onour of an office, an order, or
an establishment, especially when that institution is the most sacred of
all, the Church itself.

Erasmus's conception of the Church was no longer purely Catholic. Of
that glorious structure of medieval-Christian civilization with its
mystic foundation, its strict hierarchic construction, its splendidly
fitting symmetry he saw hardly anything but its load of outward details
and ornament. Instead of the world which Thomas Aquinas and Dante had
described, according to their vision, Erasmus saw another world, full of
charm and elevated feeling, and this he held up before his compatriots.

[Illustration: XV. THE HANDS OF ERASMUS]

It was the world of Antiquity, but illuminated throughout by Christian
faith. It was a world that had never existed as such. For with the
historical reality which the times of Constantine and the great fathers
of the Church had manifested--that of declining Latinity and
deteriorating Hellenism, the oncoming barbarism and the oncoming
Byzantinism--it had nothing in common. Erasmus's imagined world was an
amalgamation of pure classicism (this meant for him, Cicero, Horace,
Plutarch; for to the flourishing period of the Greek mind he remained
after all a stranger) and pure, biblical Christianity. Could it be a
union? Not really. In Erasmus's mind the light falls, just as we saw in
the history of his career, alternately on the pagan antique and on the
Christian. But the warp of his mind is Christian; his classicism only
serves him as a form, and from Antiquity he only chooses those elements
which in ethical tendency are in conformity with his Christian ideal.

[Illustration: XVI. ERASMUS AT THE AGE OF 57]

And because of this, Erasmus, although he appeared after a century of
earlier Humanism, is yet new to his time. The union of Antiquity and the
Christian spirit which had haunted the mind of Petrarch, the father of
Humanism, which was lost sight of by his disciples, enchanted as they
were by the irresistible brilliance of the antique beauty of form, this
union was brought about by Erasmus.

What pure Latinity and the classic spirit meant to Erasmus we cannot
feel as he did because its realization does not mean to us, as to him, a
difficult conquest and a glorious triumph. To feel it thus one must have
acquired, in a hard school, the hatred of barbarism, which already
during his first years of authorship had suggested the composition of
the _Antibarbari_. The abu