For the moment the discussion turned on the question of indulgences. On this subject Erasmus had made no utterance which could be understood as committing him on the theory as a whole. In the Praise of Folly he had ridiculed the grosser absurdities of the practice, especially the counting up of the days and years of redemption from Purgatory, as if salvation were a thing of the multiplication-table. The teaching of the Enchiridion was hopelessly against any such conception of moral regeneration. Anyone who had read Erasmus could not have a moment's doubt that the system of indulgences, as it was practised throughout Europe, must have been repulsive to him in the extreme. The idea that Erasmus could ever have invested a penny in such traffic for the advantage of his own soul or that of anyone dear to him, was grotesquely absurd. Moreover the circumstances of that special sale of indulgences in Germany which called out the wrath of Luther were such as must have seemed equally outrageous to Erasmus. The barefaced openness with which the Prince Elector of Mainz had lent himself to the papal exaction, on condition that half the plunder should go into his own pocket to pay for the _pallium_ which the papacy itself had just granted him, brought out into clearest relief the purely mercantile nature of the whole transaction. It required all the hair-splitting of all the schools to carry a man through the stages of that bargain and leave him at last with any tenderness whatever for the system that made it possible. Yet this was precisely the feat which Erasmus was apparently to perform. We gain a glimpse at the working of his mind on this subject in the letter to Volzius, called forth by criticism of the Enchiridion, and dated in August, 1518[121]: [121] iii.¹, 343-E.