That the same anti-Christian and sceptical tendencies were equally prevalent in the sphere of practical morality and politics as in that of speculative philosophy, was also painfully obvious. That popes themselves had discarded Christianity as the standard of their own morality both in social and political action, had for generations been trumpeted forth to the world by their own sensual lives, and their faithless and immoral political conduct. When in the ‘Praise of Folly’ Erasmus had satirised the policy of popes, he had put a sting to his description of their unchristian conduct by adding that they acted ‘as though Christ were dead.’[525] The greatest political philosopher of the age had already written his great work ‘The Prince,’ in which he had codified, so to speak, the maxims of the dominant anti-Christian school of politics, and framed a system of political philosophy based upon keen and godless self-interest, and defying, if not in terms denying, both the obligation and policy of the golden rule—a system which may be best described, in a word, by reference to the name of its author, as Machiavellian.[526]

The dogmatic school, equally anti-Christian in its practice,

On the other hand, opposed to the new ‘learning,’ and its anti-Christian tendencies, was the dogmatic system of the Schoolmen, defended with blind bigotry by monks and divines of the old school. These had done nothing during the past twenty years to reconcile their system with the intellectual tendencies of their age. They were still straining every nerve to keep Christianity and reviving science hopelessly apart. Their own rigidly defined scholastic creed, with all its unverified hypotheses, rested as securely as ever, in their view, on the absolute inspiration of the Vulgate version of the Bible: witness the letter of Dorpius. No new light had disturbed the entire satisfaction with which they regarded their system, or the assurance with which they denounced Greek and Hebrew as ‘heretical tongues,’ derided all attempts at free inquiry, and scornfully pointed to the sceptical tendencies of the Italian school as the result to which the ‘new learning’ must inevitably lead.

and in its politics.

And yet the practical results of this proudly orthodox philosophy were as notoriously anti-Christian, both as regards social and political morality, as was the Machiavellian philosophy, at which these professed Christians pointed with the finger of scorn. Again and again had Erasmus occasion bitterly to satirise the gross sensuality in which as a class they grovelled. Again and again had he to condemn their political influence, and the part they played in prompting the warlike and treacherous policy of princes whose courts they infested.[527]

And passages have already been quoted from the ‘Praise of Folly’ in which Erasmus pointed out how completely they had lost sight of the one rule of Christian morals—the golden rule of Christ—how they had substituted a new notion of virtue for the Christian one, and how the very meaning of the word ‘sin’ had undergone a corresponding change in their theological vocabulary.

Neither party had practical faith in Christianity.

Such were the two opposing parties, which, in this age of intellectual re-awakening and progress, were struggling in hopeless antagonism; both of them for the sake of ecclesiastical emoluments still professing allegiance to the Church, and keeping as firm a foothold as possible within her pale, but both of them practically betraying at the same time their real want of faith in Christianity by tacitly setting it aside as a thing which would not work as the rule of social and political life.

Erasmus, in writing the preface to his ‘Novum Instrumentum,’ had his eye on both these dominant parties. He, like Colet, believed both of them to be leading men astray. He believed, with Colet, that there was a Christianity which rested on facts and not upon speculation, and which therefore had nothing to do with the dogmatic theology of the Schoolmen on the one hand, and nothing to fear from free inquiry on the other. To ‘call men as with the sound of a trumpet’ to this, was the object of the earnest ‘Paraclesis’ which he prefixed to his Testament.

He first appealed to the free-thinking philosophic school:—