ct that
he never took sides definitely resulted from an urgent need of perfect
independence. Each engagement, even a temporary one, was felt as a
fetter by Erasmus. An interlocutor in the _Colloquies_, in which he so
often, spontaneously, reveals his own ideals of life, declares himself
determined neither to marry, nor to take holy orders, nor to enter a
monastery, nor into any connection from which he will afterwards be
unable to free himself--at least not before he knows himself completely.
'When will that be? Never, perhaps.' 'On no other account do I
congratulate myself more than on the fact that I have never attached
myself to any party,' Erasmus says towards the end of his life.

Liberty should be spiritual liberty in the first place. 'But he that is
spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man,' is
the word of Saint Paul. To what purpose should he require prescriptions
who, of his own accord, does better things than human laws require? What
arrogance it is to bind by institutions a man who is clearly led by the
inspirations of the divine spirit!

In Erasmus we already find the beginning of that optimism which judges
upright man good enough to dispense with fixed forms and rules. As More,
in _Utopia_, and Rabelais, Erasmus relies already on the dictates of
nature, which produces man as inclined to good and which we may follow,
provided we are imbued with faith and piety.

In this line of confidence in what is natural and desire of the simple
and reasonable, Erasmus's educational and social ideas lie. Here he is
far ahead of his times. It would be an attractive undertaking to discuss
Erasmus's educational ideals more fully. They foreshadow exactly those
of the eighteenth century. The child should learn in playing, by means
of things that are agreeable to its mind, from pictures. Its faults
should be gently corrected. The flogging and abusive schoolmaster is
Erasmus's abomination; the office itself is holy and venerable to him.
Education should begin from the moment of birth. Probably Erasmus
attached too much value to classicism, here as elsewhere: his friend
Peter Gilles should implant the rudiments of the ancient languages in
his two-year-old son, that he may greet his father with endearing
stammerings in Greek and Latin. But what gentleness and clear good sense
shines from all Erasmus says about instruction and education!

The same holds good of his views about marriage and woman. In the