dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry
triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in
its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his
friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought
this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more
especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know
how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to
bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism
would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus
was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent
Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have
discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but
of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church
Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as
Voltaire by his Deism.

In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later.
By this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was
incarnate became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked
Supernaturalism in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants
and Romanists with equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch,"
Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and Calvinism were merely three persons of
the one "Infâme" which it was the object of his life to crush. If he
hated one more than another, it was probably the last; while
D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the free-thinking host, were
disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and Pantheism.

The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific