Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1507-1521.djvu/275

 eat meat Wednesdays, but fills himself up to the point of vomiting with eggs and fish, and yet he does not think it a sin to attack the reputation of a good man with manifest lies and wicked calumnies, and to infect the minds and ears of his hearers with such sycophancy, Latomus^ shouts, Eg- mond shouts, Ruard^ stammers against Luther as a heretic, and an unlearned and stupid one, and no one admonishes Luther, no one teaches him, no one refutes him, although he himself asks to be taught, and desires to be heard and to hear. I do not know what kind of man Luther is, except that the books which he has hitherto published testify that he is well versed in the writings of theologians, not so much the ancient as the recent; moreover they show that his mind is sane and his heart graced with many and various Christian gifts. But I know these others to be such men that if there were no other Christians beside them, so love me God, I would not want to be one, so much are they given to am- bition and avarice. They help none, and wish well to none except themselves ; they hurt many and wish to be feared un- der the pretext of religion. Luther does not offend them by treating the Pope's majesty too severely, of which they them- selves do not think very highly, nor because he attacks in- dulgences, which they themselves do not approve when they are frank with each other. But they call Luther a heretic because he despises Aquinas, whom the Dominicans take as a fifth evangelist, because he rebukes the professors whose authority they want held sacred, because he does not keep before his eyes the scholastic dogmas, to which, putting it mildly, the world owes so many monks' quarrels, so many ceremonies, and, if not the extinction, at least the corruption

studied at the College of Montaigu at Paris, moved to LouTsin 1500, where he began to teach about 1510, and received the D. D. in 1519. He died March 29, 1544. He was the ablest of the opponents of Luther and Erasmus in the Netherlands. Luther's answer to his defence of the Condemnation by Cologne and Lonvain, 1 521, reprinted, Weimar, viii. 36ff. In 1525 Latomus wrote on the power of the pope against Luther, and later attacked Vir. Tyndale and Melanchthon. Real- encyclopadie.
 * C/. De Jongh, p. 173. James Masson (Latomus) of Cambron, b. circ, 1475.

^Cf. De Jongh, p. 180. Ruard Tapper of Holland, B. A. at Louvain 1507, studied under Adrian of Utrecht, D. D. 15 19. He took an active part against the Reformers, particularly in their condemnation by his university 1544 (Smith, p. 400), and took part in the Council of Trent. He was also inquisitor for a ttme. He died March 2, 1559, at the age of seventy.

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