As for his alleged blasphemy concerning Christ’s birth from the Virgin Mary, Erasmus protests: “I can swear I never said anything of the kind either in a letter, as Luther makes out, though he fails to say which, or in any of my writings.” Moreover he was a little surprised to find Luther, whose own language was not remarkable for modesty, suddenly transformed into a champion of cleanliness of speech: “Everything, bridegroom, bride and even best man, seems of a sudden to have become obscene to this Christian Luther,” etc.
Erasmus also points out that the passage concerning the Creed being a mere fable had been invented by Luther himself by means of deliberate “distortion” and shameful misinterpretation: “No text,” he exclaims, “is safe from his calumny and misrepresentation.” As for what Luther had said, viz. that “whoever tells untruths lies even when he speaks the truth,” and that he would refuse to believe Erasmus even were he to make an orthodox profession of faith, Erasmus’s retort is: “Whoever spoke this bit of wisdom was assuredly out of his senses and stood in need of hellebore” (the remedy for madness). As to the charge of deliberately leading others into infidelity he does not shrink from telling Luther, that “he will find it easier to persuade all that he has gone mad out of hatred, is suffering from some other form of mental malady, or is led by some evil genius.”[603]
Luther took good care to say nothing in public about the rebuff he had received from Erasmus; nor did he ever make any attempt to refute the charge of having “lied.”
In the circle of his intimate friends, however, he inveighed all the more against the leader of the Humanists as a sceptic and seducer to infidelity.
After Erasmus’s death he declared that, till his end (1536), he lived “without God.” He refused to give any credence to the report that he had displayed faith and piety at the hour of death. Erasmus’s last words were: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I will extol the mercies of the Lord and His judgments.”[604] Luther, on the other hand, in his Latin Table-Talk says: “He died just as he lived, viz. like an Epicurean, without a clergyman and without comfort.... ‘Securissime vixit, sicut etiam morixit,’” he adds jestingly. “Those pious words attributed to him are, sure enough, an invention.”[605]
Erasmus, he says,—revealing for once the real ground of all his hatred—“might have been of great service to the cause of the Evangel; often was he exhorted to this end.... But he considered it better that the Gospel should perish and not be preached than that all Germany should be convulsed and all the Princes be troubled with risings.” “He refuses to teach Christ,” he said of him during his lifetime; “he does not take it seriously, that is the way with all Italians and with them he has had much intercourse. One page of Terence is better than his whole ‘Dialogus’ or his ‘Colloquium’; he mocks not only at religion but even at politics and at public life. He has no other belief than the Roman; he believes what Clement VII believes; this he does at his command, and yet at the same time sneers at it.... I fear he will die the death of the wicked.”[606] After the scholar’s decease, Luther naturally desired to find his prophecy fulfilled.
An obvious weapon, one constantly employed against Luther by his foes, was to twit him with his lies; a reply addressed to him in 1531 by a friend of George of Saxony, Franz Arnoldi of Cöllen, near Meissen, was no exception to the rule. In this little work entitled “Antwort auf das Büchlein,” etc., it is not merely stated that Luther, in his “Auff das vermeint Keiserlich Edict,” had put forward “as many lies as there were words,”[607] but it is also pointed out that the Augsburg Edict, “which is truly Christian and requires no glosses,” had been explained by him most abominably and shamefully, and given a meaning such as His Imperial Majesty and those who promulgated or executed it had never even dreamt of.[608] “He promises us white and gives us black. This has come down to him from his ancestor, the raging devil, who is the father of lies.... With such lies does Martin Luther seek to deck out his former vices.”[609]