What Erasmus says about Luther to others.
To the exasperated monks, who charged him with aiding and abetting Luther in writing the books which had caused such a tumult, he replied that, as he had not read them, he could not even express a decided opinion upon them.[748]
To Cardinal Wolsey he wrote, that he had only read a few pages of Luther’s books, not because he disliked them, but because he was so closely occupied with his own. Luther’s life was such that even his enemies could not find anything to slander. Germany had young men of learning and eloquence who would, he foretold, bring her great glory. Eobanus, Hutten, and Beatus Rhenanus were the only ones he knew personally. If these German students were too free in their criticisms, it should be remembered to what constant exasperation they had been submitted in all manner of ways, both public and private.[749]
To Hutten, who was perhaps the most hot-headed of these German young men, and whose satire had already proved itself more trenchant and bitter than any in which Erasmus had ever indulged, he urgedmoderation, and said that for himself he had rather spend a month in trying to explain St. Paul or the Gospels than waste a day in quarrelling.[750]
Erasmus is writing his ‘Paraphrases.’
Erasmus was, in fact, working hard at his ‘Paraphrases.’ That on the Epistle to the Romans had been already printed in 1517, in the very best type of Thierry Martins, and forming a small and very readable octavo volume. Those on the next seven epistles[751]now followed in quick succession in the spring of 1519. How fully the heart of Erasmus was in his work is incidentally shown by the fact that, being obliged to write a pamphlet in defence of a former publication of his, he cut it short by saying that he had rather be working at the Paraphrase on the ‘Galatians,’ which he was just completing.[752]And Erasmus was preparing, in addition to these Paraphrases on the Epistles, others, at Colet’s desire, more lengthy, on the Gospels. Here was work enough surely on hand to excuse him from entering into the Lutheran controversy—work precisely of that kind, moreover, which he had told Luther that he was devoting himself to. It was the work which, when he was longing for rest, and his zeal for the moment was threatening to flag, Colet had urged him to go on with through good and evil fortune; and which he himself, in his letter to Servatius, had said he was determined to work at to the day of his death. It is clear that he was in earnest when he told Hutten that he ‘had rather spend a month in expounding St. Paul than waste a day in quarrelling.’
It seems to me, therefore, that the attitude ofErasmus towards Luther was that, not of a coward, but of a man who knew what he was about.
VI. ELECTION OF CHARLES V. TO THE EMPIRE (1519).
On January 12, 1519, Maximilian had died. It is not within the scope of this history to trace the steps and countersteps, the plots and counterplots, the bribery and treachery—the Machiavellian means and devices—in which nearly every sovereign in Europe was implicated, to the detriment of both conscience and exchequer, and which ended in placing Charles V., then absent in Spain, at the head of the German empire. With the accession of the new emperor commenced a new political era, which belongs to the history of the Protestant Reformation, and not to that of the Oxford Reformers.
Erasmus was too hard at work at his Paraphrases to admit of his meddling in politics, even though he himself had an honorary connection with the court of the prince who was the successful candidate, and had written his ‘Christian Prince’ expressly for his benefit.
Colet was living in retirement, suffering from shattered health, too closely watched by the restless eye of his bishop to take any part in public affairs.[753]
Even More, though now a constant attendant upon Henry VIII., was probably not initiated into continental secrets, and even had he shared all the counsels of Wolsey, any part which he might play would be purely executive, and belong rather to the history ofhis own political career than to that of the fellow-work of the three friends. He probably had little or nothing really to do with Wolsey’s plottings to secure the empire for his master, in order that he might, on the death of Leo X., secure the Papal chair for himself. But there was one circumstance connected with the election of the Emperor of too much significance to be passed over in this history without distinct mention—the part which Duke Frederic of Saxony played in it; and this shall simply be alluded to in the words of Erasmus himself.
Noble conduct of the Elector of Saxony.
