Erasmus during the most trying time kept his sanity. And both sides denounced him bitterly. He was accused of taking a cowardly middle of the road position. What neither group of militant partisans could see was that Erasmus, far from being in the middle of the road, was not on their wretched highway at all. He remained true to the issue for which he had struggled from the first. Erasmus saw that what was wrong with Europe, indeed what really gave rise to the abuses of mediæval society, was barbarism sanctioned by religious superstition. He knew that vice and folly and brutality and hypocrisy were not to be removed by religious warfare, but rather deepened. He saw the same spirit of doctrinaire scholasticism, the same intolerance and cruelty and pious ignorance on both sides of the coming controversy. He knew that conditions could be improved only when the leading minds of contemporary Europe could acquire the decencies which characterize the liberally educated of all times. Whether history has vindicated Erasmus in this conviction of his is a matter concerning which opinions differ. I think it has. Such liberty and cultural progress as the modern world enjoys it would seem to have derived from the Erasmian tradition, not that of Luther, Calvin or Wesley. Protestantism without the humanism of Erasmus is Fundamentalism. And conversely, Paris and Vienna and Munich are nominally Catholic, but they have known the influence of Erasmus and Voltaire to a degree that many Protestant communities have not known such influence, and so far as the advance of civilization is concerned, I think that life in such localities will compare rather favorably with that of certain strictly Protestant communities. I believe that those movements of the present day which have greatest spiritual significance and value--modernism in religion, liberalism in education, the dawning recognition of the necessity of intelligence and of individual responsibility in matters of belief and conduct, efforts for the humanization of industry and the state--are but the belated resumption of the humanizing work begun in northern Europe by Erasmus and others and broken off by the Reformation. From this point of view the Reformation is not the continuation of the Renaissance, but would appear to have been something of a bourgeois reaction against it.