at scholar's workshop where he
directs his famuli, who hunt manuscripts for him, and then copy and
examine them, and whence he sends forth his letters all over Europe. In
the series of editions of the Fathers followed Basil and new editions of
Chrysostom and Cyprian; his editions of classic authors were augmented
by the works of Aristotle. He revised and republished the _Colloquies_
three more times, the _Adages_ and the New Testament once more.
Occasional writings of a moral or politico-theological nature kept
flowing from his pen.

From the cause of the Reformation he was now quite estranged.
'Pseudevangelici', he contumeliously calls the reformed. 'I might have
been a corypheus in Luther's church,' he writes in 1528, 'but I
preferred to incur the hatred of all Germany to being separate from the
community of the Church.' The authorities should have paid a little less
attention at first to Luther's proceedings; then the fire would never
have spread so violently. He had always urged theologians to let minor
concerns which only contain an appearance of piety rest, and to turn to
the sources of Scripture. Now it was too late. Towns and countries
united ever more closely for or against the Reformation. 'If, what I
pray may never happen,' he writes to Sadolet in 1530, 'you should see
horrible commotions of the world arise, not so fatal for Germany as for
the Church, then remember Erasmus prophesied it.' To Beatus Rhenanus he
frequently said that, had he known that an age like theirs was coming,
he would never have written many things, or would not have written them
as he had.

'Just look,' he exclaims, 'at the Evangelical people, have they become
any better? Do they yield less to luxury, lust and greed? Show me a man
whom that Gospel has changed from a toper to a temperate man, from a
brute to a gentle creature, from a miser into a liberal person, from a
shameless to a chaste being. I will show you many who have become even
worse than they were.' Now they have thrown the images out of the
churches and abolished mass (he is thinking of Basle especially): has
anything better come instead? 'I have never entered their churches, but
I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an
evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity, and
there was no one except one old man who saluted me properly, when I
passed in the company of some distinguished persons.'

He hated that spirit of absolute