The impact of his successes on Christendom’s establishment may be judged by an edict from the Holy Roman emperor. Any teacher found using the Colloquia in a classroom, he ordered, was to be executed on the spot. Martin Luther agreed. “On my deathbed I shall forbid my sons to read Erasmus’ ‘Colloquies.’” But Luther was then still professor of biblical exegesis at Wittenberg, an eminent member of the Catholic establishment. Within three years he would change his mind and, with it, the history of Western civilization. And Erasmus, though he denied it on his own deathbed, had sounded the claxon of
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