Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/32

 24 ERASMUS January He left, if I can read his letters right, a world which he did not fully understand, and for which he had no longer the hopes of old. It was no longer the old world of universal scholarship with a public opinion which was that of learned men, which was really the same in every land and centred in the colleges and schools. It was hardly the world of the living Latinity he had loved and tried to teach, although a few Ciceronians might sur- vive, even after the gentle ridicule he had directed at them. It was the world of Luther's German, of Cranmer's English, and Calvin's French.^ The Vulgate, as a bond of union, he himself had in some ways helped to destroy ; the national Bibles which superseded it spoke but feebly to the scholar of no fatherland in particular, much as he wished the Bible to become a well- known book. But he looked to the Greek of the Apostles enshrining the words of his Master Christ ; among the strange inter- pretations of the day, some of them new and some of them old, with politics taking new shapes and doctrines presenting them- selves in new forms, his tolerant, comprehensive, and practical religion was acceptable to few. All could use his labours, Jesuits of the second generation and reformers of the extremist wing ; but few would take his point of view. It was not Lutherans alone, but the leaders of the Counter-Reformation also, who were the real inheritors of his labours. If protestantism profited greatly by them, so did the revivified Catholicism of the years after Trent. Formed, as I take it, by the medieval world with its universal brotherhood of learning and of religion, he was loath to see it rent on the one hand by doctrinal divisions, on the other by the force of national life. And yet in many respects he was essen- tially modern, modern most surely in his humour, even if in that Pius II had been his forerunner. It was a gift which did not tend to conciliate his enemies, yet none the less added greatly to his own enjoyment of life. But humour and breadth of view seemed almost out of place in that time of strife when the new was rising, sometimes abruptly and sometimes gradually, out of the old. He had moreover to face a problem which is often a difficulty for us ourselves, how to combine the claim of authority and the rights of the individual.^ And his success lay in this one great thing, that no man ever paid greater respect to the many-sided authority of the rich religious past, and yet at the same time ' Tho Institution Chreatienne, the French version of the Chriatianae Rcligionis Institutio ( 1536), was published in 1541. Sec Tilley, Literature of the French Renaissance, i. 227. rightly to practice, not to speculation ' : Life and Letters of F. J. A. Hort, i. 437. Protestants found fault with Erasmus for his respect to authority ; papalists criticized him for his independence of thought. He possessed each and strove to preserve both ; and he reconciled them consistently in the sphere of practice.
 * ' There is no mean between authority and reason. . . . The via media belongs