ically Protestant reformation in which he
never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom
radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or to borrow a still
more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who
refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church zealots,
and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by
both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that
he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he
does not believe; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the
consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way
towards justifying the course he adopted.

Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual
shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of
Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond
imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to
rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard,
whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and
princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of
the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the
profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the
anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression.
The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy,
and who counted many of the best and most influential men in each
country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the
enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as
the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far
more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the
future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the
Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it
from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the
scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism,
however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow
fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others, and to a cautious
thinker, by whom, whatever his short-comings, the ethical ideal of the
Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question
whether it