Because I bade monks
remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'

This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
longed for, gave him peace at last.

So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.

Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as
deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.

He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
boasted louder of his courage.

And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he
failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
any more have come of it.

Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.

When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,
for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.

And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
character how he came to achieve what he did.

You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
kidna