His bête noire at Louvain seems to have been a person called Egmund, a Carmelite monk, who may serve us as the type of "those persons" who were trying to identify Erasmus with the Lutheran cause. Writing[132] to the Rector Magnificus of the University of Louvain, still in 1519, Erasmus says that this Egmund had been expressing the pious hope that as St. Paul had been converted from a persecutor to a doctor of the Church, so Erasmus and Luther might some day be converted.
"What will become of these men? The one thing they want is to do harm in some way, and it offends them that I am not a Lutheran, as indeed I am not, except in so far as Luther serves the glory of Christ. I know that I am rather free of tongue, but yet no one has heard me approve the doctrine of Luther. I have never taken pains to read his books, excepting a few pages, and these rather skimmed than read. Your contentions against Luther I have always consistently favoured, but far more your writings, especially those of John Turenholtius, who, as I hear, has carried on the discussion in a scholarly way and without personalities."
He has not read Luther, yet he has steadily approved the Louvain contentions against him and especially the writings of a man of whom he knows only by hearsay that he writes in good temper!
"If his [Luther's] books were to be burnt, no one would find me any the sadder. I have written privately and said many things to prevent him from writing so seditiously, and yet I am called a Lutheran! If these jokes amuse your university, I am man enough to bear them; for I would rather do this than take revenge for them; but in my judgment the cause would be better served by other methods. Vincentius is charging me with the tumult in Holland, in which after a most foolish discourse, he came near being stoned to death; whereas the truth is I have never written to any Dutchman either for Luther or against him."
He writes to Mountjoy in the same year[133]:
"While you are happy for so many reasons I am compelled to fight with certain monsters rather than men. By Hercules! I would like to try what eloquence might do, were it not that as I lay my hand upon the hilt a certain Christian modesty, like Pallas in Homer, seizes me by the hair and restrains me."
So far Erasmus had stood in an attitude of studied neutrality. We have to gather from his emphasis and from the undercurrent of his eloquence our impression as to the side on which his sympathies really lay. If the world could only have stood still long enough for his wise and cautious suggestions to affect the parties, all might yet have been well. Unhappily for the Erasmians of all times, the world moves, and it does not move strictly according to rule. Even while Erasmus was exhorting to mildness, events were forcing men into partisan attitudes which made his counsel of no avail. There were enough men who felt passionately the wrongs which he felt only academically, to force the discussion into the fighting stage. The more this becomes evident, the more clearly we see Erasmus moving over from the position of sympathetic neutrality towards the reforming party into that of suspicion and declared hostility.
In the correspondence we have just quoted, the weight of emphasis is on the provocation which the reformers had received. They were pretty violent, but their enemies were worse, and if the highest authority were to act at all, it would do better to compel the men of darkness to silence rather than the excellent Luther and his worthy followers. How far Erasmus, whether in 1519-20 or at any later time, really changed his opinion on any of the points at issue, will probably always remain a subject for controversy. We are concerned with the change of emphasis by which his final attitude was determined.
Two letters of 1519, one to Philip Melanchthon, in the centre of the Lutheran camp, and one to the Dominican Jacob Hoogstraaten, the head of the Inquisition at Cologne, will serve to show how evenly at this time Erasmus distributed the discipline he felt himself called upon to administer to the new and more tumultuous generation.
One can hardly help smiling at this passage from the letter to the gentle and peace-loving Melanchthon, by all means the sweetest-natured of all the Reformation champions. Erasmus makes him some very pretty compliments on his books and then goes on[134]: