you find safer shelter from anxiety or persecution; and you and we together with our joint counsels and resources will build again the Gospel of Christ."

This letter brought Erasmus flying to England on the wings of ecstatic hope! But when he arrived he found Henry preoccupied with a rebellious Ireland and an approaching war with France. Erasmus was given into the care of Warham, always his friend and now Archbishop of Canterbury. He gave him the best benefice he had, Aldington in Kent, worth £60 a year, or about £600 in our present-day money. Erasmus was bitterly disappointed, for if there was one thing he disliked more than another it was the routine of parish work. He was no devoted shepherd of a humble flock, like Wycliffe. He had no love for simple hearts, but only for keen, clever minds, and he struggled with his English country rectory for just six months. Then he relinquished it! Warham sacrificed the parish and settled a pension on Erasmus, which was charged on the tithes, and continued to the end of his life. Lord Mountjoy also promised him money, and kept his word.

And so it came to pass once more that the English country-side, the soil, the land, paid for the translation. of the New Testament! Strangely enough, as soon as the translation from the Greek into Latin was complete, and before it was actually published, Erasmus left England, and never returned for any protracted stay. The Netherlands at last claimed their most brilliant citizen, and made provision for him.

And what of the fate of the New Testament? This, the Cardinal de Medici, who had succeeded Julius as Pope Leo X, and who aspired to shine as the patron of learning, gave his public sanction! Possibly the fact that it was

translated into Latin preserved it from persecution. It was Wycliffe's English version which enraged the Church. A hundred thousand copies of Erasmus' Testament were soon sold in France alone. For several years now he made his home between Louvain and Froden's printing establishment at Bâle. He brought out his Jerome, clear of interpolated passages and intelligently revised and edited. He dedicated this work to Leo X, who graciously accepted it, and Erasmus, feeling that a period of peaceful reformation had dawned upon the Church, wrote to Fabricius Capito, a celebrated preacher at Bâle, in this strain:

"I do not want the popular theology to be abolished. I want it enriched and enlarged from earlier sources. When the theologians know more of Holy Scripture they will find their consequence undiminished, perhaps increased. All promises well so far as I can see. My chief fear is that with the revival of Greek literature, there may be a revival of Paganism. There are Christians who are Christians only in name, and are Gentiles at heart; and again, the study of Hebrew may lead to Judaism, which would be worse still. I wish there could be an end of scholastic subtleties, or if not an end, that they could be thrust into a second place, and Christ be taught plainly and simply. The reading of the Bible and the Early Fathers will have this effect. Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ and only darken our eyes.'

Unfortunately, reformation from evil ways has scarcely ever been brought about in an atmosphere of peace. The carnal mind fights desperately for its hold on place and power, and is not extinguished without a struggle. Erasmus must have been strangely absorbed in his books, and singularly blinded by the politeness of his distinguished friends, not to have realized that the love of money and the

spiritual wickedness rampant in high places would not yield to a pure and soul-searching Gospel without terrific commotion.

It was not until Luther flung the Pope's Bull into the flames that Erasmus began to feel the first shock of the volcanic strife about to burst over Europe, in the religious earthquake at hand. He was torn between the two parties. Luther to him was an unknown, illiterate, bourgeois monk, making a parochial fuss in an obscure province of Germany. He, Erasmus, loved the refinement and intellectual luxury of the Popes and ecclesiastical princes. Yet he knew that Luther had cause to be incensed at the corruptions of the monasteries. Ignorant, overbearing monks and friars were indeed Erasmus' worst enemies. So he remained vigilantly silent, watching the current of events, and perceived with his clear, shrewd intellect that the pendulum of belief was tending to swing from one violent extreme to another; and while men in the past were bound by the dogma of indulgences and transubstantiation, they were as likely to be equally in bondage to a doctrine of predestination and original sin in the future. To lose his life in either cause seemed to Erasmus to be wholly gratuitous, since both extremes seemed to him to be utterly unlike the teaching of Christ.

"Christ cannot be taught even among Christians," he wrote to his friend, Abbot Volgius, when the pope ordered a crusade against the Crescent, to divert men's minds from the new revival. "They ought to show their faith in their works and convert Turks by the beauty of their lives."

Feeling spiritually weary, his thoughts turned again towards England. Luther he did not know. In the firebrand state of Europe, he did not feel specially desirous

of knowing him, since a democrat at all times was an unknown quantity, and in spiritual matters might be dangerously unwise, but Henry VIII he knew, and if he had not fulfilled all his promises, he was yet a dependable and enlightened friend: so that in May, 1519, Erasmus writes to Henry in all sincerity:

"The heart of a King is in the hands of God. When God means well to any nation He gives it a King who deserves a throne. . . . The Poets' golden age, if such age ever was, comes back under your Highness. . . . By their monarchs' characters realms are ennobled or depraved. Future ages will tell how England throve, how virtue flourished in the reign of Henry VIII; how the nation was born again, how piety revived, how learning grew to a height which Italy may envy, and how the prince who reigned over it was a rule and pattern for all time to come."—And Professor Froude adds: "I seriously believe that this will be the final verdict of English history on Henry VIII!"

It certainly was a grateful and unbiased contemporary verdict upon the great Tudor Monarch, before the waves of hatred and sensualism beat with merciless envy against his throne. It was only our Lord and Master who could say: "The Prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me." The Reformation was not the result of personal policy on Henry's part. It wholly centered round the question of his domestic grievances, was the desire of the nation as a whole, the fruition of seeds planted in Plantagenet days and in days long before. It was the voice of a true Christianity, and an independent early British Church; it was the voice of the English Bible which could not be stifled, and which made itself heard through innumerable avenues, from the homes of the high and the