16 PROLOGUE I 



Papacy. Bad as the churchmen might be, the 

 statesmen were worse ; and a person of far more 

 sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have 

 seen no hope for the future, except in gradually 

 freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church 

 from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, 

 prevented it from being as beneficent as it was 

 powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and 

 man of the world might well be revolted by the 

 ruffianism, however genial, of one great light of 

 Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however 

 learned and logical, of others ; and to a cautious 

 thinker, by whom, whatever his shortcomings, the 

 ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sin- 

 cerely prized, it really was a fair question, 

 whether it was worth while to bring about a 

 political and social deluge, the end of which no 

 mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up 

 Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the 

 place of the actual claimant to the reversion of 

 the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman. 



Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the 

 Lutheran and Zwinglian movement, a vision of its 

 immediate consequences had been granted to 

 Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the 

 fierce outbreak of Anabaptist communism, which 

 opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in shadowy 

 procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in 

 England, with the judicial murders of his friends, 

 More and Fisher ; the bitter tyranny of evangel- 



