"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute beast into a man."
So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"—for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (subdubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (paulo latinius). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only admitted—except when he was addressing his patrons—"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again.
[Sidenote: His wit]
But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed.
Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517—though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them—he foresaw. "In this part of the world," he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door!
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CHAPTER II
GERMANY
SECTION 1. THE LEADER
It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful reagent possible.