If a man is asked, ‘Do you deny that Abracadabra is Mesopotamia?’ he can probably say ‘No’ quite conscientiously; and there can be no doubt that this attitude of non-denial is widely accepted for positive faith. The Roman Church, and the Roman Empire before it, were quite willing to take it so. If a man would hold his peace, they would let him alone. Erasmus condemned the outbreak of Luther, whose faith in the immense amount of doctrine he left untouched he perhaps regarded as simply a huge faculty of taking things for granted, ending in straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel. For myself, as one of the crowd, I am glad that with all his blunders and shortcomings, so easy to point out at this distance, Luther took his own way, and did what he did. Truth is greater than peace. ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,’ is the method of Christianity, unless the Founder of it is mistaken. The martyrs had faults and weaknesses--say even that they were mistaken,--but they were men of nobler spirit, and did more for us and our liberties than the _traditores_, the ‘traitors’ who handed over their Scriptures to the Prætor rather than face the lions. Up to a certain point, Buchanan’s attitude seems to have been practically that of Erasmus. He tells us himself in his _Autobiography_, that while a student at the University of Paris (1526-29, pp. 20-23) he ‘fell into the spreading flame of the Lutheran sect.’ Several years later (1535-38), while resident in Scotland, he wrote some satirical verses on the Franciscan monks, which the brethren took in high dudgeon, very much to Buchanan’s astonishment--boys always are astonished that frogs should object to the pleasant amusement of being stoned,--and gave him so much annoyance, ending in his having to flee the country for his life, as to make him, in his own words, ‘more keenly hostile to the licentiousness of the clergy, and less indisposed to the Lutheran cause than before.’ _Silent Doubt_