gospel
is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are
monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often
the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for
their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let
Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they
would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant
tyranny by human decrees!

[Sidenote: Colloquies]

In the _Familiar Colloquies_, first published in 1518 and often
enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious
ideas most sharply. Enormous as were the sales and influence of his
other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work,
intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. The first
conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but
the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art. Erasmus
is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in
writing a really exquisite Latin. But his supreme gift was his dry
wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple
matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in the
_Colloquies_, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at
Canterbury, the bloody bones and the handkerchief covered with the
saint's rheum offered to be kissed--all without a disapproving word and
yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how
anything so silly could ever have existed. Thus again he strips the
worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is
asked to abet. In the conversation called _The Shipwreck_, the people
pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it
is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They offer mountains of wax candles
to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his
neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one
penny taper on his vow. Again, in the _Colloquy on the New Testament_,
a young man is asked what he has done for Christ. He replies:

A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament
of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called
on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left
hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so
sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a
mere jelly. What do you say to that? Isn't that
maintaining the gospel? And then, by way of absolution for
his sins I took this book [Era