So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"--for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (_subdubito_). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (_paulo latinius_). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only admitted--except when he was addressing his patrons--"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again. [Sidenote: His wit] But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed. Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517--though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them--he foresaw. "In this part of the world," he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door! {62} CHAPTER II GERMANY SECTION 1. THE LEADER