was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge,
the end of which no mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up
Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual
claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean
fisherman.

Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of
Anabaptist communism which opened the apocalypse had succeeded, in
shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England,
with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter
tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long
agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated
France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the
spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead
Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry
triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its
train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends
sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a
somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially,
since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little
the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the
light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw
upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at
heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian";
and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the
precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century
"enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his
"Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.

In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestanism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By
this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate
became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism
in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with
equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism,
and Calvinism were merely three persons