§ 71. ERASMUS. 408
departure. They belong to the class of which John the Baptist is the highest type. Protestants should never forget the immense debt of gratitude which they owe to the first editor of the Greek Testament who enabled Luther and Tyndale to make their translations of the word of life from the original, and to lead men to the very fountain of all that is most valuable and permanent in the Reformation. His edition was hastily prepared, before the art of textual criticism was born; but it anticipated the publication of the ponderous Complutensian Polyglot, and became the basis of the popularly received text. His exegetical opinions still receive and deserve the attention of commentators. To him we owe also the first scholarly editions of the Fathers, especially of Jerome, with whom he was most in sympathy. From these editions the Reformers drew their weapons of patristic controversy with the Romanists, who always appealed to the fathers of the Nicene age rather than to the grandfathers of the apostolic age.
Erasmus was allied to Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten, but greater and far more influential than both. All hated monasticism and obscurantism. Reuchlin revived Hebrew, Erasmus Greek learning, so necessary for the cultivation of biblical studies. Reuchlin gave his nephew Melanchthon to Wittenberg, but died a good Catholic. Hutten became a radical ultra-reformer, fell out with Erasmus, who disowned him when he was most in need of a friend, and perished in disgrace. Erasmus survived both, to protest against Protestantism.
And yet he cannot be charged with apostasy or even with inconsistency. He never was a Protestant,and never meant to be one. Division and separation did not enter into his program. From beginning to end he labored for a reformation within the church and within the papacy, not without it. But the new wine burst the old bottles. The reform which he set in motion went beyond him, and left him
404 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
behind. In some of his opinions, however, he was ahead of his age, and anticipated a more modern stage of Protestantism. He was as much a forerunner of Rationalism as of the Reformation.
Sketch of His Life.
Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a Dutch priest, Gerard, and Margaret, the daughter of a physician, —their last but not their only child.1. He was born in Rotterdam, Oct. 27, in the year 1466 or 1467.2, He received his early education in the cathedral school of Utrecht and in a flourishing classical academy at Deventer, where he began to show his brilliant talents, especially a most tenacious memory. Books were his chief delight. Already in his twelfth year he knew Horace and Terence by heart.
After the death of his mother, he was robbed of his inheritance by his guardians, and put against his will into a convent at Herzogenbusch, which he exchanged afterwards for one at Steyn (Emaus), near Gouda, a few miles from Rotterdam.
He spent five unhappy years in monastic seclusion (1486- 1491), and conceived an utter disgust for monkery. Ulrich von Hutten passed through the same experience, with the same negative result ; while for Luther monastic life was his free choice, and became the cradle of a new religious life. Erasmus found relief in the study of the classics, which he pursued without a guide, by a secret impulse of nature. We have from this period a number of his compositions in poetry
1 His father was ordained a priest after the birth of Erasmus; for he says that he lived with Margaret ‘‘ spe conjugii,’’ and became a priest in Rome on learning from his parents, who were opposed to the marriage, the false report that his beloved Margaret was dead. .
2 He says in his autobiographical sketch: ‘‘ Natus Roterodami vigilia Simonis et Jude circa annum 67, supra millesimum quadringentesimum.” His friend and biographer, Beatus Rhenanus, did not know the year of his birth. His epitaph in Basel gives 1466; the inscription on his statue at Rotterdam gives 1467; the historians vary from 1464 to 1469. Bayle, Burigny, Miiller, and Drummond (I. 3 sq.) discuss the chronology.