But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of nonsense with which his name is forever associated. In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap. In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and never forgiven. But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters. The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance. It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.