Logically this isolation was the natural outcome of lifelong habit. To be free of all obligations was, we have continually noted, Erasmus' chief desire, and that motive, consistently followed, could lead nowhere else than to isolation. Yet here we touch once more upon that other side of his nature which had always been in conflict with the instinct of freedom. In spite of his individuality he needed approval. The breath of adulation was sweet to him. He could be shabby enough to a friend, if he thought himself injured, but that very sensitiveness betrayed his need of friendship. We cannot wonder therefore that henceforth, with increasing age and infirmity, his utterances take on a tone of increasing sadness and sense of loss. More and more, too, as the doctrines of the reformers spread downward into all classes of society and outward over all countries, it became clearer and clearer to the established authorities that their real quarrel was not with this or that doctrinal quibble, nor with one or the other religious sect or social organisation, but with the underlying spirit of all these. It availed little that Erasmus rejected the doctrine of the Unfree Will, that he refused to be a Lutheran or a Zwinglian, an Anabaptist or a socialist. The powers threatened by all these felt, and rightly felt, that he stood for something more dangerous still,--a something without which none of the sects could have stood alone for a moment. That something was the spirit of criticism and of science based upon a first-hand knowledge of the sources of Christian truth. The year 1525 marks a distinct reactionary movement. As, on the one hand, the social and economic disturbances were the severest strain on the new religious awakening, so, on the other hand, they were the final argument to convince the powers of conservatism that it was now or never with them. For a moment the Church had seemed to waver. In electing as pope Adrian VI., a Northerner, an intimate of the young emperor, a school-fellow of Erasmus, and well known as a man of enlightened and moderate views, the Roman Curia had seemed to cut itself loose from an exclusively Roman policy. That policy had more than once brought the papacy to the brink of ruin and was to do so more than once again, but for the moment reformers of all grades believed that a substantial progress had been made. The early action of Adrian had confirmed this belief; but the pressure was too great; the papacy was stronger than the pope. Adrian died in 1523 after a disappointing administration of a single year, and the proverbial swing of the papal pendulum brought to the chair of Peter once more an Italian--not indeed a Roman, but a man as completely identified with the curial policy as Adrian had been unfamiliar with it.