All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity cannot be said to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.
And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go back to my history.
When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely return to this earth.
That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.
The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity. And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who regarded their interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.
Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book, few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known as Erasmus.
For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.
Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the effects of the drug.
It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring, their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal shores.