"Now, supposing it was our purpose to draw you into our party, how could we hope to do it easily in this way, since it was perfectly certain that you would never dare to do anything against him or anybody else until you saw exactly how the land lay--unless, indeed, Switzerland be so far from Brabant that we could hope you would hear nothing from there for a whole year! Away with this simple-heartedness of yours to some other world! Our Germany knows no such morals as these. "When the _Epistolæ obscurorum_ came out, you approved and applauded more than anyone else; you gave the author a regular triumph; you said there had never been discovered a more complete way of attacking those people; that barbarians ought to be ridiculed in barbarous language; and you congratulated us on our cleverness. Before our fooleries were printed, you copied some of them with your own hand, saying: 'I must send these to my friends in England and France.' But soon after, when you saw that the whole muck of the theologers were much disturbed and that the hornets were stirred up in all directions and were threatening ruin, you began to tremble, and lest suspicion might fall upon you that you were the author or that you approved the plan, you wrote a letter with that same candour of yours to Cologne, trying to get ahead of the rumours and making a great pretence of sympathy with them and regret at the affair and saying many things against the whole business and abusing the authors." If Erasmus is such a man of peace, why, asks Hutten, does he now so bitterly attack the reformers? Some people had long since accused him of treachery, but at that time no one would believe them and Erasmus was satisfied to put it all upon the Fates: "a fine notion and, as we now see, truly Erasmian! You say that, being the man you are, you must deal with Germans after their own fashion. Well, this is not the way of Germans, but of men whose fickleness and inconstancy are altogether foreign to Germans, men who can be tossed about hither and thither by every change of wind, with whom nothing is fixed, but everything slippery and shifting with the changes of fortune. Get you to Italy with such doings, to those cardinals whom you are now taking under your wing, where everyone may live according to his own morals and his own character! Or else get back to your own French-Dutchmen, if, perhaps, this is a national vice and one common to you and them!" Referring to the use of the term "Lutherans," about which Erasmus was so much distressed, Hutten says: