quoted Ajax. To dream that such evils could be cured by the gentle magic of literature was indeed to chant incantations over a malady that craved the surgeon's knife.
As might have been expected, some critics of Erasmus ascribed his attitude to worldly motives; but this was unjust, as many details of his life show. When Paul III. wished to make him a Cardinal, and to provide him with the necessary income, he declined. He was ambitious of praise, but not of wealth or rank. Personal considerations influenced him only in this sense, that he knew his own unfitness for the part of a leader or a combatant at such a time. His right place was in his study, and he grudged every hour lost to his proper work. "I would rather work for a month at expounding St Paul," he said to a correspondent, "than waste a day in quarrelling." In character and temperament he was the most perfect contrast to Luther. We remember the story of Luther being awakened in the night by a noise in his room; he lit a candle, but could find nothing; he then became certain that the invisible Enemy of his soul was present in that room,—and yet he lay down, and went calmly to sleep. There is the essence of the man—the intensely vivid sense of the supernatural, and the instinctive recourse to it as an explanation—and the absolute faith. Erasmus was once in a town where a powder-magazine exploded, and destroyed a house which had harboured evil-doers; some one remarked that this showed the divine anger against guilt;
