It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where only one had been before. Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over the individual man and you have made over the entire world! Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way. In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages. In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.