reputable defender since. In time the
critique had an immense effect. Ulrich von Hutten published it in
1517, and in the same year an English translation was made. In 1537
Luther turned it into German.

[Sidenote: Valla attacks the Pope]

And if the legality of the pope's rule was so slight, what was its
practical effect? According to Valla, it was a "barbarous,
overbearing, tyrannical, priestly domination." "What is it to you," he
apostrophizes the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed? You have
crushed it. If our temples have been pillaged? You have pillaged
them. If our virgins and matrons have been violated? You have done
it. If the city is innundated with the blood of citizens? You are
guilty of it all."

[Sidenote: Annotations on the New Testament]

Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle
and the humanist's demigod Cicero. More important were his
_Annotations on the New Testament_, first published by Erasmus in 1505.
The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to
be, the authentic or official form of the Scriptures. Taking in hand
three Latin and three Greek manuscripts, Valla had no difficulty in
showing that they differed from one another and that in some cases the
Latin had no authority whatever in the Greek. He pointed out a number
of mistranslations, some of them in passages vitally affecting the
faith. In short he left no support standing for any theory of verbal
inspiration. He further questioned, and successfully, the authorship
of the Creed attributed {50} to the Apostles, the authenticity of the
writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ to
King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius.

[Sidenote: Attack on Christian ethics]

His attack on Christian ethics was still more fundamental. In his
_Dialogue on Free Will_ he tried with ingenuity to reconcile the
freedom of the will, denied by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of
God, which he did not feel strong enough to dispute. In his work on
_The Monastic Life_ he denied all value to asceticism. Others had
mocked the monks for not living up to their professions; he asserted
that the ideal itself was mistaken. But it is the treatise _On
Pleasure_ that goes the farthest. In form it is a dialogue on ethics;
one interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and
the third the Christian standard. The sympathies of the author are
plainly wit