smus's New Testament, a
folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding
whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Ghost.

"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel
by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute
beast into a man."

So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the
leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions
without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he
undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued
against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"--for that is
the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary,
of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his
Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt"
(_subdubito_). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he
confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average"
(_paulo latinius_). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only
admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not
altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light
touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made
his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been
quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be
quoted as often again.

[Sidenote: His wit]

But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he
was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of
its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing
him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one
should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his
coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with
but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a
religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to
its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected
something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so
delicately conveyed.

Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a
letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his
letters on publishing them--he foresaw. "In this part of the world,"
he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It w