be avoided. The existence of it in individuals can never justify the modification of law. The State and the Christian Church alike will find their greatest good in maintaining unbroken the general principles of right. Christians know that the individual who therefore suffers may find his highest welfare in his pain.

We have others to consider besides ourselves. The influence of England in America and the colonies is greater than we sometimes think. The branches of the Church in those countries in communion with the Church in England may be strengthened or weakened by much which we do. Young Churches in the mission field rightly look to us for help.

On every ground-to maintain the law of Christ which Providence has preserved in our own branch of the Church, to protect the best interests of the community at home, to exercise a healthful influence in the Church and in society abroad-we appeal to the Bishops. It is for them to strengthen the hands of the clergy. If they cannot alter the law of the State, they can at least protect the law of the Church. A decision of the English Episcopate declaring to the clergy the indissoluble character of the marriage bond and the need of maintaining the law of marriage by Church discipline, making clear to the laity that the Church in this land has not lost the power of the keys and has voice and strength, would do much for English Christianity and for the moral law.

ART. II. ERASMUS AND THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND.

Life and Letters of Erasmus. Lectures delivered in Oxford, 1893-4. By J. A. FROUDE, Regius Professor of Modern History. (London, 1894.)

THIS last fruit of a fertile tree is a worthy conclusion of its bearing. The author was perhaps rejoicing in the sense of his own art when he compared Erasmus's literary skill to that of Horace, who could make a dull journey to Brundusium interesting for all time. For the same admirable grace is found in the biographer himself. Macaulay's quick-trotting sentences and Carlyle's eccentricities of power may be wonderful, yet who would wish to write like them? Professor Froude had a style fit for any subject, and such as any man might imagine himself attaining, so easily does it seem to flow. Any man may imagine

himself attaining it, but if when his page is written he believes it to read like a page of Froude he is a prejudiced selfcritic indeed.

Between the charms of the style and the attractions of the subject, this biography of Erasmus is as interesting as the best of novels, and much more so than the second best. If it were not an insult to the muse of history, we should say that a reader of Charles Reade's admirable fiction, The Cloister and the Hearth, which tells the story of Erasmus's father, will find all his delight renewed by following on to the biography of the son as set before us in this volume. We do not mean to hint that the work is of kin to a novel, except in its life and interest. On the contrary, we consider this presentation of the great humanist as very just and fair. Its weakness lies in the fact which all the critics have recognized, that Mr. Froude's invincible judgments upon the history of the time enter unchecked and uncorrected into the biography, and fill a larger space in it than the proportions of the work required. Though the life of Erasmus by Mr. Drummond' is doubtless inferior in literary skill to the workmanship of Professor Froude, we must confess that it affords more complete materials upon the great man's personality. And there is more than one particular in which the judgments upon public affairs to which Professor Froude is committed, not only exclude interesting personal matter, but warp his opinion upon Erasmus's character and history.

For instance, the writer's determination to hold the worst opinion of monks and friars, for the justification of the later proceedings of his idol, Henry VIII., urges him to stamp with perfect accuracy every invective which Erasmus directs against them. We would by no means argue that this illustrious exposer of falsehood was himself untruthful. But, if we may use academic phrase he was truthful with the truthfulness of literæ humaniores rather than with that of mathematics. He has no objection to put, as Johnson has it, a cocked hat on his story and a gold-headed cane in its hand, any more than Livy or Thucydides had to enliven their history with speeches that were never spoken. Professor Froude himself well characterizes his truthfulness (p. 194) by saying that he had an intellectual contempt for lies and ignorance backed up by bigotry and superstition;' and equally

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1 Erasmus, his Life and Character. By Robert Blackley Drummond. 2 vols. London, 1873. We do not forget the work of Mr. Pennington, which is very meritorious within its limited space, but too much disposed to view the career of its subject from a Lutheran standpoint.

well marks its infirmity when he tells us (p. 31) that 'one must not take too literally the passionate expressions of a sensitive, emotional, and, evidently at the time, distracted man of genius.'

This refers to certain records of Erasmus's life in Paris. But we believe that emotion and passion renewed themselves in his mind whenever he thought of the coercion to which his inexperienced youth had been subjected by inferior men, and especially of the ugly reproach of solemn vows now broken with which they had loaded his memory. Nor can we recognize anything so dangerous in a letter to the court of Leo X. upon the wrongdoings of monks as should forbid our supposing that Erasmus made in it the worst of their misdeeds and the best of his own case. No doubt monasticism was fallen far from its first purity. No doubt culture and enlightenment found no friends among men whose thoughts were imprisoned in their rule. But before we determine to

believe that monasticism had been essentially bad for a hundred years before Erasmus, we must forget that Thomas à Kempis, that master of the spiritual life, had been a monk in the very regions where Erasmus's experiences were endured, and lived for four years after the birth of the scholar. The early life of Luther affords no such records of cloistered brutality and self-indulgence as Erasmus relates, and as Mr. Froude would pronounce universal. And if the monasticism of England so soon to be extinguished had left such evil odour behind it, would the monks and friars of Shakespeare have been the unworldly personages that they are?

