It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly addicted; that he blasphemed the Holy Scriptures, and particularly Moses; that he did not believe a word of what he preached; that he had called the Epistle of St.James a thing of straw; and, above all, that the Reformation was no work of his, but, in reality, was due to a certain astrological position of the stars.

It was, however, a vulgar saying among the Roman ecclesiastics that Erasmus laid the egg of the Reformation, and Luther hatched it.
Rome at first made the mistake of supposing that this was nothing more than a casual outbreak; she failed to discern that it was, in fact, the culmination of an internal movement which for two centuries had been going on in Europe, and which had been hourly gathering force; that, had there been nothing else, the existence of three popes--three obediences--would have compelled men to think, to deliberate, to conclude for themselves.

The Councils of Constance and Basle taught them that there was a higher power than the popes.

The long and bloody wars that ensued were closed by the Peace of Westphalia; and then it was found that Central and Northern Europe had cast off the intellectual tyranny of Rome, that individualism had carried its point, and had established the right of every man to think for himself.
DECOMPOSITION OF PROTESTANTISM.

But it was impossible that the establishment of this right of private judgment should end with the rejection of Catholicism.