In writing to one of the cardinals after the publication of his _Spongia_, there is a touch of sadness in his complaints, that having been forced to do battle with the “Lutherans as against a hydra of many heads,” Catholics should still try and make the world believe that he was really a Lutheran at heart. “I have never,” he declares, “doubted about the sovereignty of the Pope, but whether this supremacy was recognised in the time of St. Jerome, I have my doubts, on account of certain passages I have noted in my edition of St. Jerome. In the same place, however, I have marked what would appear to make for the contrary opinion; and in numerous other places I call Peter ‘Prince of the apostolic order,’ and the Roman Pontiff, Christ’s Vicar and the Head of His Church, giving him the highest power according to Christ.”[197]
Probably a more correct view of Erasmus’s real mind can hardly be obtained than in part of a letter already quoted (Ep. 501) addressed to Bishop Marlianus of Tuy in Galicia, on March 25, 1520. “I would have the Church,” he writes, “purified, lest the good in it suffer by conjunction with the evil. In avoiding the Scylla of Luther, however, I would have care taken to avoid Charybdis. If this be sin, then I own my guilt. I have sought to save the dignity of the Roman Pontiff, the honour of Catholic theology, and to look to the welfare of Christendom. I have, as yet, read no whole work of Luther, however short, and I have never even in jest defended his paradoxes. Be assured that if any movement is set on foot which is injurious to the Christian religion and dangerous to the public peace or the supremacy of the Holy See, it does not proceed from Erasmus.… In all I have written, I have not deviated one hair’s-breadth from the teaching of the Church. But every wise man knows that practices and teachings have been introduced into the Church partly by custom, partly by the canonists, partly by means of scholastic definitions, partly by the tricks and arts of secular sovereigns, which have no sound sanction. Many great people have begged me to support Luther, but I have ever replied that I would be ready to take his part when he was on the Catholic side. They have asked me to draw up a formula of faith; I have said that I know of none save the creed of the Catholic Church, and every one who consults me I urge to submit to the authority of the Pope.”[198]