The Church, yea, even the Church of the earliest times, was made to bear the curse of having degraded woman and of having, by the religious life, declared war on marriage.
A contemporary, Petrus Silvius, who read Luther’s writings with indignation and disgust, wrote, in 1530: “Luther, with his usual lies and blasphemy, calumniates the Christian Church and now says, that she entirely rejected and condemned matrimony.”[581]
In what has gone before these falsehoods concerning the earlier degradation and his own exaltation of woman have been refuted at some length; the detailed manner in which this was done may find its vindication in the words of yet another opponent of Luther’s, H. Sedulius, who says: “It must be repeated again and again, that it is an impudent lie to say we condemn marriage.”[582]
CHAPTER XXIII
FRESH CONTROVERSIES WITH ERASMUS (1534, 1536) AND DUKE GEORGE († 1539)
[1. Luther and Erasmus Again]
In reply to Luther’s “De servo arbitrio” against Erasmus the latter had published, in 1526, a sharp retort entitled “Hyperaspistes,” which, in the following year, he enlarged by adding to it a second part.[583] In this work the author’s able pen brings into the light of day the weakness of Luther’s objections, his distortion of the Church’s teaching, his frequent misrepresentations of Erasmus and his own self-contradictions.
Luther did not then reply to the work of the chief of the Humanists. In the ensuing years, however, he became painfully aware that the hostility of Erasmus had lost him many adherents belonging to the Erasmian school. A great cleavage had become apparent in the scholar’s circle of friends till then so closely united, the greater number taking their master’s side against the smaller group which remained true to Luther. It was in vain that several of Erasmus’s admirers intervened and besought Luther to spare the feelings of the elder man. The Wittenberg professor made many cutting allusions to his opponent and assumed more and more an attitude which foreboded another open outburst of furious controversy.