‘The Duke Frederic of Saxony has written twice to me in reply to my letter. Luther is supported solely by his protection. He says that he has acted thus for the sake rather of thecausethan of the person [of Luther]. He adds that he will not lend himself to the oppression of innocence in his dominions by the malice of those who seek their own, and not the things of Christ.’ And Erasmus goes on to say, that ‘when the imperial crown was offered to Frederic of Saxony by all [the electors], with great magnanimity he had refused it, the very day before Charles was elected. And’ (he writes) ‘Charles never would have worn the imperial title had it not been declined by Frederic, whose glory in refusing the honour was greater than if he had accepted it. When he was asked who he thought should be elected, he said that no one seemed to him able to bear the weight of so great a name but Charles. In the same noble spirit he firmly refused the 30,000 florins offered him by our people [i.e.the agents of Charles]. When he was urged that at least he would allow 10,000 florins to be given to his servants, “They may take them” (he said) “if they like, but no one shall remain myservant another day who accepts a single piece of gold.”’ ‘The next day’ (continues Erasmus) ‘he took horse and departed, lest they should continue to bother him. This was related to me as entirely reliable, by the Bishop of Liege, who was present at the Imperial Diet.’[754]
Well did the conduct of the Elector of Saxony merit the admiration of Erasmus. Would that Charles V. had merited as fully the patronage of the wise Elector!
It was a significant fact that, after all the bribery and wholesale corruption by which this election was marked, the only prince who in the event had a chance of success, other than Charles, was the one man who was superior to corruption, and would not allow even his servants to be bribed, who did not covet the imperial dignity for himself, but firmly refused it when offered to him—the protector of Luther against the Pope and the empire—the hope and strength of the Protestant Revolution which was now so rapidly approaching.
VII. THE HUSSITES OF BOHEMIA (1519).
While the election of the Emperor was proceeding the famous disputation at Leipzig took place, which commenced between Carlstadt and Eck, upon the question of grace and free-will, and was continued between Eck and Luther on the primacy of the Pope—that remarkable occasion on which, after pressing Eck into a declaration that all the Greek and other Christians who did not acknowledge the primacy of the Pope, were heretics and lost, Luther himself was finally driven to assert, probably as much to his own surprise as to that of his auditors, ‘that among the articles on whichthe Council of Constance grounded its condemnation of John Huss, were some fundamentally Christian and evangelical.’
Luther finds he is a Hussite.
Well might Duke George mutter in astonishment ‘a plague upon it.’ A few months later Luther himself, after pondering the matter over and over with his New Testament and Melanchthon, was obliged to exclaim, ‘I taught Huss’s opinions without knowing them, and so did Staupitz: we are all of us Hussites without knowing it! Paul andAugustineare Hussites! I do not know what to think for amazement.’[755]
Letter from Schlechta to Erasmus.The Pyghards of Bohemia.
