of character underlying this susceptibility to the impressions of the moment. His seeming inconsistencies are reconciled to apprehension, not by a formula of the intellect, but by the many-sidedness of a highly impressible nature. In the words of J. Nisard, Erasmus was one of those "dont la gloire a ete de beaucoup comprendre et d'affirmer peu." This equal openness to every vibration of his environment is the key to all Erasmus's acts and words, and among them to the middle attitude which he took up towards the great religious conflict of his time. The reproaches of party assailed him in his lifetime, and have continued to be heaped upon his memory. He was loudly accused by the Catholics of collusion with the enemies of the faith. His powerful friends, the pope, Wolsey, Henry VIII., the emperor, called upon him to declare against Luther. Theological historians from that time forward have perpetuated the indictment that Erasmus sided with neither party in the struggle for religious truth. The most moderate form of the censure presents him in the odious light of a trimmer; the vulgar and venomous assailant is sure that Erasmus was a Protestant at heart, but withheld the avowal that he might not forfeit the worldly advantages he enjoyed as a Catholic. When by study of his writings we come to know Erasmus intimately, there is revealed to us one of those natures to which partisanship is an impossibility. It was not timidity or weakness which kept Erasmus neutral, but the reasonableness of his nature. It was not only that his intellect revolted against the narrowness of party, his whole being repudiated its clamorous and vulgar excesses. As he loathed fish, so he loathed clerical fanaticism. Himself a Catholic priest--"the glory of the priesthood and the shame"--the tone of the orthodox clergy was distasteful to him; the ignorant hostility to classical learning which reigned in their colleges and convents disgusted him. In common with all the learned men of his age, he wished to see the power of the clergy broken, as that of an obscurantist army arrayed against light. He had employed all his resources of wit and satire against the priests and monks, and the superstitions in which they traded, long before Luther's name was heard of. The motto which was already current in his lifetime, "that Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it," is so far true, and no more. Erasmus would have suppressed the monasteries, put an end to the domination of the clergy, and swept away scandalous and profitable abuses, but to attack the church or re-mould received theology was far from his thoughts. And when out of Luther's revolt there arose a new fanaticism--that of evangelism, Erasmus recoiled from the violence of the new preachers. "Is it for this," he writes to Melanchthon (_Ep._ xix. 113; 703), "that we have shaken off bishops and popes, that we may come under the yoke of such madmen as Otto and Farel?" Passages have