With the art peculiar to him, he came to persuade himself, that the champion of free-will was hostile to the idea of any Divine supremacy over the human will, scoffed at all religion, denied the Godhead and was worse than any persecutor of the Church; he was confirmed in this belief by the sarcastic sayings about his Evangel, to which Erasmus gave vent in his correspondence and conversations, and which occasionally came to Luther’s knowledge. It is true that if we look at the matter through Luther’s spectacles we can understand how certain darker sides of Erasmus and his Humanist school repelled him. Luther fixed on these, and, as was his wont, harshly exaggerated and misrepresented them. The too-great attention bestowed on the outward form, seemingly to the detriment of the Christian contents, displeased him greatly; still more so did the undeniable frivolity with which sacred things, still dear to him, were treated. At the same time it was strange to him, and rightly so, how little heed the Humanists who remained faithful to the Church paid to the principle of authority and of ecclesiastical obedience, preferring to follow the lax example set by Erasmus himself, more particularly during the first period of his career; they appeared to submit to the yoke of the Church merely formally and from force of habit, and showed none of that heart-felt conviction and respect for her visible supremacy which alone could win the respect of those without.[584] Schlaginhaufen has noted down the following remark made by Luther in 1532 when a picture of Erasmus was shown him. “The cunning of his mode of writing is perfectly expressed in his face. He does nothing but mock at God and religion. When he speaks of our Holy Christ, of the Holy Word of God and the Holy Sacraments, these are mere fine, big words, a sham and no reality.... Formerly he annoyed and confuted the Papacy, now he draws his head out of the noose.”[585] In the same year, and according to the same reporter, he declared: “Erasmus is a knave incarnate.... Were I in good health, I should inveigh against him. To him the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are something ludicrous.... Erasmus is as sure there is no God as I am that I can see. Lucian himself was not so bold and impudent as Erasmus.”[586] At Easter of the following year Veit Dietrich, who lived in Luther’s house, announced in a letter to Nuremberg, that the storm was about to break: Luther was arming himself against Erasmus, reading his books carefully and gathering together his blasphemies. The same writer in a collection of Luther’s conversations not yet published quotes the following outbursts: “Erasmus makes use of ambiguities, intentionally and with malice, this I shall prove against him.... Were I to cut open Erasmus’s heart, I should find nothing but mockeries of the Trinity, the Sacraments, etc. To him the whole thing is a joke.”[587]