.

Between 1867 and 1893 Froude had become more favourable to Erasmus,
or more sympathetic with his point of view. It was not that he
admired Luther less. On the contrary, his Protestant convictions
grew stronger with years, and to the last he raised his voice
against the Anglo-Catholic revival. But he seemed to feel with more
force the saying of Erasmus that "the sum of religion is peace." He
translated and read out to his class the whole of the satiric
dialogue held at the gate of Paradise between St. Peter and Julius
II., in which the wars of that Pontiff are ruthlessly flagellated,
and the wicked old man threatens to take the celestial city by
storm. Erasmus, averse as he was from violent measures, had no lack
of courage, and in his own name he told the truth about the most
dignified ecclesiastics. No artifices imposed upon him, and he
acknowledged no master but Christ. He translated the arch-sceptic
Lucian, about whom Froude has himself written a delightful essay. "I
wish," said Froude, "I wish more of us read Lucian now. He was the
greatest man by far outside the Christian Church in the second
century." Lucian lived in an age when miracles the most grotesque
were supported by witnesses the most serious, and when, as he said,
the one safeguard was an obstinate incredulity, the ineradicable
certainty that miracles did not happen. Erasmus enjoyed Lucian as a
corrective of monkish superstition, though he himself was
essentially Christian. A Protestant he never became. He lived and
died in communion with Rome, denounced by monks as a heretic, and by
Lutherans as a time-server. Paul III. Would have made him a Cardinal
if his means had sufficed for a Prince of the Church. Standing
between the two extremes, he saw better than any of his
contemporaries the real proportions of things, and Froude's last
words on the subject were that students would be most likely to
understand the Reformation if they looked at it with the eyes of
Erasmus. Small faults notwithstanding, there is no one who has drawn
a more vivid, or a more faithful, portrait of Erasmus than Anthony
Froude.

Of Froude in his Oxford Chair it may fairly be said that in a short
time he fulfilled a long time, and made more impression upon the
under-graduates in a few months than Stubbs had made in as many
years. It was not so much the love of learning that he inspired,
though the range of his studies was wide, as enthusiasm for history
because it was the histor