Holland, and England, the revival of learning produced far more salutary results than in Italy. The deep moral earnestness of the Teutonic race preserved it from pagan debasement. After a time the new learning was cultivated with as much zeal north as south of the Alps, but its results were utilized in the interests of a purer Christianity. The Greek and Hebrew Scriptures were studied as well as the Latin and Greek classics. Critical editions of the Old and New Testaments were published by able scholars, and by this means, as many believed, theological dogma was placed on a more assured foundation.

A. Agricola

BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS.-This able scholar, the father of German humanism, was born in 1443 near Groningen, Germany. His real name was Husmann (that is, houseman or husbandman), which, according to a custom of the humanists, he Latinized into Agricola. For a time he was a pupil of Thomas à Kempis; then he passed several years at the University of Louvain; subsequently he studied at Paris, and afterward in Italy, where he attended lectures by the most celebrated literary men of the age. His learning and eloquence gave him a wide reputation; and, upon his return to Germany, several cities and courts vied with one another in the effort to secure his services. At length, upon the solicitation of Dalberg, Bishop of Worms, who was an old and intimate friend, he established himself at Heidelberg. He divided his time between private studies and public lecturing; and, through his labors and influence, he was largely instrumental in transplanting the learning of Italy into his native land. He understood French and Italian, and set great store by his mother-tongue. At the age of

forty-one he began the study of Hebrew, in order to be able to read the Old Testament in the original.

OPINION OF SCHOOLS.-Agricola did not have a high opinion of the average school of his time. Having been called to take charge of a school at Antwerp, he wrote: 66 A school is to be committed to me. That is a difficult and vexatious thing. A school is like a prison, in which there are blows, tears, and groans without end. If there is anything with a contradictory name, it is the school. The Greeks named it schola-that is, leisure; the Latins, ludus literarius-literary play; but there is nothing further from leisure than the school, nothing harder and more opposed to play. More correctly did it receive from Aristophanes the name phrontizerion-that is, place of care."

SELECTING A TEACHER.-Agricola did not accept the school offered him at Antwerp, but in declining gave the authorities there the following advice: "It is necessary to exercise the greatest care in choosing a director for your school. Take neither a theologian nor a so-called rhetorician, who thinks he is able to speak of everything without understanding anything of eloquence. Such people make in school the same figure, according to the Greek proverb, that a dog does in a bath. It is necessary to seek a man resembling Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles; that is, who knows how to teach, to speak, and to act at the same time. If you know such a man, get him at any price; for the matter involves the future of your children, whose tender youth receives with the same susceptibility the impress of good and of bad examples."

EMPTY ELOQUENCE.-He thought little of the eloquence which so many students were striving after and which subsequently became still more prominent in education. Very many devote themselves," he says, " to those phrase

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mongering and empty discussions, which people frequently take for wisdom. They waste the day in refined and tedious disputations, and, to use a fitting expression, in riddles, which in the course of centuries have found no Edipus to solve them, and will find none. With this sort of learning they torture the ears of their pitiable youths. To such nourishment they drive their students, as it were, by force. Thus they destroy promising talent, and kill the fruit in the bud."

To give fluency and worth to discourse, Agricola recommended the study of the best authors with translations into the mother tongue. "It will be very useful to you," he says in writing to a friend, "to express in the most fitting words of the mother tongue all that you read in the classic authors. For through this exercise you will bring it about that, when you must write or speak anything, you will in meditating the subjects, at once associate the Latin expressions with idioms of the mother tongue. Further, when you wish to express anything in writing, it is to be recommended that you conceive of the matter fully and correctly in the mother tongue, and then express it in pure and appropriate Latin. In this way the exposition will be clear and exhaustive." Grace of style seemed to him a matter of secondary consideration.

METHOD OF STUDY.-As to methods of study, he expressed himself very clearly and forcibly. "Whoever in the acquisition of a science," he says, "wishes to obtain results answerable to his trouble, must especially consider three things. He must clearly and correctly apprehend, faithfully retain in memory what he has apprehended, and put himself in a position, by means of what he has learned, to produce something of himself. Therefore, the first requisite is careful reading, the second a trustworthy

memory, and the third continued practise." In reading he held it necessary to understand the scope as well as the details of books. "Nevertheless, it is not well to spend too much time in clearing up obscurities; one often finds elucidation further on. One day gives light to another."

THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHY.-Agricola recommended especially the study of philosophy, in which he included. ethics and physics. "If you cherish the correct idea," he writes, "that what is noble is to be sought for its own sake, then I advise you to turn to philosophy, that is, to give yourself the trouble to gain a correct knowledge of all subjects and the ability to give fitting expression to what you have learned. Now knowledge, just as the nature of the things that form its object, is twofold. The one department aims at our acts and morals. Upon it rests the whole theory of a righteous and well-ordered life. It detaches from the trunk of philosophy the science of ethics, and deserves very especially our attention. But we need not seek it alone with the philosophers who treat it as a branch of literature, as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others, but also with the historians, poets, and orators. They by no means teach ethics systematically, but they show-and that is precisely the most effective teachingthrough praise of the good, through censure of the bad, and through the presentation of examples, virtue and its opposite, as it were, in a mirror. Through a reading of these authors one should pass on to the Holy Scripture. For according to its precepts, one must order his life, and trust it as an experienced guide in matters of the soul's salvation." The study of natural philosophy seemed to him less important. Though not strictly necessary in the development of a morally good man, it is still favorable to virtue. "For when a genuine interest for scientific

investigation has once laid hold of a man, there is no longer room in his soul for common and ignoble pursuits."

B. Reuchlin

BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS.-One of the greatest representatives of the new learning was Reuchlin, who was born at Pforzheim, Germany, in 1455. At the age of eighteen he went to Paris, where he studied under a native Greek. After leaving Paris, he taught Latin and Greek at Basel, and subsequently became a professor at Tübingen. He resided for a time at Heidelberg, and in the interests of Greek scholarship issued several elementary text-books of Greek, which were used in Germany for many years. Melanchthon, the distinguished scholar and reformer, was his nephew and adopted son.

HEBREW STUDIES.-But Reuchlin's studies were not confined to the Latin and Greek classics. He took a profound interest in the Hebrew language, and is justly regarded as the father of Hebrew studies in Germany. In 1498 he was sent on an embassy to Rome, where he employed all his leisure in studying Hebrew under a learned Jew, and in collecting Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. The motive that urged him to prosecute his studies in Hebrew is explained in a letter to Cardinal Hadrian: "I devoted myself to the Hebrew language because I perceived the great value which it would have for religion. and true theology. To this end I have always directed my labors, and continue to direct them more than ever. As a true worshiper of our Lord, I have done all for the restoration and glorification of the true Christian Church." On the publication of his Hebrew grammar and lexicon, in 1506, the first work of the kind prepared in Germany,