more than mortal wounds are dealt me, that I can be pleased with some little joke or other. . . . The whole world knows your nature ; truly you have so guided your pen that you have^ writen against no one more rabidly and (what is more detest-j able) more maliciously than against me. Perhaps you are re- \ying on your own confession that you are a weak sinner, though at other times you demand ever)rthing except to be taken for God. You are a man, you write, of a violent dispo- sition, and one who delights in that noble form of argument. And, therefore, that same admirable ferocity which you formerly used against Fisher* and against Cochlaeus, who challenged you to it and provoked you by their reviling, you now use against my book On the Free Will, which argued politely. How do your scurrilous reproaches and mendaciour\ Christianity, besides many oflier things which you say you pass over, help the argument one way or the other? I bear your accusations with tolerable calmness because my coni_ science does not charge me with one of them. Did I not be- lieve in God, Christianity and revealed religion, I should not wish to live a day longer. If you plead your cause with your customary vehemence but without your furious reviling, you would provoke fewer men to come out against you; more than a third part of your book is taken up with such invective since you give rein to your temper. Your rage itself shows! your way to impute to me so many crimes while my book ^. did not intend to deal with things that the world alreadyj knows. You imagine, I dare say, that Erasmus has no friends, but there are more Ihan you think. And yet it makes little difference what happens to us two; I especially, who must soon depart this life, care little if the whole world applaud me. But what does terribly pain me, and all good men, is that your~^ arrogant, insolent, rebellious nature has cast the world into I letters with a set of malignant Pharisees, and that you have_j armed the wicked and turbulent to rebel; in short, that you so treat the evangelical cause as to confound all things, sacred
- John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Luther's most zealous opponent in England.
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