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
shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely
prized, it really was a fair question, whether it 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 "