Again, it was plain, once for all, as early as 1518, that Erasmus had not in him the stuff out of which great leaders of men in critical times are made. No one would have acknowledged this more readily than he, and nothing could have been farther from the line of his ambition than such leadership. Even if we make large deductions from his account of the great positions he had declined, enough remains to make us quite sure that, if he had chosen, he might have held any one of many places, which, by their very importance, would have given him an effective leverage upon European affairs. Such influence lay within the field neither of his gifts nor of his desires. Such effect as he might have upon the course of events must come through the natural channel of his work as a scholar and a critic. The difficulty of our problem is greatly increased by the almost hopeless complication of questions which entered into that one great demonstration we call the Reformation. Even at this distance of time it is impossible, without resorting to some rather large generalisation, to say in a single phrase what the issue of the Reformation was. Still less, of course, was such clear discrimination possible to one who stood, as Erasmus did, in the midst of these rapid and ever-shifting and often conflicting currents and was called upon to say just where his standing-ground was, or with which one of these currents he was willing to drift. Luther nailed his Theses on Indulgences to the door of the Palace-Church at Wittenberg on the last day of October in the year 1517. When and where the news of this action reached Erasmus we do not know. It is impossible that it can have been more than a few weeks before he, in common with all intelligent persons, had read this first proclamation of a war that was to be to the death. The Theses attacked indulgences, but these were only the outward form under which the whole theory of a mechanical salvation was expressed. If the indulgence was wrong, not merely in practice, but in theory as well, then the whole church system, in so far as it was a soul-saving apparatus, was wrong too. Doubtless there was room for infinite refinements upon this simple deduction. The same thesis about indulgences had been put forth many times before. Men had come to the same conclusions by many different roads; but never yet had any one person travelled so many of these roads. In Luther there spoke the monk, who had tried faithfully the method of conformity; the priest, who had gone directly to the souls of men with the consolations of religious hope; the scholar, who had caught the gleam of that new light of reason which was changing the whole aspect of human thought; the patriot, who saw his fellow-countrymen victimised by a vast foreign oppression; and finally the man, who had worked through the awful problem of human sinfulness until he saw it clearly solved by reference to the common inheritance of humanity.