Bigoted Catholics hated and feared him, as much as the liberal admired and lauded him."He laid the egg," they said, "which Luther hatched."^514 They perverted his name into Errasmus
because of his errors, Arasmus because he ploughed up old truths and traditions, Erasinus because
he had made himself an ass by his writings. They even called him Behemoth and Antichrist. The
Sorbonne condemned thirty-seven articles extracted from his writings in 1527. His books were
burned in Spain, and long after his death placed on the Index in Rome.
In his last word to his popish enemies who identified him with Luther to ruin both together,
he writes: "For the future I despise them, and I wish I had always done so; for it is no pleasure to
drown the croaking of frogs. Let them say, with their stout defiance of divine and human laws, ’We
ought to obey God rather than men.’ That was well said by the Apostles, and even on their lips it
is not without a certain propriety; only it is not the same God in the two cases. The God of the
Apostles was the Maker of heaven and earth: their God is their belly. Fare ye well."^515
His Works.
The literary labors of Erasmus may be divided into three classes: —
I. Works edited. Their number proves his marvellous industry and enterprise.
He published the ancient Latin classics, Cicero, Terence, Seneca, Livy, Pliny; and the Greek
classics with Latin translations, Euripides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Lucian.
He edited the principal church fathers (some for the first time from MSS.); namely, Jerome
(1516–1518; ed. ii., 1526; ed. iii., a year after his death), Cyprian (1520), Athanasius (in a Latin
version, 1522), Hilarius (1523), Irenaeus (Latin, 1526, ed. princeps, very defective), Ambrose
(1527), Augustin (1529), Epiphanius (1529), Chrysostom on Matthew (1530), Basil (in Greek,
1532; he called him the "Christian Demosthenes"), Origen (in Latin, 1536). He wrote the prefaces
and dedications.
He published the Annotations of Laurentius Valla on the New Testament (1505 and 1526),
a copy of which he had found by chance on the shelves of an old library.
The most important of his edited works is the Greek New Testament, with a Latin
translation.^516
II. Original works on general literature.
His "Adages" (Adagia), begun at Oxford, dedicated to Lord Mountjoy, first published in
Paris in 1500, and much enlarged in subsequent editions,^517 is an anthology of forty-one hundred
and fifty-one Greek and Latin proverbs, similitudes, and sentences,—a sort of dictionary and
commonplace-book, brimful of learning, illustrations, anecdotes, historical and biographical sketches,
attacks on monks, priests, and kings, and about ten thousand quotations from Greek poets, literally
translated into the Latin in the metre of the original.
(^514) He himself alludes to this saying: "Ego peperi ovum, Lutherus exclusit" (Op. III. 840), but adds, "Egoposui ovum gallinaceum,
Lutherus exclusit pullum longe dissimillimum."
(^515) Des. Erasmi Epistola ad quosdam impudentissimos Graculos (jackdaws). Op. IX. Pars II. (or vol. X.), p. 1745; Drummond, II. 265
sq.
(^516) On this see the critical introductions to the New Testament; Scrivener’s Introd. to the Criticism of the N. T., 3d ed., pp. 429-434;
Schaff’s Companion to the Greek Test., 3d ed., pp. 229-232; and Drummond, I. 308 sqq.
(^517) The last edition before me, Adagiorum Chiliades ... ex officina Frobenia, 1536, contains 1087 pages folio, with an alphabetical index
of the Proverbs. See vol. II. of the Leiden ed. For extracts see Drummond, I. ch. X.