Meanwhile, before Luther had come to the conclusionthat he himself, with St. Augustine, was aHussite, Erasmus had been in correspondence with Johannes Schlechta, a Bohemian,[756]on the religious dissensions which existed in Bohemia and Moravia, and with special reference to theHussitesect of the ‘Pyghards,’ or United Brethren.[757]Schlechta had informed Erasmusthat, setting aside Jews and unbelieving philosophers who denied the immortality of the soul, the people were divided into three sects:—First, the Papal party, including most of the magistrates and nobility. Secondly, a party to which he himself belonged, who acknowledged the Papacy, but differed from other good Catholics in dispensing the Sacrament in both kinds to the laity, and in chanting the Epistle and Gospel at mass, not in Latin, but in the vulgar tongue; to which customs they most pertinaciously adhered, on the ground that they were confirmed and approved in the Council of Basle (1431).[758]Thirdly, the sect of the ‘Pyghards’ [or ‘United Brethren’], who since the times of John Zisca[759]had maintained their ground through much bloodshed and violence. These, he said, regarded the Pope and clergy as manifest ‘Anti-christs;’ the Pope himself sometimes as the ‘Beast,’ and sometimes as the ‘Harlot’ of the Apocalypse. They chose rude and ignorant and even married laymen as their priests and bishops. They called each other ‘brothers and sisters.’ They acknowledged no writings as of authority but the Old and New Testaments. Fathers and Schoolmen they counted nothing by. Their priests used no vestments, and no forms of prayer but ‘the Lord’s Prayer.’ They thought lightly of the sacraments; used no salt or holy water—onlypure water—in baptism, and rejected extreme unction. They saw only simple bread and wine, no divinity, in the Sacrament of the Altar, and regarded these only as signs representing and commemorative of the death of Christ, who they said was in heaven. The suffrages of the saints and prayers for the dead they held to be vain and absurd, and also auricular confession and penance. Vigils and fasts they looked upon as hypocritical. The festivals of the Virgin, Apostles, and Saints, they said, were invented by the idle; Sunday, Christmas, Good Friday, and Pentecost they observed. Other pernicious dogmas of theirs were not worthy of mention to Erasmus. If, however (his Bohemian friend added), the first two of these three sects could but be united, then perhaps this vicious sect, now much on the increase, owing to recent ecclesiastical scandals, might, by the aid of the King, be eitherexterminatedor forced into a better form of creed and religion. Erasmus, he concluded, had now the whole circumstances of these Bohemian divisions before him.[760]
Here, then, Erasmus was brought into direct contact with the opinions of the very sect to which Luther was gradually approaching, but had not yet discovered his proximity.
The reply of Erasmus may be regarded, therefore, as evidence of his views, not only on the opinions and practices of the Hussites of Bohemia, but also as foreshadowing what would be his views with regard to the opinions and practices of Luther and the Protestant Reformers so soon as they should publicly profess themselves Hussites.
Reply of Erasmus.
‘You point out,’ (Erasmus wrote) ‘that Bohemia and Moravia are divided up into three sects. I wish, my dear Schlechta, that some pious hand could unite the three into one!’
The second party (Erasmus said) erred, in his opinion, more in scornfully rejecting the judgment and custom of the Roman Church than in thinking it right to take the Eucharist in both kinds, which was not an unreasonable practice in itself, though it might be better to avoid singularity on such a point. As to the ‘Pyghards,’ he did not see why it followed that the Pope was Antichrist, because there had been some bad popes, or that the Roman Church was the ‘harlot,’ because she had often had wicked cardinals or bishops. Still, however bad the ‘Pyghards’ might be, he would not advise a resort to violence. It would be a dangerous precedent. As to their electing their own priests and bishops, that was not opposed to primitive practice. St. Nicholas and St. Ambrose were thus elected, and in ancient times even kings were elected by the people. If they were in the habit of electing ignorant and unlearned men, that did not matter much, if only theirholy lifeoutweighed their ignorance. He did not see why they were to be blamed for calling one another ‘brothers and sisters.’ He wished the practice could obtain amongst all Christians, if only the fact were consistent with the words. In thinking less highly of the Doctors than of the Scriptures—that is, in preferring God to man—they were in the right; but altogether to reject them was as bad as altogether to accept them. Christ and the Apostles officiated in their everyday dress; but it is impious to condemn what was instituted, not without good reason, by the fathers. Vigils and fasts, inmoderation, he did not see why they rejected, seeing that they were commended by the Apostles; but he had rather that men wereexhortedthancompelledto observe them. Their views about festivals were not very different from Jerome’s. Nowadays the number of festivals had become enormous, and on no days were more crimes committed. Moreover, the labourer was robbed by so many festivals of his regular earnings.
As to the cure for these diseases of Bohemia: he desiredunity, and expressed his views how unity could be best attained.
Erasmus thinks the Church should be broad and tolerant.
