Their way lies through a narrow lane, worn deep by traffic and weather, and with a high bank on either side. Colet rides to the left of the road. Presently an old mendicant monk comes out of a house[481] on Colet’s side of the way, and proceeds to sprinkle him with holy water. Though not in the best of tempers, Colet submits to this annoyance without quite losing it. But when the old mendicant next presents to him the upper leather of an old shoe for his kiss, Colet abruptly demands what he wants with him. The old man replies that the relic is a piece of St. Thomas’s shoe! This is more than Colet knows how to put up with. ‘What!’ he says passionately, turning to Erasmus, ‘do these fools want us to kiss the shoes of every good man? They pick out the filthiest things they can find, and ask us to kiss them.’ Erasmus, to counteract the effect of such a remark upon the mind of the astonished mendicant, gives him a trifle, and the pilgrims pass on their journey, discussing the difficult question how abuses such as they have witnessed this day are to be remedied. Colet cannot restrain his indignant feeling, but Erasmus urges that a rough or sudden remedy might be worse than the disease. These superstitions must, he thinks, be tolerated until an opportunity arises of correcting them without creating disorder.
There can be little doubt that the graphic picture of which the above is only a rapid sketch was drawn from actual recollections, and described the real feelings of Erasmus and his bolder friend.
Little did the two friends dream, as they rode back to town debating these questions, how soon they would find a final solution. Men’s faith was then so strong and implicit in ‘Our Lady of Walsingham’ that kings and queens were making pilgrimage to her shrine, and the common people, as they gazed at night upon the ‘milky way,’ believed that it was the starry pathway marked out by heaven to direct pilgrims to the place where the milk of the Holy Virgin was preserved, and called it the ‘Walsingham way.’ Little did they dream that in another five and twenty years the canons would be convicted of forging relics and feigning miracles, and the far-famed image of the Virgin dragged to Chelsea by royal order to be there publicly burned. Then pilgrims were flocking to Canterbury in crowds to adore the relics and to admire the riches of St. Thomas’s shrine. Little did they dream that in five and twenty years St. Thomas’s bones would share the fiery fate of the image of the Virgin, and the gold and jewellery of St. Thomas’s shrine be carried off in chests upon the shoulders of eight stout men, and cast without remorse into the royal exchequer![482]
CHAPTER X.
I. ERASMUS GOES TO BASLE TO PRINT HIS NEW TESTAMENT (1514).
Erasmus crosses the Channel.
It was on a July morning in the year 1514 that Erasmus again crossed the Channel. The wind was fair, the sea calm, the sky bright and sunny; but during the easy passage Erasmus had a heavy heart. He had once more left his English friends behind him, bent upon a solitary pilgrimage to Basle, in order that his edition of the letters of St. Jerome and his Greek New Testament might be printed at the press of Froben the printer. But, always unlucky on leaving British shores, he missed his baggage from the boat when, after the bustle of embarkation, he looked to see that all was right. To have lost his manuscripts—his Jerome, his New Testament, the labours of so many years—to be on his way to Basle without the books for the printing of which he was taking the long journey—this was enough to weigh down his heart with a grief which he might well compare to that of a parent who has lost his children. It turned out, after all, to be a trick of the knavish sailors, who threw the traveller’s luggage into another boat in order to extort a few coins for its recovery. Erasmus, in the end, got his luggage back again; but he might well say that, though the passage was a good one, it was an anxious one to him.[483]