Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1521-1530.djvu/269

 that had to be done, and divining that the affair would lead to seditions and tumults. Although I was at that time on terms of familiar intimacy with those who earnestly ap- plauded the beginning of his work, no one could persuade me to approve of his attempt. Certainly I openly and steadily disapproved the progress of the affair in whatever company I was, 90 much so that when I found, while I was living in Brabant, that Froben,^ at the instigation of certain scholars, Capito among them, had printed certain books of Luther's, I wrote him a letter telling him he could not retain my friend- ship if he continued to defile his press with such books. Not content with this, I added a note to my book of Colloquies, which was then in press at Louvain, in which I clearly testi- fied that I was altogether out of sympathy with the Lutheran party. Meanwhile I privately admonished even Luther him- self, who had written to me now and then, to conduct the case with an open mind and with that moderation which was proper in a professor of the Gospel.* Even the Emperor did not yet shrink from Luther's doctrine; it was only certain monks and indulgence-sellers whose profits were apparently falling off, that were making a disturbance. The chief result of the wild tumults they were raising, was that the little spark became a great fire. The more I urged Luther to moderate measures, the more he raged, and when I tried to pacify the other party the thanks I got was the charge that I sympathized with Luther.

You say, "Why did you not enter the conflict after the evil had become acute?" I answer that it was my belief that no one was less fitted for an affair of this kind than I, and I do not think that I was mistaken in my opinion. The men who were making an outcry to the Emperor and to the other princes that I was the best man to suppress Luther were two-faced, for these same men were, and still are, pro- claiming it abroad that I know nothing of theology. What else were they trying to do than set Erasmus unarmed to fight the wild beasts and thus put the onus of the whole business upon him? What reputation should I have gotten out of it? I should only have put myself forward as the scribe of the

iC/. VoL I. p. 161. "C/. VoL I, p. 193.

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