‘In my opinion’ (he wrote) ‘many might be reconciled to the Church of Rome if, instead of everything being defined, we were contented with what is evidently set forth in the Scriptures or necessary to salvation. And these things arefewin number, and thefewerthe easier formanyto accept. Nowadays out of one article we make six hundred, some of which are such that men might be ignorant of them or doubt them without injury to piety. It is in human nature to cling by tooth and nail to what has once been defined. The sum of the philosophy of Christ’ (he continued) ‘lies in this—that we should know that all our hope is placed in God, who freely gives us all things through his son Jesus; that by his death we are redeemed; that we are united to his body in baptism in order that, dead to the desires of the world, we may so follow his teaching and example as not only not to admit of evil, but also to deserve well of all; that if adversity comes upon us we should bear it in the hope of the future reward which is in store for all good men at the advent of Christ. Thus we should always be progressing from virtue to virtue, and whilst assumingnothing to ourselves, ascribe all that is good to God. If there should be anyone who would inquire into the Divine nature, or the nature (hypostasis) of Christ, or abstruse points about the sacraments, let him do so; only let him not try to force his views upon others. In the same way as very verbose instruments lead to controversies, so too many definitions lead to differences. Nor should we be ashamed to reply on some questions: “God knows how this should be so, it is enough for me to believe that it is.” I know that the pure blood and body of Christ are to be taken purely by the pure, and that he wished it to be a most sacred sign and pledge both of his love to us and of the fellowship of Christians amongst themselves. Let me, therefore, examine myself whether there be anything in me inconsistent with Christ, whether there be any difference between me and my neighbour. As to the rest,howthe same body can exist in so small a form and in so many places at once, in my opinion such questions can hardly tend to the increase of piety. I know that I shall rise again, for this was promised to all by Christ, who was the first who rose from the dead. As to the questions, with what body, and how it can be the same after having gone through so many changes, though I do not disapprove of these things being inquired into in moderation on suitable occasions, yet it conduces very little to piety to spend too much labour upon them. Nowadays men’s minds are diverted, by these and other innumerable subtleties, from things of vital importance. Lastly it would tend greatly to the establishment of concord, if secular princes, and especially the Roman Pontiff, would abstain from all tyranny and avarice. Formen easily revolt when they see preparations for enslaving them, when they see that they are not to be invited to piety but caught for plunder. If they saw that we were innocent and desirous to do them good, they would very readily accept our faith.’[761]
It will be seen that the point of this letter turns notdirectlyupon the difference which Luther had discerned between himself and Erasmus (viz. that the one rejected and the other accepted the doctrinal system of St. Augustine), but rather upon questions involving the duty and object of ‘the Church.’ From More’s delineation of the Church of Utopia, it has been seen that the notion of the Oxford Reformers was that the Church was intended to be broad and tolerant, not to define doctrine and enforce dogmas, but to afford a practical bond of union whereby Christians might be kept united in one Christian brotherhood, in spite of their differences in minor matters of creed. In full accordance with this view, Erasmus had blamed Schlechta and his party, in this letter, not for holding their peculiar views respecting the ‘Supper,’ but for making them a ground for separation from their fellow-Christians. So also he blamed Schlechta (himself a dissenter from Rome) for his harsh feelings towards the ‘Pyghards’ and his wish ‘to exterminate’ them. So, too, whilst sympathising strongly with the poor ‘Pyghards’ in many of the points in which they differed from the Church of Rome, he blamed them for jumping to the conclusion that the Church was ‘Antichrist,’ and for flying into extremes. So, too, he blamed the Church herself, as he always had blamed her, for so narrowing her boundaries as toshut out these ultra-dissenters of Bohemia from her communion.
Now it is obvious that at the foundation of the position here assumed by Erasmus, and elsewhere by the Oxford Reformers, lay the conviction that many points of doctrine were in their nature uncertain and unsettled—that many attempted definitions of doctrine, on such subjects as those involved in the Athanasian Creed, in the Augustinian system, and in scholastic additions to it, were, after all, and in spite of all the ecclesiastical authority in the world, just as unsettled and uncertain as ever; in fact, mere hypotheses, which in their nature nevercanbe verified.
