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ulent crowd of little princelings, the good

burghers were more directly at the mercy of their bishops and

prelates. These dignitaries were trying to collect large sums

of money for the benefit of those enormous churches which

were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance. The Germans

felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they did

not like it.

And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany

was the home of the printing press. In northern Europe books

were cheap and the Bible was no longer a mysterious manu-

script owned and explained by the priest. It was a household

book of many families where Latin was understood by the

father and by the children. Whole families began to read it,

which was against the law of the Church. They discovered that

the priests were telling them many things which, according to

the original text of the Holy Scriptures, were somewhat different.

This caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And

questions, when they cannot be answered, often cause a great

deal of trouble.

The attack began when the humanists of the North opened

fire upon the monks. In their heart of hearts they still had

too much respect and reverence for the Pope to direct their

sallies against his Most Holy Person. But the lazy, ignorant

monks, living behind the sheltering walls of their rich monasteries,

offered rare sport.

The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very

faithful son of the church Gerard Gerardzoon, or Desiderius

Erasmus, as he is usually called, was a poor boy, born in

Rotterdam in Holland, and educated at the same Latin school

of Deventer from which Thomas a Kempis had graduated.

He had become a priest and for a time he had lived in a monastery.

He had travelled a great deal and knew whereof he wrote,

When he began his career as a public pamphleteer (he would

have been called an editorial writer in our day) the world was

greatly amused at an anonymous series of letters which had

just appeared under the title of ``Letters of Obscure Men.''

In these letters, the general stupidity and arrogance of the

monks of the late Middle Ages was exposed in a strange

German-Latin doggerel which reminds one of our modern

limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious

scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first

reliable version of the New Testament, which he translated

into Latin together with a corrected edition of the original

Greek text. But he believed with Sallust, the Roman poet,

that nothing prevents us from ``stating the truth with a smile

upon our lips.''

In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-

land, he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book,

called the ``Praise of Folly,'' in which he attacked the monks

and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all

weapons, humor. The booklet was the best seller of the sixteenth

century. It was translated into almost every language

and it made people pay attention to those other books of

Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of

the church and appealed to his fellow humanists to help him

in his task of bringing about a great rebirth of the Christian

faith.

But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was

too reasonable and too tolerant to please most of the enemies

of the church. They were waiting for a leader of a more

robust nature.

He came, and his name was Martin Luther.

Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class

brain and possessed of great personal courage. He was a

university man, a master of arts of the University of Erfurt;

afterwards he joined a Dominican monastery. Then he became

a college professor at the theological school of Wittenberg

and began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent ploughboys

of his Saxon home. He had a lot of spare time and this he used

to study the original texts of the Old and New Testaments.

Soon he began to see the great difference which existed between