the
two can hardly be kept apart.

The world, says Erasmus, is overloaded with human constitutions and
opinions and scholastic dogmas, and overburdened with the tyrannical
authority of orders, and because of all this the strength of gospel
doctrine is flagging. Faith requires simplification, he argued. What
would the Turks say of our scholasticism? Colet wrote to him one day:
'There is no end to books and science. Let us, therefore, leave all
roundabout roads and go by a short cut to the truth.'

Truth must be simple. 'The language of truth is simple, says Seneca;
well then, nothing is simpler nor truer than Christ.' 'I should wish',
Erasmus says elsewhere, 'that this simple and pure Christ might be
deeply impressed upon the mind of men, and that I deem best attainable
in this way, that we, supported by our knowledge of the original
languages, should philosophize _at the sources_ themselves.'

Here a new watchword comes to the fore: back to the sources! It is not
merely an intellectual, philological requirement; it is equally an
ethical and aesthetic necessity of life. The original and pure, all that
is not yet overgrown or has not passed through many hands, has such a
potent charm. Erasmus compared it to an apple which we ourselves pick
off the tree. To recall the world to the ancient simplicity of science,
to lead it back from the now turbid pools to those living and most pure
fountain-heads, those most limpid sources of gospel doctrine--thus he
saw the task of divinity. The metaphor of the limpid water is not
without meaning here; it reveals the psychological quality of Erasmus's
fervent principle.

'How is it', he exclaims, 'that people give themselves so much trouble
about the details of all sorts of remote philosophical systems and
neglect to go to the sources of Christianity itself?' 'Although this
wisdom, which is so excellent that once for all it put the wisdom of all
the world to shame, may be drawn from these few books, as from a
crystalline source, with far less trouble than is the wisdom of
Aristotle from so many thorny books and with much more fruit.... The
equipment for that journey is simple and at everyone's immediate
disposal. This philosophy is accessible to everybody. Christ desires
that his mysteries shall be spread as widely as possible. I should wish
that all good wives read the Gospel and Paul's Epistles; that they were
translated into all languages; that out of these the husbandman sang
whi