THE TRIUMPH OF ERASMUS IN

MODERN PROTESTANTISM.

PROFESSOR HENRY GOODWIN SMITH,
Cincinnati, Ohio.

PROTESTANTISM in the past certainly has not flattered Erasmus. The sanity and catholicity of his conceptions were long obscured in polemic dust. He was always the advocate of moderation and reason, but his gospel of peace fell on deaf ears in an age that demanded passion, intensity, and heroism. The men of his day were also prejudiced against his opinions by their unfavourable estimate of his character.

But there are signs that Erasmus is coming to his own. Protestantism seems to be making amends for its ungracious treatment by offering him now the sincere flattery of imitation. His distinctive principles are dominating Protestant scholarship, and the world, Mr Froude has told us, has come round to the Erasmian way.

The triumph of Erasmus is only too complete, for his popularity is not confined to his virtues. His strength lay in his conceptions; probably no man of his generation had a broader vision of truth. It is the glory of Protestantism that it has "caught his clear accents" and is learning to "speak his great language." He was weak in his convictions. His words were often ambiguous. His attitude toward the great dilemmas of his day was evasive. Dilemmas of all kinds he shrank from instinctively, and partisanship he abhorred. He saw truth on both sides of every actual issue.

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He wrote copiously on most of the great questions which then were agitating the minds of men; but his favourite mode of presenting his thoughts was the dialogue, in which it might be uncertain which of the contestants spoke for Erasmus. He yielded to ecclesiastical authority for the sake, he said, of the peace of the Church, but his real motives certainly included his own peace and security. He was unable to sacrifice himself for the sake of truth, but he had enough grace to

confess to this inability.

Luther towered above him as the rugged champion of honesty and personal liberty.

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To-day the spirit of Protestantism is striving against the letter. The moral rights of the individual thinker challenging the authority of the Church and the restrictions of the creeds, and Erasmus, as was his wont, is found speaking on both sides of the controversy. On the progressive side, his noble conceptions are inspiring the onward march and point toward the goal of Christian unity and love, which four centuries of Protestantism have failed to reach. On the other hand, we hear the duty of conformity to the Church placed above the rights of the individual, quite in the old Erasmian. way. On both sides of the Atlantic, the simple ethical demands of honesty and personal liberty of conscience are being subordinated to the exigencies of institutions and denominations. Ecclesiastical Protestantism is thus restraining the forces which brought it into existence, and which gave it its only reason for existence. These progressive forces are now resisted by the very arguments with which Erasmus, and his kind, opposed Protestantism, as a movement, in its beginning.

Many are looking forward earnestly to a new reformation as the logical, and the heroic, solution of these difficulties. Some seem to think that the proclamation of great, expansive religious truths, such as the Kingdom of God and the Fatherhood of God, is all that is necessary to hasten these days of refreshing. But history gives little encouragement

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to this confidence in the power of ideas. Every great upward movement in history was effected by moral forces or convictions far more than by intellectual conceptions. The simple Protestant virtues of frankness, straightforwardness and veracity will be the main inspiration in this reformation of Protestantism, if it ever comes to pass. The demands of these elemental moral instincts must be satisfied somewhere; if not inside Protestantism, then it must be outside. The ideas of Erasmus will point out the path of progress, but the passionate convictions and the outspoken honesty of Luther will be sorely needed before the path is trod.

In the great intellectual or doctrinal points at issue between Erasmus and Luther, the verdict to-day is in favour of Erasmus, or, at least, the tide of opinion is setting in his direction. There were five main questions in regard to which the two men differed fundamentally. These were the attitude toward the Papacy, the proper method of reforming the Church, toleration of opinion, the value of dogma, and the freedom of the human will.

