e it was worth while to die. He knew the great perils which
would be associated with it for one of his warlike temperament, but
he had become, by the divine summons, an evangelical theologian, a
combatant for the liberation of the slaves sighing under the tyranny of
Rome. A serious conversation with a friend who was a German and resisted
yielding to a movement of the spirit which was kindling the inmost
depths of the German nature, thoughts, and feelings, and was destined
to heal the woes of the German nation and preserve it from the basest
abuse, would be to him inconceivable.

Wolf interrupted this avowal with the assurance that he must
nevertheless decline a religious discussion with him, for the weapons
they would use were too different. Erasmus, as a theologian, was deeply
versed in the Protestant faith, while he professed Catholicism merely
as a consequence of his birth and with a layman's understanding and
knowledge. Yet he would not shun the conflict if his hands were not
bound by the most sacred of oaths. Then he turned to the past, and
while he himself, as it were, lived through for the second time the most
affecting moment in his existence, he transported his friend to his dead
mother's sick-bed.

In vivid language he described how the devout widow and nun implored her
son to resist like a rock in the sea the assault of the new heretical
ideas, that the thousands of prayers which she had uttered for him, for
his soul, and his father's, might not be vain.

Then Wolf confessed that just at that time, as a pupil in the school
of poets, he had come under the influence of the scholar Naevius, whose
evangelical views Erasmus knew, and related how difficult it had been
for him to take the oath which, nevertheless, now that he had once sworn
it, he would keep, even though life and his own intelligence would not
have taught him to prefer the old faith to every new doctrine, whether
it emanated from Luther, from Calvin, or from Zwingli.

For a short time Erasmus found no answer to this statement, and
Wolf's old nurse, who herself clung to the Protestants from complete
conviction, and had listened attentively to his words, urged her young
co-religionist, by all sorts of signs, to respect his friend's decision.

The confession of his schoolmate had not been entirely without effect
upon the young theologian. The name of "mother" also filled him with
reverence.

True, his birth had cost his own mother her life, but h