Its real end was the end at which Colet had aimed in his Oxford lectures.

Erasmus desired to set Christ himself in the place of the Church, to recall men from the teaching of Christian theologians to the teaching of the Founder of Christianity.
The whole value of the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they brought home to their readers the personal impression of Christ himself.
"Were we to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have so intimate a knowledge as they give us of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising again, as it were in our very presence." All the superstitions of mediaeval worship faded away in the light of this personal worship of Christ.

"If the footprints of Christ are shown us in any place, we kneel down and adore them.

Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing picture of him in these books?
We deck statues of wood and stone with gold and gems for the love of Christ.

Yet they only profess to represent to us the outer form of his body, while these books present us with a living picture of his holy mind." In the same way the actual teaching of Christ was made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the older ecclesiastical teaching.