called upon the people to pray for you, and aided you in supporting your tottering authority."

Then, turning to the peasants, he exhorted them, under all their provocations, to desist from violence. "Nevertheless, though your complaints are just, and your demands reasonable, it behoves you to prosecute these demands with moderation, conscience, and justice. If you act with moderation, conscience, and justice, God will aid you; and even, though subdued for the moment, you will triumph in the end; and those of you who may perish in the struggle will be saved. Put no trust, I pray you, in the prophets of murder, whom Satan has raised up amongst you, and who proceed directly from him, though they sacrilegiously invoke the name of the holy gospel. They will hate me, I know, for the counsel I give you; they will call me hypocrite, but this I heed not a whit. What I desire is, to save from the anger of God the good and honest among you-I care not for the rest: I heed them not, I fear them not. I know One who is stronger than all of them put together, and He tells me, in the 3d Psalm, to do that which I am now doing. You invoke the name of God, and you say that you will act according to his word. Has not God said, They that take the sword shall perish with the sword?' And St Paul, Render, therefore, honour to whom honour is due. How can you, after reading these precepts, still pretend that you are acting according to the gospel? Beware, beware, lest a terrible judgment fall upon you!

"But, say you, authority is wicked, cruel, intolerable; it will not allow us the gospel; it overwhelms us with

burdens beyond all reason or endurance; it ruins us, soul and body. To this I reply, that the wickedness and injustice of authority are no warrant for revolt, seeing that it befits not all men indiscriminately to take upon themselves the punishment of wickedness. Besides which, the natural law says that no man shall be the judge in his own cause, nor revenge his own quarrel. The divine law teaches us the same lesson; Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.' Your enterprise, therefore, is not only wrong according to bible and gospel law, but it is opposed also to natural law and to equity; and you cannot properly persevere in it unless you can prove that you are called to it by a new commandment of God especially directed to you, and confirmed by miracles."*

These solemn words were no doubt ineffectual, but this was not Luther's fault. He had done his duty nobly-a duty none the less magnanimous that it failed in its object. His mortification and grief at the result were extreme; and if we detect in his final words to the peasants-when they had proved the fruitlessness of their efforts, and the day of sanguinary disaster which he had predicted had come and gone-a bitterness almost cruel, and a harshness that grates on our feelings, we must remember that he felt most acutely the disgrace which their movement had brought upon the Reformation. He could not see the fair work of God so marred,-the religious revival, for which he wrought, thrust back and discredited before the world, -without being deeply moved and embittered. While Luther was thus standing in the breach, in * MICHELET'S Life, p. 165-180.

favour of social order, against the peasants, and feeling, in the odium he thereby incurred, that he was no longer the popular chieftain he had been a few years before, he was made, at the same time, somewhat painfully to feel that he was no longer in unison with the mere literary or humanistic party in the Reformation. Erasmus, the recognised head of this party, had long been showing signs of impatience at what he considered to be Luther's rudeness and violence. He could not sympathise in the intense earnestness of the Wittenberg reformer: the religious zeal, the depth of persuasion, and especially the polemical shape which the latter's convictions had assumed in his doctrine of grace, were all unintelligible or positively displeasing to him. No two men could be more opposed at once in intellectual aspiration and in moral temper;-Luther aiming at dogmatic certainty in all matters of faith, and filled with an overmastering feeling as to the importance of this certainty to the whole religious life, with the most vivid sense of the invisible world touching him at every point, and exciting him now with superstitious fear, and now with the most hilarious confidence ;Erasmus-latitudinarian and philosophical in religious opinion, with a strong perception of both sides of any question, indifferent or at least hopeless as to exact truth, and with a consequently keen dislike of all dogmatic exaggerations, orthodox or otherwise-well informed in theology, but without any very living and powerful faith, cool, cautious, subtle, and refined, more anxious to expose a sophism, or point a barb at some folly, than to fight manfully against error and sin. It was impossible that any hearty harmony could long

subsist between two men of such a different spirit, and having such different aims. To do Erasmus justice, it must be remembered that his opposition to the Papacy had never been dogmatic, but merely critical; he desired literary freedom and a certain measure of religious freedom; he hated monkery; but he had no new opinions or "truths" for which to contend earnestly, as for life or death. He was content to accept the Catholic tradition if it would not disturb him; and the Catholic system, with its historic memories and proud associations, was dear to his cultivated imagination and taste. It is needless to blame Erasmus for his moderation; we might as well blame him for not being Luther. He did his own work just as Luther did his; and while we can never compare his character, in depth, and power, and reality of moral greatness, with that of the reformer's, we do not see in it the same exaggerations and intolerance that offend many in Luther.

Already, in 1524, Luther felt that there was a breach impending between him and the literary patriarch of the time. He was so far from courting it, however, that he used careful means to avoid it. Nothing but a direct attack of Erasmus would draw him into conflict; he was disposed to overlook the sundry sharp side-blows and cuts which had already come from the keen armoury of Basle, and to let alone for let alone, if the offence were not repeated and aggravated. acknowledged the services of Erasmus in having contributed to the flourishing rise of letters and the right understanding of Scripture, and he did not expect any further assistance from him in the work of reform.

He

For the Lord had meted out to him in this respect but limited gifts (so Luther said), and had not seen fit to bestow upon him the energy and direction of mind requisite to attack the monsters of the Papacy soundly and boldly. But if this was not the case, let him be entreated to remain at least a silent spectator of the tragedy. "Do not join your forces to our adversaries; publish no books against me, and I will publish none against you." * Such was the strain in which Luther addressed Erasmus in a remarkable letter of this year. We cannot tell how he received the remonstrance. It does not seem particularly calculated, as a whole, to smooth his vanity or stay his hand. At the very moment he was busy with his treatise De Libero Arbitrio, and the complacent admonitions of the reformer were not likely to deaden any of the glancing thrusts that he was aiming at the Lutheran doctrine of grace. The treatise saw the light in the following year; and Luther, although still disinclined, saw no alternative but to come forward in defence of views which he considered to be identical with the truth of Scripture. In the course of the same year (1525) he published his counter-treatise, De Servo Arbitrio, on which he bestowed great pains, and which he was afterwards in the habit of reckoning, along with his Catechism, as among his greatest works.

It would be idle for us to enter into the merits of this controversy, and in truth its merits are no longer to us what they were to the combatants themselves. The course of opinion has altered this as well as many other points of dispute, so that under the same names * Briefe, De Wette, vol. ii. p. 500.