of the text. Its real end was the end
at which Colet had aimed in his Oxford lectures. Erasmus desired to set
Christ himself in the place of the Church, to recall men from the teaching
of Christian theologians to the teaching of the Founder of Christianity.
The whole value of the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they
brought home to their readers the personal impression of Christ himself.
"Were we to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have so
intimate a knowledge as they give us of Christ, speaking, healing, dying,
rising again, as it were in our very presence." All the superstitions of
mediaeval worship faded away in the light of this personal worship of
Christ. "If the footprints of Christ are shown us in any place, we kneel
down and adore them. Why do we not rather venerate the living and
breathing picture of him in these books? We deck statues of wood and stone
with gold and gems for the love of Christ. Yet they only profess to
represent to us the outer form of his body, while these books present us
with a living picture of his holy mind." In the same way the actual
teaching of Christ was made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the
older ecclesiastical teaching. "As though Christ taught such subtleties,"
burst out Erasmus: "subtleties that can scarcely be understood even by a
few theologians--or as though the strength of the Christian religion
consisted in man's ignorance of it! It may be the safer course," he goes
on with characteristic irony, "to conceal the state mysteries of kings,
but Christ desired his mysteries to be spread abroad as openly as was
possible." In the diffusion, in the universal knowledge of the teaching of
Christ the foundation of a reformed Christianity had still, he urged, to
be laid. With the tacit approval of the Primate of a Church which from the
time of Wyclif had held the translation and reading of the Bible in the
common tongue to be heresy and a crime punishable with the fire, Erasmus
boldly avowed his wish for a Bible open and intelligible to all. "I wish
that even the weakest woman might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St.
Paul. I wish that they were translated into all languages, so as to be
read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen, but even by Saracens
and Turks. But the first step to their being read is to make them
intelligible to the reader. I long for the day when the husbandman shall
sing portions of them to himself as he follows the p