Laudator Temporis Acti

H.R. Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), "Desiderius Erasmus," Encounter 4.5 (May, 1955) 57-68, rpt. in his Historical Essays (London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1963), pp. 35-60 (at 52-53) :

Political programmes may be defeated entirely, but not ideas: at least, not great ideas. Political circumstances may alter around them, ideological frontiers may be formed against or across them, but such convulsions merely alter the terrain: they may divert or divide, but they do not permanently dam the stream. The idea of ideological blocs systematically opposed to one another in intellectual matters is a naïve idea such as can only occur to doctrinaires and bigots. The Age of the Reformation had of course its bigots: monks who, in sixteenth-century Spain, denounced Liberal Catholics as 'Lutheran' heretics, puritans who, in seventeenth-century England, denounced Liberal Protestants as 'popish' conspirators. But the historian of ideas is not interested in these stunted McCarthyites. The victims of persecution are always more interesting than their persecutors; and if we wish to discover the heirs of Erasmus, rather than to assume too easily that they were crushed by the Counter-Reformation, we should not accept as final and mutually exclusive the barren categories of 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' into which Christendom was officially and superfically divided. There was an Erasmianism after Erasmus, a secret stream which meandered to and fro across those loudly proclaimed but ill-guarded frontiers, creating oases of rational thought impartially on either side.

Id. (at 59-60):

What does a humanist do when bigotries swell, black and red, on either side? There are some to-day who say that intellectuals should line up on either side as a species of army chaplains to encourage the troops. I well remember the spectacle, five years ago, in Berlin, when a so-called 'Congress for Cultural Freedom' mobilised the intellectuals of the West and invited them to howl in unison against the rival intellectuals similarly mobilised in an opposite 'Intellectual Congress' in Breslau. But I do not think that Erasmus, if he had yielded to political pressure and joined the Gadarene stampede of Lutherans or monks, would have had so lasting and beneficent an effect in the history of thought as he did by continuing to advocate peace for the diffusion of unarmed sense. Intellectuals may be citizens; they may even, as such, have to become soldiers; but it is not their business to be recruiting-sergeants. If their rational message is not heard in their time, let them still utter it rather than turn it into a battle-cry: it may still be heard tomorrow. For history, closely considered, suggests that opposite sides in an ideological struggle, for all their high-sounding abstract slogans, are not so opposite as they think that they are. The humanist message in fact can be understood by both. It may take a long time and a devious route; it may have to survive by stealth; but there is no proper alternative to it.