I. The Attitude toward the Papacy.-In 1518 Luther promised to obey the voice of Leo as the voice of Christ. In 1519 he was uncertain whether the Pope was the apostle of Christ or antichrist. In the following year he decided the question and adopted the view of Wiclif and Huss. In the Babylonish Captivity he declared that "the Papacy is in truth nothing else than the kingdom of Babylon and of very antichrist." The Pope himself is a "stiff-necked, erring heretic and apostate." In 1521 he was still surer of his position. The Pope "is more wicked than all devils, for he damned the faith, which no devil had ever done, and he is the greatest murderer that has ever been since the beginning of the world, in that he kills souls as well as bodies."

Later in life he wrote, "I will curse and gird those wretches (the Papists) till I am in my grave, and they shall not hear another good word from me." It is probable that he carried out this promise faithfully. The conviction that the Pope

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was antichrist fortified him in his difficult and uncompromising position, and was the inspiration of his vehement utterances; but beyond this, it produced in his soul an exultation of assurance. "When I write against the Pope I am not melancholy. I write with joy of heart. Not the Pope and all his shaven crew can make me sad, for I know that they are Christ's enemies; therefore I fight against them with joyful courage."

Erasmus had no sympathy with Luther's determined, belligerent attitude. The fastidious taste of the great

Humanist could not abide the coarse bluntness of the Teuton Reformer. The Erasmian prudence and experience rejected the Wittenberg methods as crude and undiscriminating. Early in the controversy he wrote to Luther, advising him to denounce those who abused the Pope's authority, and not to abuse the Pope personally. In 1520 he explained to Campegio his own relation to Luther: "I told Luther that if he would moderate his language, he might be a shining light, and that the Pope, I do not doubt, would be his friend.'

The conscience of Erasmus also, as well as his taste and prudence, held him back from sympathy with the Lutheran programme. To Erasmus, Christianity consisted essentially in the spirit of love, wisdom, and goodness. He always opposed war and all controversies, although, by the irony of circumstance, he had to engage in controversy to defend his principles of peace. The main reason why Erasmus, when the crisis came, withheld his open sympathy from Luther, was not, as both Protestant and Romanist historians have sometimes taught, because he was a temporiser and a coward. He may, at times, have acted in a cowardly fashion, although he could speak out bold words in defence of other men. It would be hard to free him from the charge of temporising. But historians have often failed to recognise that his conscience restrained him from indorsing Luther's position. Erasmus could not approve of Luther's attitude toward the Pope or of his views of the Papacy.

Erasmus always considered the Papacy salvable. He

reverenced it, as Dante had done, although, like Dante, he had his own opinion of the character of some individual popes. Still, he believed, or at least said he believed, that Leo X. was a "pious Pope." The successors of Leo, Adrian and Clement, he thought were willing to compromise and find an agreement. "The difficulty," he wrote in his later life, "lay elsewhere." There is little question as to where he was pointing when he said "elsewhere." It was toward the convents of the mendicant monks, who were always his bitterest enemies, while popes and cardinals were his friends and confidential correspondents. Moreover, Erasmus was bound to Leo by strong ties of personal gratitude. He had been rescued twice from the restrictions and intolerance of the monks by the kind personal interposition of the Pope. He knew, also, that Leo had expressed openly his abhorrence of the irregular and immoral practices of the monks. Leo had read with relish his Encomium of Folly, in which the sins of monkery were denounced unsparingly, and even the faults of previous popes were ridiculed.

At bottom Erasmus and Leo were fellow-Humanists, though one happened to be wearing the scholar's cap and the other the triple crown. If Erasmus had no reason for considering that Leo X. was antichrist, he had much less reason for taking this dark view of his successor, Adrian VI. The earnestness and sincerity of Adrian is shown in his message to the Nuremberg Diet, in 1522 :—

"We are well aware that even in this Holy See, for many years past, much that is abominable has been going on--abuses in things spiritual, transgressions of commands: yea, that all things have been perverted to evil. We have all of us wandered from the right way, and we must therefore humble ourselves before God. As far as it lies with us to do anything in this matter we will use all diligence," etc.

We have all of us wandered from the right way, and we must therefore humble ourselves before God! These are excellent words to read, but they do sound a little incongruous in the lips of antichrist.

Luther massed together the Pope, the papal institution, the