It is noticeable that with all his protests of respect, Erasmus nowhere urges the appeal to the existing order in the Church as final. Men _may_ fast, worship saints, take vows, seek absolution; but their real salvation is to be found in none of these things. As this little book went out into the world in the year 1503, it remained to be seen which aspect of its teaching would prove the more effectual, whether its real meaning would penetrate alike to friends and enemies. Some light on this point may be gained from a letter[64] of Erasmus written in 1518 to his friend Volzius and afterward published as a preface to a new edition of the Enchiridion. In this letter he says that his work was criticised as unlearned, because it did not use the quibbling methods of the schools. But he was not trying "to train men for the prize-ring of the Sorbonne, but rather for the peace which belongs to the Christian." There is no lack of books on theology; [64] iii.¹, 337. "there are as many commentaries on the 'Sentences' of Petrus Lombardus as there are theologians. There is no end of little _summas_, which mix up one thing with another over and over again and after the manner of apothecaries fabricate and refabricate old things from new, new from old, one from many, and many from one. The result is that there are so many books about right living that no one can ever live long enough to read them. As if a doctor should prescribe for a man in a dangerous illness that he should read the books of Jacobus à Partibus and all the likes of them and there he would find out how to mend his health." There were books enough, Heaven knew! but not life enough to read them, and this multitude of quarrelling doctors were only obscuring the true art of living, which Christ meant to make plain and simple to all. These so-called philosophers are obstacles, not helps, to the true Christian life. "They could never have enough of discussing in what words they ought to speak of Christ, as if they were dealing with some horrid demon, who would bring destruction upon them if they failed to invoke him in proper terms, instead of with a most gentle Saviour, who asks nothing of us but a pure and upright life." Erasmus makes here the very practical and constructive suggestion, that "a commission of pious and learned men should bring together into a compendium from the purest sources of the gospels and the apostles and from their most approved commentators, the whole philosophy of Christ, with as much simplicity as learning, as much brevity as clearness. What pertains to the faith should be treated in as few articles as possible; what belongs to life, also in few words, and so put that men may know that the yoke of Christ is easy and pleasant, not cruel; that they have been given fathers, not tyrants; pastors, not robbers; called to salvation, not betrayed into slavery.