problem of sexual relations he distinctly sides with the woman from deep
conviction. There is a great deal of tenderness and delicate feeling in
his conception of the position of the girl and the woman. Few characters
of the _Colloquies_ have been drawn with so much sympathy as the girl
with the lover and the cultured woman in the witty conversation with the
abbot. Erasmus's ideal of marriage is truly social and hygienic. Let us
beget children for the State and for Christ, says the lover, children
endowed by their upright parents with a good disposition, children who
see the good example at home which is to guide them. Again and again he
reverts to the mother's duty to suckle the child herself. He indicates
how the house should be arranged, in a simple and cleanly manner; he
occupies himself with the problem of useful children's dress. Who stood
up at that time, as he did, for the fallen girl, and for the prostitute
compelled by necessity? Who saw so clearly the social danger of
marriages of persons infected with the new scourge of Europe, so
violently abhorred by Erasmus? He would wish that such a marriage should
at once be declared null and void by the Pope. Erasmus does not hold
with the easy social theory, still quite current in the literature of
his time, which casts upon women all the blame of adultery and lewdness.
With the savages who live in a state of nature, he says, the adultery of
men is punished, but that of women is forgiven.

Here it appears, at the same time, that Erasmus knew, be it half in
jest, the conception of natural virtue and happiness of naked islanders
in a savage state. It soon crops up again in Montaigne and the following
centuries develop it into a literary dogma.

CHAPTER XIII

ERASMUS'S MIND-CONTINUED

Erasmus's mind: Intellectual tendencies--The world encumbered by
beliefs and forms--Truth must be simple--Back to the pure
sources--Holy Scripture in the original languages--Biblical
humanism--Critical work on the texts of Scripture--Practice
better than dogma--Erasmus's talent and wit--Delight in words
and things--Prolixity--Observation of details--A veiled
realism--Ambiguousness--The 'Nuance'--Inscrutability of the
ultimate ground of all things

Simplicity, naturalness, purity, and reasonableness, those are to
Erasmus the dominant requirements, also when we pass from his ethical
and aesthetic concepts to his intellectual point of view; indeed,