.

'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
"Bar, bar, bar!"'

I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.

I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
themselves in a hundred years.'

Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet
these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'

'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
like fiery angels.'

And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
and the loathing of the service of God.'

Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods
cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste
everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,
which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on
in sleepy sensuality, dividing th