Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'
When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,' Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been legions of Antichrists these many years.'
More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther—not from a noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the difference between him and them.'
He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.
'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'
Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely tempted as he was, he could not.
With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily; but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.
He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution, caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.
Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and pathetic:—
'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I, poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin—rats, mosquitoes, bugs, and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name. Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.