This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and it was the school and the university which were the peculiar institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education there was, but at what a price had it been won. One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which their childhood and youth was passed. At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education. The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it had from the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its object a complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit of education. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece, and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom of speculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and in particular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaeval Church; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man. Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitely antagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europe the new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, and classical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. It was the synthesis of what mediaeval Europe had regarded as irreconcilable opponents. That was the inspiration of the school reform, and this is the guiding principle of all higher education for the next three centuries. It was a movement that originally was not local or national but European, and in its first form was not in opposition to the maintenance of the ecclesiastical unity of Western Europe. The figure in whom it reaches its clearest expression is that of Erasmus. Standing at the transition between two epochs, he was the last of the great European scholars, and belongs to the undivided Catholic Church as much as did Abelard or Anselm. The wandering scholar of the Renaissance, without father, without mother, completely freed from ties of family or country, at home equally in Deventer or Cambridge, in Basel or in Paris or in Rome, without even a native language, for to him Latin was the