In his celebrated _Praise of Folly_,[271] Erasmus has much to say of the weaknesses of the monks and theologians, and of the foolish people who thought that religion consisted simply in pilgrimages, the worship of relics, and the procuring of indulgences. Scarcely one of the abuses which Luther later attacked escaped Erasmus' satirical pen. The book is a mixture of the lightest humor and the bitterest earnestness. As one turns its pages one is sometimes tempted to think Luther half right when he declared Erasmus "a regular jester who makes sport of everything, even of religion and Christ himself." Yet there was in this humorist a deep seriousness that cannot be ignored. Erasmus was really directing his extraordinary industry, knowledge, and insight, not toward a revival of classical literature, but to _a renaissance of Christianity_. He believed, however, that revolt from the pope and the Church would produce a great disturbance and result in more harm than good. He preferred to trust in the slower but surer effects of enlightenment and knowledge. Popular superstitions and any undue regard for the outward forms of religion would, he argued, be outgrown and quietly disappear as mankind became more cultivated. To Erasmus and his many sympathizers, culture, promoted especially by classical studies, should be the chief agency in religious reform. Nevertheless, just as Erasmus thought that his dreams of a peaceful reform were to be realized, as he saw the friends and patrons of literature,--Maximilian, Henry VIII, Francis I,--on the thrones of Europe, and a humanist pope, Leo X, at the head of the Church, a very different revolution from that which he had planned, had begun and was to embitter his declining years. [Sidenote: Sources of discontent in Germany with the policy of the papal court.]