The point at issue between the Oxford Reformers and those who held by the Augustinian system.
Here again, therefore, wasindirectlyinvolved the point at issue between Erasmus and Luther; between the Oxford and the Wittemberg Reformers. For the latter in accepting the Augustinian system still adhered, in spirit, to the scholastic or dogmatic system of theology. To treat questions such as those above mentioned as open and unsettled seemed to them to be playing the part of the sceptic. Luther was honestly and naturally shocked when he found Erasmus hinting that the doctrine of ‘original sin’ was in some measure analogous to the epicycles of the astrologer. He was equally shocked again when Erasmus, a few years after, treated the question of the Freedom of the Will as one insoluble in its nature, involving the old philosophical questions between free-will and fate.[762]And why washe shocked? Because the Augustinian system which he had adopted, treated these questions as finally concluded. And how were they concluded? By the judgment of the church based upon a verbally inspired and infallible Bible.
Luther did not indeed assert so strongly the verbal inspiration of the Bible, much less of the Vulgate version, as Dr. Eck and other Augustinian theologians had done; yet his standing-point obliged him practically to assume the truth of this doctrine, as it obliged his successors more and more strongly to assert it as the years rolled on. And so, whilst rejecting, even more thoroughly than Erasmus ever did, the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of Rome, yet it is curious to observe that, in doing so, Luther did not reject the notion of ecclesiastical authority in itself, but rather, amidst many inconsistencies, set up the authority of what he considered to be thetruechurch against that of the church which he regarded as thefalseone. As a consistent Augustinian he was driven to assume, in replying to the Wittemberg prophets on the one hand and the scepticism of Erasmus on the other, that there is a true church somewhere, and that somewhere in the true church there is an authority capable of establishing theological hypotheses. He was not willing that the Scriptures should be left simply to the private judgment of each individual for himself. He even allowed himself to claim for the public ministers of his own church—‘the leaders of the people and the preachers of the word’—authority ‘not only for themselves but also for others, and for the salvation of others, to judge with the greatest certainty the spirit and dogmas of all men.’[763]
Not that Luther always consistently upheld this doctrine any more than Erasmus consistently upheld its opposite. Luther was often to be found asserting and using the right of private judgment against the authority of Rome, as Erasmus was often found upholding the authority of the Catholic Church and her authorised councils against the rival authority of Luther’s schismatic and unauthorised church. In times of transition, menareinconsistent; and regard must be had rather to the direction in which they are moving than the precise point to which at any particular moment they may have attained. And what I wish to impress upon the reader is this—that not only Luther, but all other Reformers, from Wickliffe down to the modern Evangelicals, who have adopted the Augustinian system and founded their reform upon it, have practically assumed as the basis of their theology, first, the plenary inspiration of each text contained in the Scriptures; and, secondly, the existence of an ecclesiastical authority of some kind capable of establishing theological hypotheses; so that,in this respect, Luther and other Augustinian reformers, instead of advancing beyond the Oxford Reformers, have lagged far behind, seeing that they have contentedly remained under a yoke from which the Oxford Reformers had been labouring for twenty years to set men free.
The power of St. Augustine.
In saying this I am far from overlooking the fact, that the Protestant Reformers, in reverting to a purer form of Augustinian doctrine than that held by the Schoolmen, did practically by it bring Christianity tobear upon men with a power and a life which contrasted strangely with the cold dead religion of the Thomists and Scotists. I am as far also from underrating the force and the fire of St. Augustine. What, indeed, must not that force and that fire have been to have made it possible for him to bind the conscience of Western Christendom for fourteen centuries by the chains of his dogmatic theology! And when it is considered, on the one hand, that the greatest of the Schoolmen wereso loyalto St. Augustine, that some of their subtlest distinctions were resorted to expressly to mitigate the harshness of the rigid results of his system, and thus were attempts, not to get from under its yoke, butto make it bearable;[764]and, on the other hand, that the chiefreactionsagainst scholastic formalism—those of Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, the Portroyalists, the Puritans, the modern Evangelicals—wereAugustinianreactions; so far fromunder-estimating the power of the man whose influence was so diverse and so vast, it may well become an object of ever-increasing astonishment to the student of Ecclesiastical History.
