During the earlier years of his work, while this work was directed rather against the abuses that had grown up in the Church than against the authority of the Church itself, and before the Reformers had attempted any constructive theology, Luther was able to preserve relations with the leaders of the Humanistic movement, and received encouraging letters from men like Erasmus and Reuchlin, who stood at the head of the liberal scholarship of the time. It was only later, when the Church had cast out Luther and the Lutherans had definitely repudiated the authority of the Church, and when the doctrines of the Lutheran creed had been finally formulated, that Erasmus, who had heartily sympathised with the fight against the abuses of ecclesiasticism, but who believed that the Church Universal should be preserved, and who did not believe in the doctrine of justification by faith, cast in his lot with the opponents of Luther, a decision that was marked by the publication of his famous essay on _Free Will_. The Reformers took pains, however, to utilise for their cause, as far as practicable, the influence and the learning of the Humanists. In 1520, Ulrich von Hutten published a translation of the treatise of Laurentius Valla, one of the earliest of the Italian Humanists, which had been first issued in Naples in 1450, and in which was exposed the forgery of the _Donation_ of Constantine. The _Donation_ was the document or edict in which Constantine was supposed to have granted to the Roman See the possession and control of the entire western world, making the Church the heir of the Roman Empire. The scholarly argument of Valla had never been refuted, and its republication at this time dealt a heavy blow to the traditional pretensions of the Papacy; but this purpose did not prevent von Hutten from dedicating his translation to Leo X. Shortly after the publication of the revised edition of _The New Testament_, the indefatigable Luther entered upon the still more laborious task of translating the books of _The Old Testament_, the work upon which continued for a number of years. He secured the help of a group of scholarly collaborators, of whom the most important was Melanchthon. For _The New Testament_ he had had the use of the Greek edition edited by Erasmus, and recently published by Froben of Basel, a volume which, as well for the accuracy of its text as for the scholarly authority, the boldness and the original information of its notes, far surpassed any texts of the Scriptures as yet issued. Luther expresses very freely his obligations to the learning and industry of Erasmus, and never got over his astonishment that a man who had the scholarship and the courage to puncture so many of the unwarranted assumptions of the Roman Church, could still believe that Church to be worth preserving.