"I said _among friends_ that I could follow his opinion, if the authority of the Church would approve it; but I added that I could by no means differ from the Church. But by 'Church' I mean the consent of all Christian people.... How much the authority of the Church avails with others I know not, but it is so important to me that I could agree with Arians or Pelagians, if the Church should approve what they taught. Not that the words of Christ are not sufficient for me, but it is no wonder that I follow as interpreter the Church, upon the authority of which I believe in the canonical Scriptures. Others perhaps have more talent or more strength than I, but I rest nowhere so safely as in the certain judgment of the Church. Of reasons and argumentations there is no end." [Illustration: BILIBALD PIRKHEIMER OF NUREMBERG. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY ALBRECHT DÜRER, IN "ERASMI OPERA," PUBLISHED AT LEYDEN, 1703.] In short, Erasmus had on this subject, as he had usually had on all controverted points, one opinion for his friends and another for the world. His array of "ifs" and "buts" was only a cover for his nervous dread of committing himself to something. His attitude on this question is throughout characteristic. If it meant anything, it would be a complete justification for the suspension of all thought on any speculative question. To say that one would be inclined to a belief if only the Church would approve it, is to emasculate one's own intelligence. It could not help things to say that the Church meant to him the consent of all Christian people. At that moment there was no consent of all Christian people, and the only conceivable way by which such consent could be reached was by a full and free comparison of the honest views of honest men, in order that essentials might be emphasised and non-essentials eliminated. It is a poor defence of the brightest and clearest mind of his day, to say that he refused to take his manly part in the clearing up of precisely those speculative questions about which discussion must necessarily arise. It was idle for him to talk about avoiding dissensions. The dissensions were there, and the real question was not how to suppress them, but how to solve them so that right-minded and intelligent men could know where they stood. The worst thorn in Erasmus' side on this question was Conrad Pelicanus, one of the reformed preachers of Basel. The chief offence of Pelicanus was that he had sought to support his spiritual view of the Eucharist by declaring that Erasmus really believed just as he did. We have three letters of Erasmus to him, all of 1526, and each more violent than the other. Let us notice only the most decided of these expressions.