rt of hearts they still had too much respect and
reverence for the Pope to direct their sallies against his Most Holy
Person. But the lazy, ignorant monks, living behind the sheltering walls
of their rich monasteries, offered rare sport.

The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very faithful son
of the church Gerard Gerardzoon, or Desiderius Erasmus, as he is usually
called, was a poor boy, born in Rotterdam in Holland, and educated
at the same Latin school of Deventer from which Thomas a Kempis had
graduated. He had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a
monastery. He had travelled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote, When
he began his career as a public pamphleteer (he would have been called
an editorial writer in our day) the world was greatly amused at an
anonymous series of letters which had just appeared under the title of
"Letters of Obscure Men." In these letters, the general stupidity and
arrogance of the monks of the late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange
German-Latin doggerel which reminds one of our modern limericks. Erasmus
himself was a very learned and serious scholar, who knew both Latin and
Greek and gave us the first reliable version of the New Testament,
which he translated into Latin together with a corrected edition of the
original Greek text. But he believed with Sallust, the Roman poet, that
nothing prevents us from "stating the truth with a smile upon our lips."

In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-land, he took
a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, called the "Praise of
Folly," in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers
with that most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet was the best
seller of the sixteenth century. It was translated into almost every
language and it made people pay attention to those other books of
Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of the church
and appealed to his fellow humanists to help him in his task of bringing
about a great rebirth of the Christian faith.

But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was too reasonable
and too tolerant to please most of the enemies of the church. They were
waiting for a leader of a more robust nature.

He came, and his name was Martin Luther.

Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class brain and possessed
of great personal courage. He was a university man, a master of arts of
the University of Erfurt; afterwards he