eal. We bring along the bricks, but to build the temple of God.'

He does not want to be intractable. Let the Vulgate be kept for use in
the liturgy, for sermons, in schools, but he who, at home, reads our
edition, will understand his own the better in consequence. He, Erasmus,
is prepared to render account and acknowledge himself to have been wrong
when convicted of error.

Erasmus perhaps never quite realized how much his philological-critical
method must shake the foundations of the Church. He was surprised at his
adversaries 'who could not but believe that all their authority would
perish at once when the sacred books might be read in a purified form,
and when people tried to understand them in the original'. He did not
feel what the unassailable authority of a sacred book meant. He rejoices
because Holy Scripture is approached so much more closely, because all
sorts of shadings are brought to light by considering not only what is
said but also by whom, for whom, at what time, on what occasion, what
precedes and what follows, in short, by the method of historical
philological criticism. To him it seemed so especially pious when
reading Scripture and coming across a place which seemed contrary to the
doctrine of Christ or the divinity of his nature, to believe rather that
one did not understand the phrase _or that the text might be corrupt_.
Unperceived he passed from emendation of the different versions to the
correction of the contents. The epistles were not all written by the
apostles to whom they are attributed. The apostles themselves made
mistakes, at times.

The foundation of his spiritual life was no longer a unity to Erasmus.
It was, on the one hand, a strong desire for an upright, simple, pure
and homely belief, the earnest wish to be a good Christian. But it was
also the irresistible intellectual and aesthetic need of the good taste,
the harmony, the clear and exact expression of the Ancients, the dislike
of what was cumbrous and involved. Erasmus thought that good learning
might render good service for the necessary purification of the faith
and its forms. The measure of church hymns should be corrected. That
Christian expression and classicism were incompatible, he never
believed. The man who in the sphere of sacred studies asked every author
for his credentials remained unconscious of the fact that he
acknowledged the authority of the Ancients without any evidence. How
naively he appeals to Antiquity,