had become, by the divine summons, an evangelical theologian, a combatant
for the liberation of the slaves sighing under the tyranny of Rome. A
serious conversation with a friend who was a German and resisted yielding
to a movement of the spirit which was kindling the inmost depths of the
German nature, thoughts, and feelings, and was destined to heal the woes
of the German nation and preserve it from the basest abuse, would be to
him inconceivable.

Wolf interrupted this avowal with the assurance that he must nevertheless
decline a religious discussion with him, for the weapons they would use
were too different. Erasmus, as a theologian, was deeply versed in the
Protestant faith, while he professed Catholicism merely as a consequence
of his birth and with a layman's understanding and knowledge. Yet he
would not shun the conflict if his hands were not bound by the most
sacred of oaths. Then he turned to the past, and while he himself, as it
were, lived through for the second time the most affecting moment in his
existence, he transported his friend to his dead mother's sick-bed.

In vivid language he described how the devout widow and nun implored her
son to resist like a rock in the sea the assault of the new heretical
ideas, that the thousands of prayers which she had uttered for him, for
his soul, and his father's, might not be vain.

Then Wolf confessed that just at that time, as a pupil in the school of
poets, he had come under the influence of the scholar Naevius, whose
evangelical views Erasmus knew, and related how difficult it had been for
him to take the oath which, nevertheless, now that he had once sworn it,
he would keep, even though life and his own intelligence would not have
taught him to prefer the old faith to every new doctrine, whether it
emanated from Luther, from Calvin, or from Zwingli.