'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty. Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.' Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world must have accepted the Reformation. He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of lightning. Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.' When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,' Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been legions of Antichrists these many years.' More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the difference between him and them.' He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth. 'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?' Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely tempted as he was, he could not. With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily; but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.