Professor Froude gives a very plain proof of the limited credit which he extends to Erasmus's truthfulness by translating, with his own inimitable skill, the Julius Exclusus (p. 140 sq.), the authorship of which the scholar persistently denied. And we may remark that the biographers do not scem to have noticed that an additional reason for the Erasmian authorship of this relentless satire is found in its resemblance to the savage account of the post-mortem adventures of the Emperor Claudius from the pen of Seneca, a favourite author with Erasmus.'

Erasmus was a classicist, a man of the Renaissance. Intellectual restrictions were hateful to him; justly hateful, since he made such noble use of the liberty which he secured for himself at the expense of his vows. He found in his classic authors bright examples of poetry, history, and the observa1 Senecæ Op. Elzev. 1679, tom. ii. p. 686; Merivale's Roman Empire, ch. 1.

tion of life of the kindliness and the satire which were alike dear to him and in the Christian Fathers who wrote before the structure of formal knowledge which surrounded him was erected, he found the true authorities for Christian life. All these priceless treasures had been accumulated in times of liberty. By liberty alone could they be recovered for future times, and turned to the uses of new Christian generations. It was natural that the scholar should resent the attempt to fetter him.

Erasmus lived just at the time when his learning and his wit could win the highest appreciation. The Latin tongue in which his scholarship moved him to write was still the universal language of readers. And if readers were panting for better supplies of knowledge from a past so sacred to them, and yet so hidden from their eyes, they were also as eager to be amused as the very customers of Mr. Mudie. Erasmus had it in him to supply both wants, and when we learn that the Praise of Folly was published at the same time as the Greek Testament, it is as if we heard that Bishop Lightfoot on the morrow of the appearance of the St. Ignatius had sent out Vanity Fair.

Even in the latter days of Erasmus himself much was changed. The intellectual division of labour became inevitable. Religious questions waxed so desperately earnest, and reading spread so widely, that nothing but vernacular tongues could answer the need. The stores upon which scholarship drew became immense, Erasmus himself being among their chief contributors, and there was no longer room for a man to be at the same time a popular writer of fiction, an editor of Fathers, and a theological disputant. There could not have been another Erasmus in any age since his own, or, to speak more correctly, Erasmus in any age since his own must have written in a different language and for a different public; for the whole reading community of some one of the great nations, instead of the learned of them all. If his letters were 'humaniores' in comparison with the school divinity of his time, Luther and Montaigne and Shakespeare supplanted them as the century ran on by something more human still.

And this has made a great change in the meaning of classicism to our minds. Erasmus's studies in the classics are excursions into the land of liberty. There lay human nature undrilled and free to speak. There were the studies fit to delight the minds which desired liberty more than they feared licence. But so far has modern literature outrun the Renaissance that classicism stands for us as the observance of

form in opposition to the unrestrained luxuriance of later thought. And, in truth, developments of classicism grew up even in Erasmus's own time which he set himself distinctly to resist. Bishop Fitzgerald, an able historian, very sympathetic with Erasmus, is of opinion that the true design of his famous dialogue, the Ciceronian, is commonly misunderstood.'

'At first glance the reader might suppose that he held in his hand a mere satire upon the Italian purists, intended for no higher end than to ridicule a sickly fastidiousness about the style of Latin composition. But, in truth, its great author had a much greater object in view, and the furious resentment of the powerful personages whom he provoked shows that they well understood how thoroughly he had penetrated their secret. The fact is this. The profligacy of the clergy had produced as its natural consequence irreligion. Conscious that it was by trick and imposture their own system was supported, and, at the same time, ignorant of the true faith and its evidences, they could hardly fail of drawing the inference that Christianity itself was but a gainful delusion, while yet there was something in it (even in the base form it was compelled to wear) that made its awful denunciations against hypocrisy and impurity a heavy burden on its professors. Now, consider the effect which the recovery of the old pagan literature, in all the freshness and grace of novelty, must have had upon minds so prepared. Here they found whatever could encourage their profligate sensuality; here whatever might refine the taste or captivate the fancy. Here were unlocked for them all the treasures of ancient atheism in its most attractive and elegant disguises; here they found a popular mythology exactly suited to their purpose, beautiful in its forms, romantic in its fables, not grasping the mind like Christianity with a firm and unrelaxing hand, but holding it in airy and elastic fetters. . . . In short, the genius of paganism appeared to be on the point of becoming again triumphant in its ancient form, and Erasmus saw with alarm that in the very capital of Christendom, and beside the chair of its first bishop, the very semblance of a Christian profession was rapidly disappearing."1

It may be that a set purpose of restoring heathenism is here ascribed to what was but an unconscious tendency, and that ridicule of a forced and exaggerated classicism of style held a more prominent place in Erasmus's design than the bishop supposes. But, that besides the exquisite literary ridicule of the Ciceronian, there lay in its author's intention an imputation of heathenism against the Italian Renaissance, is upon the face of the work. And what the bishop does not observe is the fearful ease with which a secularized Papacy

1 Lectures on Ecclesiastical History, by William Fitzgerald, Bishop of Killaloe. London: Murray, 1885, ii. 180.