Where should we expect to find Erasmus, as we have been making acquaintance with him to the year 1518, on this great new question of human justification? Our answer must follow two main lines. First, as to the general notion of the freedom of the will, we may fairly conclude from all his moral teaching up to that time, that the idea of Luther in itself would be most repugnant to him. The whole tone of the Enchiridion, for example, is to emphasise the function of the individual conscience in determining action. The call to duty is imperative; the assumption is that man can do what he ought to do. The freedom of the will in human action is so completely assumed that there is no need of discussing it. The ultimate appeal is never to any outside power. If, on the one hand, Erasmus avoids all final reference to an ecclesiastical authority, so, on the other hand, he equally avoids reference to a theological "grace of God" which is to do our moral work for us. The same impression comes from a study of the Christian Prince. The prince is a "good prince," not because he is a special instrument in the hand of God, nor because he is a faithful servant of any church authority, but because he does his duty as a man, in the station to which he is called. He ought to do this thing or that simply because it is the right and the wise thing to do, tending most directly toward the welfare of his subjects and the interest of the prince himself. The Christian state is such because it tends toward a realisation of the teaching of Christ, not because it corresponds to any abstract ideal set for it by the church power or by any direct working of the divine agency. Our second point of view is thus already suggested. In so far as the Lutheran position dealt with man as an individual being, responsible directly to God, without the need of any intervening human agency, in so far it could not fail to command the sympathy of whatever was most sound and most sincere in the thought of Erasmus. His moral appeal throughout is completely free from any really convincing reference to a highest church tribunal, whose decisions must be final. One can find plenty of passages in which he has, even before 1518, expressed his respect for the papal system; but it would be hard to think of any one of these as representing his really deepest convictions. Either they are purely conventional, having no bearing upon the issue of the Reformation, or they are evident "hedging," put in to guard their author against the suspicion of having gone too far on the way of criticism. It is always difficult to know which of his selves is the real self; but wherever in Erasmus' moral writing we seem to feel the ring of a sincere emotion, it is always when he is appealing to the essential manliness of man--never when he is making his apologies to the powers that be.