Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/28

 20 ERASMUS January although it was only in his later years that he asserted salvation by faith alone, with emphasis on the qualification ' alone ', yet he had the germ of this beUef in earlier years, certainly in 1516. Erasmus, on the other hand, laid stress upon the freedom of man's will and upon the necessity of good works. A life of righteousness was, with him, the first condition. With Luther, righteousness was fundamentally a theological expression, a part of theology and not of life. And the explanation of this funda- mental difference is to be found in the differing conceptions the two men had of the church. Luther really cared little for the church, for its organization and its resulting effect upon life. Erasmus, on the other hand, looked upon it as the earthly sphere in which man lived and where he came into vital touch with God. Here Erasmus, the scholar, was practical, while Luther, who, in the end, worked a revolution in life, was theoretical. But the difference prevented the two from working together. Writing to John Lang, his friend of early Erfurt and Witten- berg days, Luther spoke of ' our Erasmus ' (1517).* The name of Erasmus was a fashionable one in all universities, and Luther, like all students, had come under its fascination. Moreover, he looked with pleasure at the attack made by Erasmus upon abuses of all kinds, and he welcomed his ridicule of ignorance among monks. But even thus early Luther saw by instinct that he and Erasmus were certain to go different ways ; through their common correspondent, Spalatin, he urged Erasmus to emphasize St. Paul's apparent condemnation of the righteousness of works. And he was eager to point out (in a way more significant than tactful) that to be a good scholar was very different from being a good Christian. In other words Luther was something of a mystic, and inclined, like Wyclif before him and many other revivalists after him, to underrate human learning. If towards the end of the sixteenth century we find the Lutherans deserting the traditions of humanism for a kind of Lutheran scholasticism, neglecting scholarship for theology of an abstract kind, they were in reality only following where Luther had pointed out the way. But Erasmus regarded ' sound learning ' as an essential of Christian progress, and if there was to be learning and scholarship, the freedom of man to work and to think was also essential. When Erasmus and Luther, then, engaged in controversy on the slavery of the will the dispute was about the fundamentals of their respective schemes. And the later history of Lutheranism justified the line taken by Erasmus. Critics of Erasmus, and notably Seebohm and Drummond, have described Erasmus as an anti-dogmatist, although the latter is inclined to hold him an Arian.^ But the passages quoted in • See Grisar, Luiher, i. 43. * Drummond, ii. 162.