Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/31

 1920 ERASMUS 23 Lutheranism was rising, under the leadership of Farel (an agitator whom Erasmus never liked) and of Oecolampadius, an old friend whom he respected,^ everywhere raged strife and controversy. And the old dispute with Hutten, who had died (August 1526) in poverty and sadness, dragged on its way with a weary tag of a quarrel and a threatened law-suit with Eppendorf only appeased by the dedication of a book to him. In 1527 Froben the elder died just after the edition of St. Augustine had begun to appear, a worthy continuation of editions of St. Jerome, St. Cyprian, and part of St. Athanasius. Soon the Reformation passed into its acutest stage, the discussion upon the Eucharist ; and before the works of St. Augustine had all appeared (1529), Erasmus had moved to Freiburg in the Breisgau. At Basle he had contrived to stay for a time the sale of a book by Oecolampadius written in a Zwinglian tone. But by 1529 the tide of change rose higher : the mass was abolished and the images removed from the churches. Sadly, therefore, he left the city which he had learnt to love and which still seems to speak of him more perhaps than any other place except the Cambridge cloisters of Queens'. Sadly enough he left it ; neither in England nor in Bohemia, although both invited him, did he choose to live ; he wished to stay in the emperor's lands (he was, we may remember, an imperial councillor), and at Freiburg his wish was gratified. In spite of his continued activity in letters, his life was now practically at an end, for labours like his demanded a more peaceful atmosphere. Illness prevented him from attending as an imperial councillor the council at Augsburg in 1530, and although the accession of Paul III (1534) gave the world a pope wishful of reform, the ideal of a council to bring about unity was merely a dream. His old friends, too, were leaving him alone in a world rapidly growing strange : Warham and Pirck- heimer, the tjrpical burgher of the great city of Nuremberg, gentle deaths removed ; Fisher and More deaths that were cruel and violent. In 1535 he left Freiburg and went to Basle, his beloved home of old, as a, resting-place on the way to some spot where the * beata tranquillitas ' might be his. There and then he wrote his Ecclesiastes, a tractate on preaching, and was preparing for the press a new edition of his letters, many of which had been pirated and published here and there. On 28 June 1536 he wrote his last letter, the end of a long and magnificent series which is almost a history of the theology and scholarship,of the theologians and writers, of a great and momentous time. And on 12 July he passed away. • Oecolampadius had been a press corrector at Basle and had been in charge of the Greek text of the Novum Instrumentum (Nichols, ii. 217, 634, and iii. 310).