Erasmus stood practically alone in the world of belief and of disbelief. He had no sympathy with the doctrines of either Luther or Calvin. He could not accept the theory of individual interpretation of religious truth. He believed in a Church universal. He looked and worked for the time when this world’s Church, shaking off the corruption, the worldliness, and the vulgarity by which it had become demoralised, should, under the leadership of scholars, wise, sane, tolerant, and pure-minded, resume its authority over all Christian believers. To this end, he continued to denounce and to hold up to ridicule, as the worst enemies of the Church, the intolerant bigots and the vulgar corruptionists whose actions were bringing it into disrepute and strengthening the hands of the reformers. An English scholar presents as follows the position of Erasmus: “It is the conclusion of Erasmus that the Bible, learning, criticism, humanism, are each and all incomplete as guides to man without the permanent interpretative power and historic witness of the visible institution ordained by Christ Himself. His appeal is always to Christ; but it is inconceivable to him that Christ should be apart from His Church or the Church from Him.... As critic and as historian, Erasmus found it impossible to say that Christ was right and that the fundamental principles of the continuous Church were wrong. Thus, what the Church had regarded as essential doctrines were and must remain the permanent, unalterable bases of loyalty to the Lord.... Erasmus believed in the Church not as a congeries of disintegrating elements, not as a rigid and inflexible machine, but as a sacred institution divinely instituted and divinely inspired, and because it was ever in touch with divine life continually growing and developing into the knowledge of the truth.... The Church was to him the body of Jesus Christ, and in Christ he profoundly believed; and, so believing, he was not impatient, not afraid to wait for light.”[207]