But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.
The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.
It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.
This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.
And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.
Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed away.
But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually hold.
Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.