"The great scholar was completely absorbed in restoring the Greek text of Origen, so that though his illness was extremely painful, he would not give up till death itself wrested the pen from his hand. His last words on earth, spoken in the midst of his heavy groaning, were these: 'Oh, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me! I will sing of the mercy of God and of his judgment.' And therein you can see the truly Christian spirit of the man."
The last will of Erasmus, made in due form on the 12th of February, 1536, shows him to have been possessed of a comfortable property. He appoints Boniface Amerbach general executor of all his estate. He gives substantial legacies to several friends and servants, provides for the sale of his library to John à Lasco, and finally directs his executor to give the remainder to poor and infirm persons, especially to provide dowries for poor girls and to help young men of good promise.
Expressions of grief and reverence for the great scholar came from the men of all parties who could think of him as the prince of learning and the advocate of right living. Only those who could not forgive him his refusal to enter the ranks of any party failed to do honour to his memory.
Let us ask once more in conclusion what was, precisely, the contribution of this man to the work of the Reformation. If by "Reformation" we mean only the work which Luther believed himself to be doing, we must limit our answer to the somewhat scanty acknowledgment he was ready to make of his indebtedness to Erasmus as a scholar. But we have learned that Luther's own conception of the Reformation movement was a very narrow and inadequate one. He believed it to be limited to a purely religious revival on the basis of a true understanding of Scripture. In reality it was the whole great revolt of the human mind against arbitrary and conventional limitations, and it is only when we study it in this light that we can measure the influence of Erasmus upon it. First and most important was his insistence, begun in the Enchiridion and continued even through the Ecclesiastes, upon the principle of a sound, sane, reasonable individual judgment, not in opposition to the prevailing authority of tradition, but in interpretation of it. To be sure this was no absolutely new thing in the world. It had been before men's minds since the days of Petrarch, but it had never before found so many-sided and so consistent an expression in the North. It had taken three generations since Petrarch for the slower mind of the northern peoples to ripen to the point of receiving this idea. They took it now from Erasmus with enthusiasm. It came to them in his satire in such form that the humblest reader could understand it. It spoke to them in his serious treatises in language which appealed to the scholar at once by its literary finish and by its enormous learning and seriousness. The private judgment of the individual is really, no matter how concealed, the tribunal to which the reader is continually referred.
Closely akin to this is the appeal, the other distinguishing mark of the Renaissance man, to the essential rightness of what is natural. The mediæval ideal of morals had been that whatever was natural was essentially wrong. It could be right only in so far as it was given a formal guarantee by some recognised authority. Erasmus represents human life throughout as being, of its very nature, in harmony with the eternal law of morality. Especially family life in all its forms, the natural and mutual duties of man and wife, the tender love and care of children, the honourable uses of wealth in the service of the state and of religion, the obligations of friendship, the natural piety of the simple child of God, the dignity and responsibility of rulers as the agents of a divine order among men, the supreme duty of peace,—these are the constantly recurring subjects of his well-trained pen. Even in his literary ideals the same general principle of naturalness prevails. Style is an instrument to be cultivated; it has a charm of its own worth the careful attention of the scholar; but, after all, style is only a means of conveying thought, and the object of it is to carry the highest thought in the clearest and most direct fashion.
Now one may well ask: How is all this nobility and elevation of purpose to be reconciled with the obvious personal limitations of Erasmus' character? How does this profound interest in the welfare of human society go with a self-centred, nervous dread of criticism which rises at times to the hysterical point? How account for the fear that the very ideas he seems most to cherish might be spread abroad among the very people for whom they seem especially intended? How explain the elaborate contradictions in his own accounts of the motives that led to his most open actions? Such a personality, we are tempted to say, is beneath our honest contempt. It is the very negation of all the ideals of which the man tried to pose as the champion.