hem gather. The Catholic Church is not two
thousand years old--it is ten thousand years old and goes back to Egypt.
The birth of Jesus formed merely a psychosis in the Church's existence.

Here he parted company with Luther, who was a dogmatist and wanted to
debate his ninety-five theses. Erasmus laughed at all religious
disputations and called them mazes that led to cloudland. Very
naturally, people said he was not sincere, since the mediocre mind never
knows that only the paradox is true. Hence Erasmus was hated by
Catholics and denounced by Protestants.

The marvel is that the men with fetters and fagots did not follow him
with a purpose. Fifty years later he would have been snuffed out. But at
that time Rome was so astonished to think that any one should criticize
her that she lost breath. Besides, it was an age of laughter, of revolt,
of contests of wit, of love-bouts and love-scrapes, and the monks who
lapsed were too many to discipline. Everybody was busy with his own
affairs. Happy time!

Erasmus was part and parcel of the Italian Renaissance. Over his head
blazes, in letters that burn, the unforgetable date, Fourteen Hundred
Ninety-two. He was a part of the great unrest, and he helped cause the
great unrest. Every great awakening, every renaissance, is an age of
doubt. An age of conservatism is an age of moss, of lichen, of rest,
rust and ruin. We grow only as we question. As long as we are sure that
the present order is perfect, we button our collars behind, a thing
which Columbus, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Leonardo and
Gutenberg, who all lived at this one time, never did. The year of
Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, like the year Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-six, was essentially "infidelic," just as the present age is
constructively iconoclastic. We are tearing down our barns to build
greater. The railroadman who said, "I throw an engine on the scrap-heap
every morning before breakfast," expressed a great truth. We are
discarding bad things for good ones, and good things for better ones.

* * * * *

Rotterdam has the honor of being the birthplace of Erasmus. A storm of
calumny was directed at him during his life concerning the irregularity
of his birth. "He had no business to be born at all," said a proud
prelate, as he gathered his robes close around his prebendal form. But
souls knock at the gates of life for admittance, and the fact that a man
exists is proof