His _bête noire_ at Louvain seems to have been a person called Egmund, a Carmelite monk, who may serve us as the type of "those persons" who were trying to identify Erasmus with the Lutheran cause. Writing[132] to the _Rector Magnificus_ of the University of Louvain, still in 1519, Erasmus says that this Egmund had been expressing the pious hope that as St. Paul had been converted from a persecutor to a doctor of the Church, so Erasmus and Luther might some day be converted. [132] iii.¹, 537. "What will become of these men? The one thing they want is to do harm in some way, and it offends them that I am not a Lutheran, as indeed I am not, except in so far as Luther serves the glory of Christ. I know that I am rather free of tongue, but yet no one has heard me approve the doctrine of Luther. I have never taken pains to read his books, excepting a few pages, and these rather skimmed than read. Your contentions against Luther I have always consistently favoured, but far more your writings, especially those of John Turenholtius, who, as I hear, has carried on the discussion in a scholarly way and without personalities." He has not read Luther, yet he has steadily approved the Louvain contentions against him and especially the writings of a man of whom he knows only by hearsay that he writes in good temper! "If his [Luther's] books were to be burnt, no one would find me any the sadder. I have written privately and said many things to prevent him from writing so seditiously, and yet I am called a Lutheran! If these jokes amuse your university, I am man enough to bear them; for I would rather do this than take revenge for them; but in my judgment the cause would be better served by other methods. Vincentius is charging me with the tumult in Holland, in which after a most foolish discourse, he came near being stoned to death; whereas the truth is I have never written to any Dutchman either for Luther or against him." He writes to Mountjoy in the same year[133]: [133] iii.¹, 538-C. "While you are happy for so many reasons I am compelled to fight with certain monsters rather than men. By Hercules! I would like to try what eloquence might do, were it not that as I lay my hand upon the hilt a certain Christian modesty, like Pallas in Homer, seizes me by the hair and restrains me."