with Rome. Thus he lost the respect and confidence of both parties. It would have been better for
his fame if he had died in 1516, just after issuing the Greek Testament, a year before the Reformation.
To do justice to him, we must look backward. Men of transition, like Staupitz, Reuchlin, and
Erasmus, are no less necessary than bold leaders of a new 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 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.^501 He was born in Rotterdam, Oct. 27, in the year
1466 or 1467.^502 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.
(^501) 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.
(^502) He says in his autobiographical sketch: "Natus Roterodami vigilia Simonis et Judæ 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, Müller, and Drummoud (I.
3 sq.) discuss the chronology.