But the most famous child of the German revival is Erasmus. Educated at the school of Deventer, a school which owed its origin to the Brethren of the Common Life, he was, at the date of the Diet of Worms, looked upon as the greatest scholar of his age, and enjoyed a reputation such as probably has never been equalled since. If Reuchlin may be called the father of Old Testament criticism, Erasmus may be termed the father of New Testament criticism, and of scientific theology. In 1505, he republished Valla’s notes on the New Testament, the solitary piece of biblical criticism which had come from Italy. This was followed, in 1516, by his Greek edition of the New Testament, with a Latin translation and notes. The aim of these works was to revive the knowledge of the original, and by the collation of such MSS. as were procurable, to furnish as correct a version as possible of the text. In the notes, Erasmus applied the canons of ordinary criticism to the New Testament, and thereby laid the foundations of modern biblical scholarship. The aim of his third work, the _Enchiridion Militis Christi_, may be gathered from a letter to his friend Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s: ‘I write,’ he says, ‘to remedy the error which makes religion depend on ceremonies and on observance of bodily acts, while neglecting true piety.’ With these views Erasmus was naturally a severe critic of the existing state of things. He lamented the ignorance of many churchmen who dreaded the new learning without understanding it; who went so far as to denounce Hebrew and Greek as heretical because they were not the language of the Vulgate, and whose bigotry had just been so conspicuously displayed in the Reuchlin controversy. He despised the idleness of the monks, and the intolerable narrowness of the scholastic pedants, with their barren disputations and endless hair-splittings. He denounced the folly of that Church which insisted on every tittle of outward ceremony and dogma, and yet neglected practical piety. These were the objects of his satirical pen in his _Praise of Folly_, which was written in England in 1509. In this wonderful satire, Folly, declaring herself the real source of happiness, represents herself as the authoress of all the superstition, the pedantry, the idleness, the hypocrisy, which were so prosperous in the world.