Absolution for incest was afforded at thirty-six livres, three ducats.  Perjury came to seven livres and three carlines.  Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper.  Even a parricide could buy forgiveness at God’s tribunal at one ducat; four livres, eight carlines.  Henry de Montfort, in the year 1448, purchased absolution for that crime at that price.  Was it strange that a century or so of this kind of work should produce a Luther?  Was it unnatural that plain people, who loved the ancient Church, should rather desire to see her purged of such blasphemous abuses, than to hear of St. Peter’s dome rising a little nearer to the clouds on these proceeds of commuted crime?

At the same time, while ecclesiastical abuses are thus augmenting, ecclesiastical power is diminishing in the Netherlands.  The Church is no longer able to protect itself against the secular aim.  The halcyon days of ban, book and candle, are gone.  In 1459, Duke Philip of Burgundy prohibits the churches from affording protection to fugitives.  Charles the Bold, in whose eyes nothing is sacred save war and the means of making it, lays a heavy impost upon all clerical property.  Upon being resisted, he enforces collection with the armed hand.  The sword and the pen, strength and intellect, no longer the exclusive servants or instruments of priestcraft, are both in open revolt.  Charles the Bold storms one fortress, Doctor Grandfort, of Groningen, batters another.  This learned Frisian, called “the light of the world,” friend and compatriot of the great Rudolph Agricola, preaches throughout the provinces, uttering bold denunciations of ecclesiastical error.  He even disputes the infallibility of the Pope, denies the utility of prayers for the dead, and inveighs against the whole doctrine of purgatory and absolution.

With the beginning of the 16th century, the great Reformation was actually alive.  The name of Erasmus of Rotterdam was already celebrated; the man, who, according to Grotius, “so well showed the road to a reasonable reformation.”  But if Erasmus showed the road, he certainly did not travel far upon it himself.  Perpetual type of the quietist, the moderate man, he censured the errors of the Church with discrimination and gentleness, as if Borgianism had not been too long rampant at Rome, as if men’s minds throughout Christendom were not too deeply stirred to be satisfied with mild rebukes against sin, especially when the mild rebuker was in receipt of livings and salaries from the sinner.  Instead of rebukes, the age wanted reforms.  The Sage of Rotterdam was a keen observer, a shrewd satirist, but a moderate moralist.  He loved ease, good company, the soft repose of princely palaces, better than a life of martyrdom and a death at the stake.  He was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made, as he handsomely confessed on more than one occasion.  “Let others affect martyrdom,” he said, “for myself I am unworthy of the honor;” and, at another time, “I am not of a mind,” he