At the same time, these considerations must raise also our estimate of the need and the value of the firm stand taken 350 years ago by the Oxford Reformersagainst this dogmatic power so long dominant in the realm of religious thought. It has been seen in every page of this history, that they had taken their standpoint, so to speak,behindthat of St. Augustine; behind even the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom; behind those patristic hypotheses which grew up into the scholastic theology; behind that notion of Church authority by which these hypotheses obtained a fictitious verification; behind the theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ without which the Scriptures could not have been converted, as they were, into a mass of raw material for the manufacture of any quantity of hypotheses—behind all these—on the foundation offactwhich underlies them all.
The essential difference between the standpoints of the Protestant and Oxford Reformers Luther had been the first to perceive. And the correctness of this first impression of Luther’s has been singularly confirmed by the history of the three-and-a-half centuries of Protestant ascendency in Western Christendom. The Protestant movement, whilst accomplishing by one revolutionary blow many objects which the Oxford Reformers were striving and striving in vain to compass by constitutional means, has been so far antagonistic to their work in other directions as to throw it back—not to sayto wipe it out of remembrance—so that in this nineteenth century those Christians who have desired, as they did, to rest their faith upon honest facts, and not upon dogmas—upon evidence, and not upon authority—instead of taking up the work where the Oxford Reformers left it, have had to begin it again at the beginning, as Colet did at Oxford in 1496. They have had, like the Oxford Reformers, to combat at the outsetthe theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ and the tendency inherited along with it from St. Augustine, by both Schoolmen and Protestant Reformers, to build up a theology, as I have said, upon unverified hypotheses, and to narrow the boundaries of Christian fellowship by the imposition of dogmatic creeds so manufactured. They have had to meet the same arguments and the same blind opposition; to bear the same taunts of heresy and unsoundness from ascendant orthodox schools; to be pointed at by their fellow-Christians as insidious enemies of the Christian faith, because they have striven to present it before the eyes of a scientific age, as what they think it really is—nota system of unverified hypotheses, but a faith infactswhich it would be unscientific even in a disciple of the positive philosophy to pass by unexplored.
VIII. MORE’S DOMESTIC LIFE (1519).
By the aid of a letter from Erasmus to Ulrich Hutten,[765]written in July 1519, one more lingering look may be taken at the beautiful picture of domestic happiness presented by More’s home. This history would be incomplete without it.
More forty years old.His first wife.
The ‘young More,’ with whom Colet and Erasmus had fallen in love twenty years ago, was now past forty.[766]The four motherless children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John, awhile ago nestling round their widowed father’s knee, as the dark shadow of sorrow passed over the once bright home in Bucklersbury, were now from ten to thirteen years old. The good stepmother, Alice Middleton, is said to have ruledher household well, and her daughter had taken a place in the family circle as one of More’s children. There was a marked absence of jarring or quarrelling,[767]which in such a household bore witness to the goodnature of the mistress. She could not, indeed, fill altogether the void left in More’s heart by the loss of his first wife—the gentle girl brought up in country retirement with her parents and sisters, whom he had delighted to educate to his own tastes, in letters and in music, in the fond hope that she would be to him a lifelong companion,[768]and respecting whom, soon after his second marriage, in composing the epitaph for the family tomb, in whichshewas already laid, he had written this simple line:—
‘Cara Thomæ jacet hic Joanna uxorcula Mori!’[769]
His second wife.
The ‘dame Alice,’ though somewhat older than her husband and matronly in her habits, ‘nec bella nec puella,’ as he was fond of jokingly telling her, out of deference to More’s musical tastes, had learned to sing and to play on the harp;[770]but, after all, she was more of the housekeeper than of the wife. It wasnot to her but to his daughter Margaret that his heart now clung with fondest affection.
