With More he bore reproach for a good cause. While the English lawyer pleaded for the study of Greek at the English universities, the Dutch scholar met the assaults of those who would check the publication of the New Testament in the original tongue. He was justly indignant at the treatment he received. "There are none," he said, "that bark at me more furiously than those who have never even seen the outside of my books. When you meet with one of these brawlers, let him rave on at my New Testament till he has made himself hoarse. Then ask him gently whether he has read it. If he has the impudence to say yes, urge him to produce one passage that deserves to be blamed. You will find that he cannot. Consider, now, whether this be the behaviour of a Christian, to blacken a man's reputation, which he cannot restore to him again if he would. Of all the vile ways of defaming him, none is more villainous than to accuse him of heresy; and yet to this they have recourse on the slightest provocation!" A Dominican friar at Strasburg, who had spitefully attacked Erasmus's Testament, was compelled to own that he had not read one word of it. "These men," exclaims Erasmus, "first hate, next condemn, and, lastly, seek for passages to justify their censures. And then, if any one opposes them, and calls them what they are, they say he is a disturber of the public peace; which is just as if you gave a man a blow in the face, and then bid him be quiet, and not make a noise about nothing." But all through the babel of contending voices Erasmus kept his own course. He could neither be coerced to give up his liberal scholarship nor lured to ally with Luther and the Protestant doctors. To him the way of sound learning seemed the path of the Catholic Church. And here too he was of one mind with More. The Englishman had to meet dangers which never beset the foreign scholar, and he met them, it may be, as Erasmus would not have dared to do. But it cannot be doubted that in their opinions, as in their hearts, they were never really divided. In Mistress Margaret's _Libellus_, Erasmus appears chiefly as a fellow of infinite jest, but wise withal, chatting at table as he chats in his letters, and saying, indeed, much that we have under the safe warrant of his own pen.