Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/252

 doctrine of the freedom of the human will, which Luther had denied and Erasmus here affirmed. The work (De libera arbitric Diatribe sive CoUaHo; best edition by von Walter, Breslau, 1910, Quellenschriften zur Geschkhte des Protestantismus, no. 8) is brief and moderate in tone, but is unmistakably directed against Luther. It was hailed with delight by Luther's Roman opponents and translated into German by Emser and G>chlaeus. Luther's answer {De servo arbitrio, Weimar, xviii, 6ooff.) did not appear till December, 1525. Cf. Smith, pp. 207f, Emerton, Eras- mus, 58o£F. This letter and the following, to Duke George, were writ- ten almost simultaneously with the publication of the book.

. . . You will wonder why I have published the book On the Free Will. I had against me a triple array of enemies. The theologians and haters of letters were leaving no stone unturned to destroy Erasmus,/not only because they haa been attacked in my books, but because I had entered their flourishing University of Louvain and infected that whole r^on with the languages and culture. This is what they said. These men had persuaded all the rulers that I was in league with Luther, and so my friends, seeing that I was in danger, held out the hope to the Pope and the princes that I would publish something against Luther. For a time I, too, cherished the same hope. In the meanwhile, however, those! men began to assail me with books, and there was nothing \ left for me to do except to publish what I had written ; other- I seemed to have given my word, and those uproarious fellows I would have clamored that I was afraid and would have j raged more fiercely than ever because of their disappointedj expectation. Finally, now that Luther's letter* is in their hands, in which he promises to withhold his pen from at- tacks on me if I will keep silent, it would have appeared that I had agreed with him not to publish. Besides, those men at Rome who made a profession of profane literature, them- selves worse than heathen, rage against me wonderfully, out of hatred for the Germans, so it seems, and so if I had pub- lished nothing, I should have given the theologians and the monks and the Roman seal-mongers (whose Alpha I think is Aleander)* a handle, arid they could more easily have per-

^Snpra, no. 620.

■Text "N." Aleander is certainly what Erasmus wrote, as is seen by compar-

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