Ephraim Emerton

“ Did you think to abuse the authority of my name in order to enforce a belief you have yourself but lately begun to hold? I pray you, in the name of Christ, is that an Evangelical thing, to make so dreadful a charge against a friend in order to drag more persons into a new sect, as if we had not sects enough already? If your doctrine is a truly pious one, have you no other means of persuading men to it except this empty statement, that Erasmus agrees with you? But if my opinion is worth so much to you, why do you hold it of no account on the many points on which I differ from you?... ”

“ Oh! my dear Erasmus, if you could only see how wild with joy everyone here is, how they are congratulating themselves on having such a prince, how they pray for nothing more earnestly than for his life, you could not help weeping for joy. The very air is full of laughter, the earth dances, everything flows with milk and honey and nectar. Avarice slinks away far from the people; generosity scatters wealth with lavish hand. Our king is eager, not for gold, not for gems and precious stones, but for virtue, glory, and immortality. ”

“ Style is an instrument to be cultivated; it has a charm of its own worth the careful attention of the scholar; but, after all, style is only a means of conveying thought, and the object of it is to carry the highest thought in the clearest and most direct fashion.
Now one may well ask: How is all this nobility and elevation of purpose to be reconciled with the obvious personal limitations of Erasmus' character? How does this profound interest in the welfare of human society go with a self-centred, nervous dread of criticism which rises at times to the hysterical point? ”

“ For what may you not promise yourself from a prince whose extraordinary—nay, almost divine character is well known to you; to whom especially you are not merely known, but known familiarly—why, you have even received letters from him written with his own hand—a thing which has happened to few men. If you knew how like a hero he now appears, how wisely he conducts himself, how he loves truth and justice, what favour he is showing to men of letters, I dare swear, though you have no wings, you would fly over to us in all haste to greet this new and auspicious star. ”

“ The appeal of Italy, in short, to the historical imagination is, one would say, perhaps the most powerful that has ever come to a scholar's mind from that land of enchantment. It was a time, too, when men's thoughts and activities were turning eagerly to all that side of the new classical study. For a century and a half, ever since the days of Petrarch and Rienzi, the treasures of ancient art, Greek as well as Roman, had been brought to light, gathered into great collections, and made to do their part in the education of Europe. ”

“ The happiest times of life, says Folly, are youth and old age, and this for no reason but that they are the times most completely under the rule of folly, and least controlled by wisdom. It is the child's freedom from wisdom that makes it so charming to us; we hate a precocious child. So women owe their charm, and hence their power, to their "folly," i. e., to their obedience to impulse. "But if, perchance, a woman wants to be thought wise, she only succeeds in being doubly a fool, as if one should train a cow for the prize-ring, a thing wholly against nature." ”

“ Who is not being taught by Erasmus? In whom does not Erasmus reign?—I mean, of course, among those who have a true love of letters. For I am glad enough and I reckon it among the gifts of Christ, that there are many who do not approve of you. By this test I discern the gifts of a loving from those of an angry God, and I congratulate you that while you are most acceptable to all good men, you are equally disliked by those who would like to be thought the only great ones and the only ones to be accepted. ”

“ There is no class of fools to whom Erasmus pays his respects with heartier good will than to those whom he calls "grammarians." Folly claims these for her choicest sons. Nothing could be more wretched than their profession were it not for their foolish self-esteem and the skill with which they make others have as good an opinion of them as themselves. The pettiness of their aims, the nastiness of their schoolrooms, the tumult of their pupils, are all concealed by the friendly aid of Folly, who makes them believe themselves "rulers of a kingdom as great as that of Phalaris or Dionysius." ”

“ In pursuance of our principle not to pretend to know the motive of every act of Erasmus' life, we shall not attempt to give one answer that will fit all cases, but shall venture to be a little Erasmian ourselves and try to view this matter from more than one side.
We shall have done our work but badly so far if we have not made it clear that Erasmus believed in his right to bring all human institutions to judgment at the bar of his own mind and conscience. Nothing which offended his own sense of right could be wholly acceptable to him. ”

“ The generation in which Erasmus had grown up to his fiftieth year was eminently one of progress in every form of enlightenment and expansion. He was twenty-five when Columbus discovered America and gave the first impulse to that intoxicating sense of limitless possibility which from time to time has seized upon a generation of men and carried it on to great triumphs—but always also to disappointments more keenly felt than its successes. Along with the discovery of the earth had gone with equal, even with more rapid pace, the discovery of man. ”

“ That sense of an overwhelming grandeur, a something indescribably greater than all that had come since, which has fallen upon so many an Italian traveller, seems to have been entirely absent in his case. When Goethe entered Italy, it was with bated breath and reverent awe at the stupendous remains of a civilisation whose influence was even then potent in the lives of men. So far as Erasmus has left us any witness of himself his mind was occupied solely with the immediate profit of the moment: his doctor's degree, his new publisher, the petty comforts and discomforts of daily life. ”

“ Erasmus had asked: "If there is no freedom of will, who will try to amend his life?" Luther frankly replied, "No man. No man can. The elect will be amended by the divine spirit; the rest will perish unamended." Erasmus had said that a door would be opened to all iniquity by this doctrine. Luther says: "So be it; that is a part of the evil that is to be borne; but at the same time there is opened to the elect a door to salvation, an entrance into heaven, a way to God." ”

