rty years old--he came to know all the privations of the system. They
embittered the earlier part of his stay at Paris and instilled in him a
deep, permanent aversion to abstinence and austerity. Had he come to
Paris for this--to experience the dismal and depressing influences of
his youth anew in a more stringent form?

The purpose for which Erasmus went to Paris was chiefly to obtain the
degree of doctor of theology. This was not too difficult for him: as a
regular he was exempt from previous study in the faculty of arts, and
his learning and astonishing intelligence and energy enabled him to
prepare in a short time for the examinations and disputations required.
Yet he did not attain this object at Paris. His stay, which with
interruptions lasted, first till 1499, to be continued later, became to
him a period of difficulties and exasperations, of struggle to make his
way by all the humiliating means which at the time were indispensable to
that end; of dawning success, too, which, however, failed to gratify
him.

The first cause of his reverses was a physical one; he could not endure
the hard life in the college of Montaigu. The addled eggs and squalid
bedrooms stuck in his memory all his life; there he thinks he contracted
the beginnings of his later infirmity. In the _Colloquia_ he has
commemorated with abhorrence Standonck's system of abstinence, privation
and chastisement. For the rest his stay there lasted only until the
spring of 1496.

Meanwhile he had begun his theological studies. He attended lectures on
the Bible and on the Book of the Sentences, the medieval handbook of
theology and still the one most frequently used. He was even allowed to
give some lessons in the college on Holy Scripture. He preached a few
sermons in honour of the Saints, probably in the neighbouring abbey of
St. Genevieve. But his heart was not in all this. The subtleties of the
schools could not please him. That aversion to all scholasticism, which
he rejected in one sweeping condemnation, struck root in his mind,
which, however broad, always judged unjustly that for which it had no
room. 'Those studies can make a man opinionated and contentious; can
they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren
subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and
by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had
been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients. They involve