pope with seditious writings. Or if he [Hutten] were asking from a wicked pope a benefice for some good man, he would write to him after this style: 'O impious Antichrist, destroyer of the Gospel, oppressor of civil liberty, flatterer of princes, thou givest basely so many a benefice to wicked men and still more basely sellest them, grant this one to this good man that all may not fall into evil hands.' You smile, reader; but these people are pleading the cause of the Gospel with no more caution than that.... But what is more foolish than to call me back from a place where I never was and to summon me to the very place I am now in? He calls me back from the party of the wicked who support the tyranny of the Romanists, who overturn the truth of the Gospel, who darken the glory of Christ; but I have always been fighting those very men. He summons me to his own side; but as yet I am not clear where Hutten himself stands."
The whole aim of the Spongia and its effect upon the world were simply to make it perfectly plain that Erasmus would not take sides. If the purpose of the Expostulatio was to force him to do so, it was a conspicuous failure. Nothing could be plainer than Erasmus' own declaration[149]: