poured oil upon the waves, or, as Erasmus was pleased to express it walked after Luther, as Lite after Ate;[191] still the whole surface of society was troubled, and many who had once thought that a storm might clear the air, now heard the sound as of abundance of rain, with alarm, and girt up their mantles and ran before it. Erasmus, no doubt, was in this respect a type of many: he was in theory (at least in his earlier days) a reformer; he promoted the Reformation very essentially, and in a great variety of ways. The perspicuity and neatness of his style, the peculiar edge which he could put upon all his thoughts, the playfulness of his fancy, the copiousness of his knowledge, made him the most popular writer of the age. As a critic, he caused Scripture to be better known to scholars, by publishing the first printed edition of the Greek Testament: as a commentator he caused it to be better understood; though by some fatality, as Bishop Bull complains,[192] he is prone, like Grotius after him, to give certain important texts an Arian bias; the effect perhaps of a capricious temperament, since his writings in general furnish proof enough of his Trinitarian orthodoxy. Certainly we ourselves owe him a debt of gratitude for his paraphrase of the New Testament, a work which Cranmer introduced into all the parish churches in England, not indeed as faultless, but as the best he could find for that use, and done by “the most indifferent writer;”[193] and mutilated and moth-eaten copies of it are still occasionally to be seen chained to their desks. In his colloquies, too, of which the influence must have been very great, he lashes the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and the monks, and friars above all, as the authors and abettors of those abuses, with a rod of nettles; and a system of things in which even the most sober thinker would see much to ridicule, found in Erasmus an assailant who could discover matter for merriment even in subjects the most grave. In truth, he had more wit than he could well manage; it is often ill-timed and ill-directed;[194] often he hits religion itself when he aims it at superstition only; and whilst he “shoots his random arrow o’er the house, he hurts a brother.”[195] It is possible to imagine that had an infidel age, instead of an age of sound religious inquiry, immediately succeeded the times of Erasmus, his levity would have frequently proved mischievous, and the blows which he had intended should tell against the church of Rome only, and which under Luther’s management did there spend themselves, would have been found misplaced, and apt to recoil. He was, perhaps, even more ambitious of reviving learning than religion; it was popish ignorance as much as popish heterodoxy that called him out. Literature was what he lived for. He could have wished that such a scholar as Melancthon, so splendidly endowed with talents for serving the cause of letters, had devoted