n old building without
bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
convenient but debasing superstition.

The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
surrounded.

'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people
are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'

'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'

The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.

We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
between the two men.

Six