I believe this to be the first social task of the educated. Could a Socrates, or a Seneca, or Cicero have returned to life in the year 1525, it is difficult to imagine that he would have pursued a course very different from that Erasmus pursued. A man’s intellectual integrity does not require that he take sides when he believes that neither side has the truth. I believe Erasmus took the longer view, for today we find Humanism gradually supplanting orthodoxy among educated Protestants, and I have no doubt that something similar is taking place in Catholic centers of culture. The liberal Catholic and the liberal Protestant are more nearly of one mind than is either of them with the Fundamentalist in his own sect. And they are each nearer to Erasmus. Erasmus did not suffer martyrdom, neither did he make martyrs of those who opposed him. Persecution and martyrdom are the first things that the uneducated think of in any social crisis. The masses are prepared to make any conflict the occasion of both, and with only the vaguest idea of what the killing is all about. If there were more men like Erasmus there would be less occasion for such practices. His is the cause which will never triumph by force. Humanism, which in the Italian Renaissance was something of a _parvenu_ effort at culture, comes to its maturity with Montaigne. It is an educational experience lived through, a wisdom grown into, as Montaigne says, with everything in its season. Montaigne’s mind is stored with the fruits of the wisdom of all historic times. He quotes the ancients as only Erasmus could, yet he is never an imitator or copier. His is one of the most original minds in literature, and his originality increases as he grows older and has time to think. It is very different from the rebelliousness of certain contemporary radicals, whose liberalism might be characterized as retarded adolescence. A contemporary critic says of him, “Montaigne ... was one of the most civilized men of whom we have any record: his intellectual curiosity was matched by his magnanimity. He hated cruelty, prejudice, violence and stupidity: his love of life was so great that it illumined every object in the world of sense and in the world of thought. His style was so original that his remarks on little things have outlived thousands of works dealing soberly with portentous ideas. He could write on trivial themes without becoming trivial.”