been used as a school-book in Jerome's days.]

In the first place what a foolish, what a mad blather he made against my
revised New Testament! Next, what could be more like madness than that
remark which he threw out against J. Faber and myself, when the very
facts bespoke that he did not understand what agreement there was
between me and Faber, or what was the subject of controversy! What more
shameless than his fixing a charge of forgery and heresy in the course
of a public address on me, because I rendered according to the Greek:
Omnes quidem non resurgemus, sed omnes immutabimur ("We shall not all
rise again, but we shall all be changed.") What more like a raging
madman, then his warning the people at Mechlin, in a public address, to
beware of the heresy of Luther and Erasmus! Why should I now recall the
ravings that he belches out rather than utters in the midst of his high
feasting as often as his zeal for the house of the Lord is inflamed from
his cups? He lately said in Holland, that I was set down for a forger
among the divines of Louvain. (One who was present and heard it wrote to
me.) When asked, Why? Because, says he, he so often corrects the New
Testament! What a dolt of a tongue! Jerome so often corrected the
Psalter: is he therefore a forger? In short if he is a forger, who
either rashly or from ignorance translates anything otherwise than it
should be, he was a forger, whose translation we use at the present day
in the Church. But what good does this sort of behavior do him? All men
laugh at him as a Morychus,[E] shun him as a crackbrain,--get out of
his way as a peevish fellow you can do nothing with. Nor can they think
ill of him, of whom he says such spiteful things. And though he
displeases all, himself alone he cannot displease.

[Footnote E: Lit.: One stained or smeared: an epithet of Bacchus
(Dionysos) in Sicily, "smeared with wine-lees." ([Greek: moryssô].)]