Lee’s criticism of Erasmus’s translation appeared at Louvain in January 1520. It produced an immediate reply from Erasmus, published at Antwerp in May 1520—a reply “all nose, teeth, nails, and stomach.” In this Erasmus says that 1200 copies of the New Testament had been printed by Froben. In the collation he had been much assisted by Bishop Tunstall, who had, in fact, supplied the exemplar on which he had worked. Erasmus then gives what he thinks is the correct version of the differences between Lee and himself. Lee, he says, was only just beginning Greek, and Erasmus, who had been working at the correction of his version of the Testament, showed him what he was doing. The margins of the book were then full of notes, and here and there whole pages of paper were added. Lee said that he had a few notes that might be useful, and Erasmus expressed his pleasure at receiving help and asked for them. Lee thereupon gave him some miscellaneous jottings, and of these, according to Erasmus’s version of the facts, he made use of hardly anything. Soon, however, reports were spread about that out of some three hundred places in which Lee had corrected the first edition of the translation, Erasmus had adopted two hundred. Bishop Fisher tried to make peace, and to prevent two men who both meant well to the cause of religion from quarrelling in public. His intervention was, however, too late, as already the letter of Erasmus to Thomas Lupset had appeared and thus rendered reconciliation impossible.
[175] Ep. 231.
[176] Ep. 380. This bishop must have been the Spaniard, George de Athegua, who was appointed to the see of Llandaff in 1517, and held it for twenty years.
[177] Ep. 380.
[178] Ep. 453.
[179] Ep. 416.
[180] Ep. 547.
[181] Ep. 529. Erasmus wrote strongly against anything that seemed to favour the idea of national churches. After declaring that national dislikes and enmities were unmeaning and unchristian, he continues: “As an Englishman you wish evil fortune to a Frenchman. Why not rather do your wishes come as a man to a fellow-man? Why not as a Christian to a Christian? Why do these frivolous things have greater weight than such natural ties, such bonds of Christ? Places separate bodies, not souls. In old days the Rhine divided a Frenchman from a German, but the Rhine cannot divide one Christian from another. The Pyrenees cut off Spain from France, but these mountains do not destroy the communion of the Church. The sea divides the English and French peoples, but it cannot cut off the society of religion.…” The world is the fatherland of all people; all men are sprung from a common stock. “The Church is but one family, common to all.” (Opera., tom. iv. col. 638.)
[182] Ep. 715.
[183] Ep. 723.