ales were spread over a year, being delivered in the
Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894. Before they were finished Froude had
begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus.
Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the
flower of the religious Renaissance. Simply and sincerely pious, he
enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin
prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he
might understand the true meaning of the New Testament. Hating the
monks of his own time for their ignorance and coarseness, he was as
learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is
like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire. He loved England,
the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More.
English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar
letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation.
Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent
epicureanism, including the collection of manuscripts and the
exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places. He felt imperfect
sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no
reformation. He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad
Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to
faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude,
whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose,
are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind
admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he
regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.

Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for
superstition. Without Luther there would have been no Reformation.
There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.

Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth
the Reformation had many sides. When Selden attended the Westminster
Assembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that
the Scriptures were not written in English. "Perhaps in your little
pocket Bibles with gilt leaves" (which they would often pull out and
read) "the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew
signifies thus and thus." So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally
silence them. But neither were the Scriptures written in
Latin. It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament,
the charter of the scholar's refo