Notwithstanding the very large investment of skilled labour and of money that the New Testament called for, the publication proved a financial success. A second edition was required within three years, making a total printing, up to 1519, of 3300 folio copies. In this second edition the text was largely altered and the volume was fortified with a papal brief, a copy of the Nicene creed, and an engraving of the Trinity, which ought, as Drummond remarks, to have proved effectual in protecting the work against charges of heresy. Above the letter of the Pope is printed a quaint device, a woodcut representing the victorious Germans under Arminius overthrowing the legions of Varus, and accompanied by an inscription, _Tandem, vipera, Sibillare desiste_. The insertion of this German device with its motto was probably the work of the printer. The purport of it could hardly be considered as complimentary to an Italian Pope. Froude, in commenting upon the great popular interest in the book, says that 100,000 copies were speedily sold in France alone,[109] but I can find no evidence in the records of the printing of any such number, and I think that Froude must have been misled by some general reference to its wide distribution. There is not space here to consider the long series of controversies provoked by the publication of the Testament of Erasmus, a volume which undoubtedly contained the first text approximating to correctness that Europe had as yet known. As before stated, the text was utilised by Luther as the basis of his own all-important German version, although in the bitterness of the disappointment on the part of the Lutherans that they had not secured the adherence of the great scholar, they appear never to have made any very specific acknowledgment of the enormous service rendered to the cause of the Reformation, as well by his scholarship as by his courage. On the side of the Church, the murmurings were many and soon became bitter. Accusations were heard of heresy and Arianism. Erasmus had departed from the version of the Vulgate, and had substituted comparatively pure Latin for the monastic barbarisms, and he had even, it was said, charged the Apostles with writing bad Greek. He had had the temerity to correct a number of texts in such a way as materially to alter their meaning, and he had omitted altogether the testimony of the “Three Witnesses” in the first Epistle of John. This unfortunate verse, after being accepted by the Protestants on the strength of its retention by Luther, and of the later and more scholarly authority of the editors of the King James version, was finally condemned as an interpolation by the revisers under Victoria, who were thus in a position, after an interval of three and a half centuries, to bear testimony to the accurate scholarship and the editorial boldness of Erasmus. It is to be regretted, on the ground of the consistency of Erasmus, that he was induced, in a later edition,