But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”
The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.
That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned.
Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it applies to the ancestors.
“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens.
The answer is, “Why should he?”
It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where only one had been before.
Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over the individual man and you have made over the entire world!
Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.
In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.