general permission for unlicensed preaching.
Soon a far more hot-headed agitator, the impetuous Guillaume Farel, also
arrived for active work at Basle and in the environs. He is the man who
will afterwards reform Geneva and persuade Calvin to stay there.

Though at first Oecolampadius began to introduce novelties into the
church service with caution, Erasmus saw these innovations with alarm.
Especially the fanaticism of Farel, whom he hated bitterly. It was these
men who retarded what he still desired and thought possible: a
compromise. His lambent spirit, which never fully decided in favour of a
definite opinion, had, with regard to most of the disputed points,
gradually fixed on a half-conservative midway standpoint, by means of
which, without denying his deepest conviction, he tried to remain
faithful to the Church. In 1524 he had expressed his sentiments about
confession in the treatise _Exomologesis_ (_On the Way to confess_). He
accepts it halfway: if not instituted by Christ or the Apostles, it was,
in any case, by the Fathers. It should be piously preserved. Confession
is of excellent use, though, at times, a great evil. In this way he
tries 'to admonish either party', 'neither to agree with nor to assail'
the deniers, 'though inclining to the side of the believers'.

In the long list of his polemics he gradually finds opportunities to
define his views somewhat; circumstantially, for instance, in the
answers to Alberto Pio, of 1525 and 1529. Subsequently it is always done
in the form of an _Apologia_, whether he is attacked for the
_Colloquia_, for the _Moria_, Jerome, the _Paraphrases_ or anything
else. At last he recapitulates his views to some extent in _De amabili
Ecclesiae concordia_ (_On the Amiable Concord of the Church_), of 1533,
which, however, ranks hardly any more among his reformatory endeavours.

On most points Erasmus succeeds in finding moderate and conservative
formulae. Even with regard to ceremonies he no longer merely rejects. He
finds a kind word to say even for fasting, which he had always abhorred,
for the veneration of relics and for Church festivals. He does not want
to abolish the worship of the Saints: it no longer entails danger of
idolatry. He is even willing to admit the images: 'He who takes the
imagery out of life deprives it of its highest pleasure; we often
discern more in images than we conceive from the written word'.
Regarding Christ's substantial presence in the sacrament o