ed the useless discussion, but Erasmus's heart
was set upon winning his schoolmate to the doctrine which he believed
with his whole soul. He toiled with the utmost zeal, but during their
nocturnal walk also he failed to convince his opponent. Both were true
to their religion. Erasmus saw in his faith the return to the pure
teachings of Christ and the liberation of the human soul from ancient
fetters; Wolf, who had had them pointed out to him at school by a
Protestant teacher, by no means denied the abuses that had crept into
his, but he clung with warm love to Holy Church, which offered his soul
an abundance of what it needed.

His art certainly also owed to her its best development--from the
inexhaustible spring of faith which is formed from thousands of rivulets
and tributaries in the holy domain of the Catholic Church, and in it
alone, the most sublime of all material flowed to the musician, and not
to him only, but to the artist, the architect, and the sculptor. The
fullest stream--he was well aware of it--came from ancient pagan times,
but from whatever sources the spring was fed, the Church had understood
how to assimilate, preserve, and sanctify it.

Erasmus listened silently while Wolf eagerly made these statements; but
when the latter closed with the declaration that the evangelical faith
would never attain the same power of elevating hearts, he interrupted
the knight with the exclamation, "We shall have to wait for that!"

Luther, he went on, had given the most powerful encouragement to music,
and the German Protestant composers even now were not so very far behind
the Netherland ones. The Catholic Church could no longer claim the great
Albrecht Durer, and, if art ceased to create images of the saints, with
which the childish minds of the common people practised idolatry, so
much the better. The Infinite and Eternal was no subject for the artist.
The humanization of God only belittled his infinite and illimitable
nature. Earthly life offered art material enough. Man himself would
be the worthiest model for imitation, and perhaps no earlier epoch had
created handsomer likenesses of men and women than would now be produced
by evangelical artists.

To their own surprise, during this conversation they had reached the
Hiltner house, and Erasmus invited his friend to come to his room and
over a glass of wine answer him, as he had had the last word. But Wolf
had already drunk at his own home more of the fiery Wurz