been collected, and it is an easy task, from the writings of Erasmus to prove that he shared the doctrines of the Reformers. Passages equally strong might be culled to show that he repudiated them. The truth is that theological questions in themselves had no attraction for him. And when a theological position was emphasized by party passion it became odious to him. In the words of Drummond: "Erasmus was in his own age the apostle of common sense and of rational religion. He did not care for dogma, and accordingly the dogmas of Rome, which had the consent of the Christian world, were in his eyes preferable to the dogmas of Protestantism.... From the beginning to the end of his career he remained true to the purpose of his life, which was to fight the battle of sound learning and plain common sense against the powers of ignorance and superstition, and amid all the convulsions of that period he never once lost his mental balance." Erasmus is accused of indifference. But he was far from indifferent to the progress of the revolution. He was keenly alive to its pernicious influence on the cherished interest of his life, the cause of learning. "I abhor the evangelics, because it is through them that literature is everywhere declining, and upon the point of perishing." He had been born with the hopes of the Renaissance, with its anticipation of a new Augustan age, and had seen this fair promise blighted by the irruption of a new horde of theological polemics, worse than the old scholastics, inasmuch as they were revolutionary instead of conservative. Erasmus never flouted at religion nor even at theology as such, but only at blind and intemperate theologians. In the mind of Erasmus there was no metaphysical inclination; he was a man of letters, with a general tendency to rational views on every subject which came under his pen. His was not the mind to originate, like Calvin, a new scheme of Christian thought. He is at his weakest in defending free will against Luther, and indeed he can hardly be said to enter on the metaphysical question. He treats the dispute entirely from the outside. It is impossible in reading Erasmus not to be reminded of the rationalist of the 18th century. Erasmus has been called the "Voltaire of the Renaissance." But there is a vast difference in the relations in which they respectively stood to the church and to Christianity. Voltaire, though he did not originate, yet adopted a moral and religious scheme which he sought to substitute for the church tradition. He waged war, not only against the clergy, but against the church and its sovereigns. Erasmus drew the line at the first of these. He was not an anticipation of the 18th century; he was the man of his age, as Voltaire of his; though Erasmus did not intend it, he undoubtedly shook the ecclesiastical edifice in all its parts; and, as Melchior Adam says of him, "pontifici Romano plus nocuit jocando quam Lutherus stomachando."