“ Perhaps the most striking argument of Erasmus against war is the utter hopelessness of it as a means of gaining the ultimate good of the state.
"'But,' they say, 'what safety will there ever be, if no one pursues his right?' By all means let right be pursued, if this be of advantage to the state, but let not the right of the prince be too costly to the people. And pray what safety is there now, when everyone is pursuing his right to the very death? We see wars arising from wars, war following upon war, and no limit or end to the confusion. ”

“ I am not a priest or a bishop.' Quite so, but you are a Christian, are you not? See to it whose man you be, if you are not a man of the Church. Christ is come into such contempt in the world, that they think it a fine thing and a royal to have no dealings with him and despise a person the more, the more closely he is bound to him. Do you not hear every day some angry layman throwing in our faces as a violent reproach the words 'Clerk!' 'Priest!' 'Monk!' and that with the same temper and the same voice as if he were charging us with incest or sacrilege? ”

“ Erasmus of Rotterdam, where art thou? Behold what the unjust tyranny of earthly power, the might of darkness, can do. Hear, thou champion of Christ! ride forth by the side of the Lord Christ; defend the truth; gain the martyr's crown! As it is, thou art but a frail old man. I have heard thee say thou hadst given thyself but a couple more years of active service; spend them, I pray, to the profit of the Gospel and the true Christian faith and believe me the gates of Hell, the See of Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee. ”

“ Let him well ponder this, that an expense once incurred at some emergency as pertaining to the advantage of the prince or the nobility, can never be abolished. When the emergency is past, not only ought the burden to be taken from the people, but the outlay of that former period ought, as far as possible, to be remedied and made good. Let him who cares for his people beware of the corrupt precedent. If he rejoices in the calamity of his own citizens or gives no thought to it, he is as far as can be from being a prince, no matter by what name he is called. ”

“ Real misery is to be out of harmony with Nature—shall we call man miserable because he cannot fly like the birds, nor walk on all fours like beasts? "We might as well call a war-horse unhappy because he doesn't know grammar and cannot eat pie." So Erasmus goes on, in extravagant praise, to glorify Nature as contrasted with Art. That life alone is happy which comes near to Nature, as that of bees and birds; the nearer these natural creatures are brought to the life of man, the more they degenerate. ”

“ Logically this isolation was the natural outcome of lifelong habit. To be free of all obligations was, we have continually noted, Erasmus' chief desire, and that motive, consistently followed, could lead nowhere else than to isolation. Yet here we touch once more upon that other side of his nature which had always been in conflict with the instinct of freedom. In spite of his individuality he needed approval. The breath of adulation was sweet to him. He could be shabby enough to a friend, if he thought himself injured, but that very sensitiveness betrayed his need of friendship. ”

“ The impulse to produce was in him an irresistible one. All he asked was opportunity, and the several patrons who, from time to time, contributed to his support must have felt that on his side the point of honour was fully met. One other consideration will perhaps help us to understand the exact feeling of Erasmus in entering upon what seems to us, perhaps, a condition of personal dependence. How, we may ask, could any man have that confidence in his own talent which would assure him against the dread that after all he might prove a bad investment? ”

“ Now ask, according to our rule, what he is doing:—if he is looking for praise or reward, he smacks of the flesh—not of the spirit. If he is merely indulging his own nature, doing what pleases him, this is not a thing to be proud of, but rather to be feared. There is your danger. You pray and you judge the man who prays not; you fast and you condemn the man who eats. Whoever does not do as you do, you think is inferior to you. Look out that your fasting be not to the flesh! ”

“ Delighted as he plainly was with everything and everybody in England, better treated than he had ever been in his life, why did not Erasmus take his own advice and settle down there in some regular occupation? So cosmopolitan a genius as his could hardly have dreaded a change of residence; the scholar's home was wherever the sun shone, and certainly never was man more free to follow the bent of his own wishes than was Erasmus. ”

“ The biographer of Erasmus is tempted to draw a somewhat pathetic picture of his last years; an aged man, broken with pain and disappointment, rejected by all parties, without influence in the world, living under continual fear of some unforeseen disaster,—these form, indeed, the elements for a sufficiently mournful description. And yet the end of Erasmus' course was such as he had been deliberately planning for himself all his life long. Isolation from all the various groupings of men upon great public questions had been his avowed ideal, and he had reached it. ”

“ By what names we call you, it matters little to you, for you do not think yourself to be other than what Homer calls the 'shepherd of the people' or Plato its 'guardian.' You have discovered a new way to increase the revenues of your nobles and of yourself: by diminishing expense instead of increasing taxes. Oh! wonderful soul! you deprive yourself that your subjects may abound; you deny yourself that there may be the more for the multitude. You keep watch, that we may sleep in safety. You are wearied with continual anxieties, that your own may have peace. ”

“ Marriage is all very well for those who cannot live otherwise, but it is a necessary evil. Earthly honours are vain and fleeting. If the great king Alexander himself could look upon the present world he would unquestionably warn us that even his unparalleled powers and dignities were as nothing compared with the victory of the man who knows how to govern himself. Death makes an end of all and does not wait for all to come to maturity, but cuts down many in the flower of their youth. ”