Long before the storm broke, Erasmus was carrying on a brave work against ignorance and obscurantism. In our times, we have seen something of the conflict of science with theology. This issue is tame in comparison with the conflict of theology with Humanism which occupied scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is difficult for us now to imagine that there could be bitter opposition to the teaching of the Latin and Greek literatures. The issue is blurred for us. Theologians are less acrimonious than they once were, and Scholasticism has long been on the decline. The classics moreover, are taught in such a manner that few students see the deep spiritual chasm which separates the Christian approach to life from that of the Latin and Greek poets and philosophers. It was pretty well recognized on both sides of the dispute that the ancients were pagans, rank heathen. Those who opposed these unchristian writers did so for much the same reason that early Christians in the second century had assailed “the present evil world” and all its works. In Italy the Renaissance tended for a time to take on a definitely pagan aspect. Imitation of the ancients became a rather ridiculous gesture, and the fad was often carried to extremes which were little less than childish. Cardinals assumed the speech and manners of ancient Roman senators. Sermons were preached in sonorous Ciceronian style. In certain quarters Christ was identified with Apollo, and God the Father with Jupiter. Nuns were spoken of as “vestal virgins,” and painters and sculptors created figures of Mars and Venus and mingled these and other heathen idols with the images of the saints. The apparent sympathy of high ecclesiastical personages with such goings on was one of the causes of the hostility to the Papacy which later swept over northern Europe. The sanity of Erasmus saved him and helped save the revival of learning from such superficiality. He found in Humanism a balanced and serious wisdom which he strove to combine with the Christian philosophy of life. The synthesis he achieved was not a new system of theology; it was the gradual merging of an older outlook upon life into a new outlook, a transformation of intellectual interests. Professor Smith quotes a passage which indicates something of Erasmus’s position regarding the classics. That this literature was pagan he well knew, but its paganism did not to his mind exclude it from the spiritual life of mankind. He says of an essay of Cicero’s, “A heathen wrote this to heathen and yet his moral principles have justice, sincerity, truth, fidelity to nature; nothing false or careless is in them.” “When I read certain passages of these great men, ... I can hardly refrain from saying, ‘St. Socrates, pray for me.’”