More’s true piety.
More himself, Erasmus described to Hutten as humorous without being foolish, simple in his dress and habits, and, with all his popularity and success, neither proud nor boastful, but accessible, obliging, and kind to his neighbours.[771]Fond of liberty and ease he might be, but no one could be more active or more patient than he when occasion required it.[772]No one was less influenced by current opinion, and yet no man had more common sense.[773]Averse as he was to all superstition, and having shown in his ‘Utopia’ what were regarded in some quarters as freethinking tendencies, he had to share with Colet the sneers of the ‘orthodox,’ yet a tone of unaffected piety pervaded his life. He had stated times for devotion, and when he prayed, it was not as a matter of form, but from his heart. When, too, as he often did, he talked to his intimate friends of the life to come, Erasmus tells Hutten that he evidently spoke from his heart, and not without the brightest hope.[774]
The children’s animals.Their celebrated monkey.
He was careful to cultivate in his children not only a filial regard to himself, but also feelings of mutual interest and intimacy. He made himself one of them, and took evidently as much pleasure as they did in their birds and animals—the monkey, the rabbits, the fox, the ferret, and the weasel.[775]Thus when Erasmus was a guest at his house, More would take him into the garden to see the children’s rabbit hutches, or towatch the sly ways of the monkey; which on one occasion so amused Erasmus by the clever way in which it prevented the weasel from making an assault upon the rabbits through an aperture between the boards at the back of the hutch, that he rewarded the animal by making it famous all over Europe, telling the story in one of his ‘Colloquies.’[776]Whereupon so important a member of the household did this monkey become, that when Hans Holbein some years afterwards painted his famous picture of the household of Sir Thomas More, its portrait was taken along with the rest, and there to this day it may be seen nestling in the folds of dame Alice’s robes.
Their interest in his pursuits.
If More thus took an interest in the children’s animals, so they were trained to take an interest in his pictures, his cabinet of coins and curiosities, and his literary pursuits. He did everything he could to allure his children on in acquiring knowledge. If an astronomer came in his way he would get him to stay awhile in his house, to teach them all about the stars and planets.[777]And it surely must have been More’s children whom Erasmus speaks of as learning the Greek alphabet by shooting with their bows and arrows at the letters.[778]
Letter to his children in verse.
Unhappily of late More had been long and frequently absent from home. Still, even when away upon an embassy, trudging on horseback dreary stages along the muddy roads, we find him on the saddle composing a metrical letter in Latin to his ‘sweetest children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John,’ which, when a second edition of his ‘Epigrams’ was called for, was added at the end of the volume and printed with therest by the great printer of Basle[779]—a letter in which he expresses his delight in their companionship, and reminds them how gentle and tender a father he has been to them, in these loving words:—
Kisses enough I have given you forsooth, but stripes hardly ever,If I have flogged you at all it has been with the tail of a peacock!··········Manners matured in youth, minds cultured in arts and in knowledge,Tongues that can speak your thoughts in graceful and elegant language:—These bind my heart to yours with so many ties of affectionThat now I love you far more than if you were merely my children.··········Go on (for you can!), my children, in winning your father’s affection,So that as now your goodness has made me to feel as though neverI really had loved you before, you may on some future occasion,··········Make me to love you so much that my present love may seem nothing!
What a picture lies here, even in these roughly translated lines, of the gentle relation which during years of early sorrow had grown up between the widowed father and the motherless children!
It is a companion-picture to that which Erasmus drew in colours so glowing, of More’s home at Chelsea many years after this, when his children were older and he himself Lord Chancellor. What a gleam of light too does it throw into the future, upon that last farewell embrace between Sir Thomas More andMargaret Roper upon the Tower-wharf, when even stern soldiers wept to behold their ‘fatherly and daughterly affection!’
More’s character.
