ich he
had read how Cain, who had often heard his parents speak of the glorious
vegetation of Paradise, where the ears of corn were as high as the
alders with us, had prevailed upon the angel who guarded it, to give him
some Paradisal grains. God would not mind it, if only he left the apples
alone. The speech by which the angel is incited to disobey the Almighty
is a masterpiece of Erasmian wit. 'Do you find it pleasant to stand
there by the gate with a big sword? We have just begun to use dogs for
that sort of work. It is not so bad on earth and it will be better
still; we shall learn, no doubt, to cure diseases. What that forbidden
knowledge matters I do not see very clearly. Though, in that matter,
too, unwearied industry surmounts all obstacles.' In this way the
guardian is seduced. But when God beholds the miraculous effect of
Cain's agricultural management, punishment does not fail to ensue. A
more delicate way of combining Genesis and the Prometheus myth no
humanist had yet invented.

But still, though Erasmus went on conducting himself as a man of letters
among his fellow-poets, his heart was no longer in those literary
exercises. It is one of the peculiarities of Erasmus's mental growth
that it records no violent crises. We never find him engaged in those
bitter inward struggles which are in the experience of so many great
minds. His transition from interest in literary matters to interest in
religious matters is not in the nature of a process of conversion. There
is no Tarsus in Erasmus's life. The transition takes place gradually and
is never complete. For many years to come Erasmus can, without suspicion
of hypocrisy, at pleasure, as his interests or his moods require, play
the man of letters or the theologian. He is a man with whom the deeper
currents of the soul gradually rise to the surface; who raises himself
to the height of his ethical consciousness under the stress of
circumstances, rather than at the spur of some irresistible impulse.

The desire to turn only to matters of faith he shows early. 'I have
resolved', he writes in his monastic period to Cornelius of Gouda, 'to
write no more poems in the future, except such as savour of praise of
the saints, or of sanctity itself.' But that was the youthful pious
resolve of a moment. During all the years previous to the first voyage
to England, Erasmus's writings, and especially his letters, betray a
worldly disposition. It only leaves him in moments of i