§ 120.6. =Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam= was the most brilliant of all the humanists, not only of Germany, but also of all Europe. Born in A.D. 1465, he was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer and Herzogenbusch, and afterwards forced by his relatives to enter a monastery in A.D. 1486. In A.D. 1491 he was relieved from the monastic restraints by the Bishop of Cambray, and sent to finish his studies at Paris. He visited England in A.D. 1497, in the company of young Englishmen to whom he had been tutor. There the humanist theologian Colet of Oxford exerted over him a wholesome influence that told upon his whole future life. After spending a year and a half in England, he passed the next six years, sometimes in France, sometimes in the Netherlands; was in Italy from A.D. 1507 till A.D. 1510; then again for five years in England, for most of that time teaching Greek at Cambridge; then other six years in the Netherlands; and at last, in A.D. 1521, he settled with his publisher Frobenius in Basel, where he enjoyed intercourse with the greatest scholars of the day, and maintained an extensive correspondence. He refused every offer of official appointment, even the rank of cardinal, but in reality held undisputed sway as king in the world of letters. He did much for the advancement of classical studies, and in various ways promoted the Protestant Reformation. The faults of the scholastic method in the study of theology he unsparingly exposed, while the misdeeds of the clergy and the ignorance and sloth of the monks afforded materials for his merciless satires. The heathenish spirit of many of the humanists, as well as the turbulent and revolutionary procedure of Ulrich von Hutten, was quite distasteful to him; but his Pelagianising tendencies also prevented him from appreciating the true character of the gospel. He desired a reformation of the Church, but he had not the reformer’s depth of religious emotion, world-conquering faith, self-denying love, and heroic preparation for martyrdom. He was much too fond of a genial literary life, and his perception of the corruption of the church was much too superficial, so that he sought reformation rather by human culture than by the Divine power of the gospel. When the Reformation conquered at Basel in A.D. 1529, Erasmus withdrew to Freiburg. He returned to Basel in A.D. 1536 for conference with Frobenius, and died there under suspicion of heresy without the sacraments of the church. His friends the monks at an earlier period, on the occasion of a false report of his death, had said in their barbarous Latin that he died “_sine lux, sine crux, sine Deus_.” The most important of his works are his critical and exegetical treatises on the N.T. The first edition of his Greek N.T., with Latin translation, short notes, and three introductory sections, was published in A.D. 1516.