This was the man whom Henry VIII. had at last succeeded in drawing into his court; who reluctantly, this summer of 1519,[780]in order that he might fulfil his duties to the King, had laid aside his post of under-sheriff in the city and his private practice at the bar; ‘who now,’ to quote the words of Roper, ‘was often sent for by the King into his traverse, where sometimes in matters of astronomy, geometry, divinity, and such other faculties, and sometimes of his worldly affairs, he would sit and confer with him. And otherwhiles in the night would he have him up into the leads there to consider with him the diversities, courses, motions, and operations of the stars and planets.
‘And because he was of a pleasant disposition, it pleased the King and Queen after the Council had supped for their pleasure commonly to call for him to be merry with them. Till he,’ continues Roper, ‘perceiving them so much in his talk to delight that he could not once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and his children (whose company he most desired), and to be absent from court two days together but that he should be thither sent for again; much misliking this restraint of his liberty, began thereupon somewhat to dissemble his nature, and so by little and little from his former mirth to disuse himself.’[781]
This was the man who, after ‘trying as hard tokeep out of court as most men try to get into it,’ had accepted office on the noble understanding that he was ‘first to look unto God, and after God to the King,’ and who under the most difficult circumstances, and in times most perilous, whatever may have been his faults and errors, still
Reverenced his conscience as his King,
and died at last upon the scaffold, a martyr to integrity!
IX. THE DEATH OF COLET (1519).
Erasmus was working hard at his Paraphrases at Louvain, when the news reached him thatColet was dead! On the 11th September Pace had written to Wolsey that ‘the Dean of Paul’s had lain continually since Thursdayin extremis, but was not yet dead.’[782]He had died on the 16th of September 1519.
The grief of Erasmus on hearing of it.His estimate of Colet’s character.
When Erasmus heard of it, he could not refrain from weeping. ‘For thirty years I have not felt the death of a friend so bitterly,’[783]he wrote to Lupset, a young disciple of Colet’s. ‘I seem,’ he wrote to Pace, ‘as though only half of me were alive, Colet being dead. What amanhasEnglandand what afriendhaveIlost!’ To another Englishman he wrote, ‘What avail these sobs and lamentations? They cannot bring him back again. In a little while we shall follow him. In the meantime we should rejoice for Colet. He now is safely enjoyingChrist, whom he always had upon his lips and at his heart.’[784]To Tunstal, ‘I should be inconsolable for the death of Colet did I not knowthat my tears would avail nothing for him and for me;’[785]and to Bishop Fisher, ‘I have written this weeping for Colet’s death.... I know it is all right with him who, escaped from this evil and wretched world, is in present enjoyment of that Christ whom he so loved when alive. I cannot help mourning in the public name the loss of so rare an example of Christian piety, so remarkable a preacher of Christian truth!’[786]And, in again writing to Lupset, a month or two afterwards, a long letter, pouring his troubles, on account of a bitter controversy which Edward Lee had raised up against him, into the ears of Lupset, instead of, as had hitherto been his wont, into the ears of Colet, he exclaimed in conclusion, ‘O true theologian! O wonderful preacher of evangelical doctrine! With what earnest zeal did he drink in the philosophy of Christ! How eagerly did he imbibe the spirit and feelings of St. Paul! How did the purity of his whole life correspond to his heavenly doctrine! How many years following the example of St. Paul, did he teach the people without reward!’[787]‘You would not hesitate,’ finally wrote Erasmus to Justus Jonas, ‘to inscribe the name of this man in the roll of the saints although uncanonised by the Pope.’
More’s estimate of Colet’s character.
‘For generations,’ wrote More, ‘we have not had amongst us any one man more learned or holy!’[788]
The inscription on the leaden plate laid on the coffin of Dean Colet[789]bore witness that he died ‘to the greatgrief of the whole people, by whom, for his integrity of life and divine gift of preaching, he was the most beloved of all his time;’ and his remains were laid in the tomb prepared by himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
X. CONCLUSION.