At the close of the fifteenth century, it was said, “Whatever is artistic, finished, learned and wise is called Erasmian.” It is difficult to speak of Erasmus except in terms of the superlative. The most broadly educated man of his times, he was not only the representative scholar of his generation; he remains an example to us all of the truly civilized man. His polished wit, his humanity, his gentle irony, his unfailing reasonableness, his ability to see through cant and superstition, his philosophic calm in the midst of intense partisan strife, his good taste and sense of proportion: these qualities of mind belong to no one age, they are the constants of which I spoke a moment ago; they are the essentials of a civilized attitude toward life in any age. Without them man is a barbarian. The Great Humanist saw as no one else did the spiritual significance of the revival of learning, and he came to represent all that was best in it. Scholarship to him was more than erudition and pedantry and literary style. He found in classic literature a window opening upon a new vision of the meaning and possibilities of living. He became the champion of a new way of life and thought. Past and present met and mingled in his thought and became a new life of reason. “He quietly stepped out of medievalism,” the first modern man, the forerunner of Descartes and Voltaire. In a time when all human interests were submerged in religion, Erasmus sought to humanize the Church, and leave it an international fellowship of culture, free of dogma and superstition. He turns from knowledge of divine things to human letters as the guide to living, and from blind faith to reason. The Gospel becomes for him the “philosophy of Christ.” With equal impartiality he could translate the mocking dialogues of Lucian and provide the coming Reformation with its first standard Greek text of the New Testament. His boldness in omitting passages from this latter work, which he found not to be authentic, and his occasional unconventional commentary on the text brought him under the suspicion of being at heart a sceptic and a heretic. With bigotry and persecution almost universal all around him, Erasmus taught tolerance, moderation, respect for truth. In a splendid biographical study, Professor Preserved Smith says that Erasmus’s “Colloquies” did more for the spread of liberal ideas than any book of the sixteenth century. Another historian says, “Almost all the liberating ideas on which the international culture of the present rests, are present in germ in his thought.”