'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of blackguards—to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure—is not this worse than death?
'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot, for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'
This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had longed for, gave him peace at last.
So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.
Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded—so much of him as deserved to succeed—in Luther's victory.
He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who boasted louder of his courage.
And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he failed hopelessly—almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could any more have come of it.
Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.
When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised—then, for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.
And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his character how he came to achieve what he did.