Selections from Erasmus | Page 4

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Rochester, sent him to Cambridge and gave him rooms in Queens'
College. For a time he held the Professorship of Divinity founded in
Cambridge, as in Oxford, by the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of
Henry VII. But teaching was not his gift. Others might inspire students
from the teacher's chair: his talent could only enlighten the teacher
through his books.
At length the time came to publish. By fortunate accident, if not by
design, he came into relations with John Froben of Basel, who with the
three sons of his late partner, John Amorbach, was printing works of
sound learning with all his energy--especially the Fathers. In July 1514
Erasmus set forth, and after a triumphal progress through Germany,
fêted and welcomed everywhere, he settled at Basel to see Jerome and
the New Testament through the press. By 1516 they were complete,
and Erasmus had achieved--almost by an afterthought, for his first
project had been a series of annotations like Valla's--the work which
has made his name great.
Mark Pattison says of Erasmus that he propounded the problem of
critical scholarship, but himself did nothing to solve it. By critical
scholarship is meant the examination of the grounds on which learning
rests. In youth we are uncritical, and accept as Caesar or Livy the books
from which we read those authors; but with growing experience we
learn that a copy is not always a true representation of its original; and
with this, even though there is little perception of the changes and
chances through which manuscripts have passed, the first lesson of
criticism has been learnt.
The problem may be stated thus--In no single case does an autograph
manuscript of a classical author survive: for our knowledge of the
works of the past we are dependent on manuscripts written at a later
date. Only rarely is there less than 300 years' interval between an
author's death and the earliest manuscript now extant of his works; in a
great many cases 1,000 years have elapsed, and in the
extreme--Sophocles and Aristophanes--1,400. The question therefore
arises, How far do our manuscripts represent what was originally
written? and it is the work of scholars to compare together existing
manuscripts, to estimate their relative value, and where they differ, to
determine, if possible, what the author actually wrote.
The manuscripts of the New Testament which scholars have examined

and collated are now numbered by hundreds. Erasmus was content for
his first edition with two lent to him by Colet from the library of St.
Paul's Cathedral, and a few of little value which he found at Basel. And
though for subsequent editions he compared one or two more, the work
never reached a high standard of scholarship. He had done enough,
however, for his age. Before Erasmus men were accustomed to read the
New Testament in Latin; after 1516 no competent scholar could be
content with anything but the Greek. But though the priority actually
belongs to Erasmus, it must be stated that the Greek version had
already been printed in January 1514 in a Polyglott Bible published
under the orders of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala in Spain. For definite
reasons, however, this great edition was not put into circulation till
1520.
By this time Erasmus had attained his highest point. As years went on
his activity continued unabated, his fame grew and his material
circumstances reached a level at which he was far above want and
could gratify his generous impulses freely. But a cloud arose which
overshadowed him; and when it broke--long after Erasmus's death--it
overwhelmed Europe. The causes which raised it up were not new. For
centuries earnest and religious men--Erasmus himself among the
number--had been protesting against evil in the Church. In December
1517 Martin Luther, a friar at Wittenberg, created a stir by denouncing
a number of the doctrines and practices of the Church; and when the
Pope excommunicated him, proceeded publicly to burn the Papal Bull
with every mark of contempt. From this he was driven on by opposition
and threatened persecution, which he faced with indomitable courage,
to a position of complete hostility to Rome; endeavouring to shatter its
immemorial institutions and asserting the right of the individual to
approach God through the mediation of Christ only instead of through
that of priests: the individual, as an inevitable consequence, claiming
the right of private judgement in matters religious instead of bowing to
dogma based on the authority of the Church from ages past.
These conclusions Erasmus abhorred. He was all for reform, but a
violent severance with the past seemed to him a monstrous remedy. He
always exercised, though he did not always claim, the right of thinking
for himself; but he would never have dreamed of allowing the same
freedom to the ignorant or the unlearned. The