19. Account for the making of Reuchlin, and describe the vast services which he rendered the cause of education, not overlooking the result of his controversy.

20. Account for the making of Erasmus, describe his varied career, and the great services which he rendered to the cause of the Reformation and education.

21. Account for the arrival of humanism in England. Explain the connections of Grocyn and Linacre with Oxford, and place some estimate upon the value of their services.

22. How did humanism reach Cambridge, and through whom was it promoted there?

23. Describe the part played by Cheke, Ascham, Colet, and Henry VIII in the history of education.

24. Place some value on northern humanism, and follow it to its decline.

PART III

THE REFORMATION

CHAPTER XII

THE REFORMATION

Modifying impulses attached themselves to the Renaissance north of the Alps, and helped to produce the Reformation.

Causes. Northern temper, with its religious and moral impulses, induced the northern humanists to use the knowledge of the dead languages, rather than Aristotelian logic, in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. In this way these scholarly humanists, especially in the University of Paris, long the centre of theological study, but elsewhere also, presently discovered what to them looked like unpardonable inconsistencies in the life of the clergy and people, and in the traditions of the church as an institution. This feeling, as we have seen, was conspicuously true of men like Erasmus, who, without a thought of revolt from the church, worked earnestly for reform from within.

The French Waldenses, the English Wycliffites, and the Bohemian Hussites had really arrived at similar conclusions of protest long before the humanists. Political and social conditions, together with the arrival on the scene of men like Luther, men of profound convictions and heroic cast, hastened the crisis. The daring freedom of thought, so characteristic of

the Renaissance from the very beginning, and present in all these discoveries of error and evil in the church, developed at length, in the sixteenth century, into open protest and revolution-the Reformation had fully come.

Nature. In its most exalted aspects the Reformation was the Renaissance ennobled by religious and moral impulse. These impulses rescued individualism from the paganistic nature-worship and self-indulgence with which it was bound up so largely in Italy, and to which Vittorino da Feltre was so notable an exception. In the Reformation human reason became still more aggressive than in humanism, growing more fully conscious of its power to solve some of the greatest problems of life-life here and life hereafter. The conviction that the soul is responsible to God and man for the use which it makes of reason in the solution of these problems allied itself with intense resentment against all institutional repression and all traditions, whether in church or state, which tended to hinder freedom of thought or freedom of action. This aggressiveness, however, did not prevent reason from submitting with profound reverence to the Holy Scriptures, rather than to the decrees of councils or the edicts of popes, as a final court of appeal in matters of faith and life, and it went so far as to make, not the church, but the individual, responsible for the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. To this end the Bible was to be given to the masses in the languages which they speak, and this task was greatly facilitated by the activity of the printing-press.

Influence. In thus exalting the intrinsic worth of the individual-his right to think for himself in matters

of salvation and morality-his personal responsibility to the future as well as to the present-the Reformation "opened a door" which, although Protestantism has not always kept open more effectively than Catholicism, can never again be completely closed. As means to ends, education became the powerful essential of the whole movement, and the heir of all its values.

LUTHER

The first great character of the Reformation was Martin Luther (1483-1546). In him all the ennobling impulses and aspirations which produced the movement found their greatest exponent.*

In the Making.-Luther, born at Eisleben, was the son of a Saxon German, a poor miner. "He was brought up in an atmosphere of deeply earnest but austere piety. His early school-days at Mansfield were darkened by harsh discipline and cruel methods of instruction. Destined to a learned career, he was sent, at the age of fourteen, to the school at Magdeburg conducted by the Brethren of the Common Life, and a year later he was removed to the school at Eisenach, presided over by John Trebonius, a learned humanist and celebrated teacher. Quick of comprehension and gifted in oratory, he excelled all his fellow pupils. He continued his studies, which included logic, rhetoric, physics, and the ancient languages, at the University of Erfurt, and broadened his culture still further by extensive reading, especially in the scholastic philosophy. It was in the library of the university that Luther one day discovered a Bible, a * Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," pp. 195-196.

copy of which, though in his twentieth year, he had never seen."*

A deep sense of sin, due in part to native temper, but certainly also to his bringing up and the influence of the "Brethren," together with the tragic loss of his friend Alexis at the Erfurt gate, induced him, contrary to the wishes of his father, who hoped he would study law, to enter the cloister of the Augustinian monks at Erfurt. Here, in order to find the soulpeace for which he longed so profoundly, but which his religion of works and penances had failed to bring him, "he studied the Bible with such energy and success that he could at once refer to any passage in it." His soul-agony drove him ever deeper into the very heart of the Holy Scriptures, until, at length, in his conclusion, based upon his study, and the counsels of a pious friend, that salvation comes not by works which man can do, but by the grace of God in Christ. he found the peace of soul which he sought.

This belief in justification by faith, with all its logical corollaries, made it a matter of conscience, no less than of reason, even if it required heroic courage, to protest against all doctrines and practices of the church that were out of harmony with such faith, and which he therefore blamed for the shameful spiritual laxity of his age. Taking the writings of Augustine as a basis, he organized his conclusions into a logical system, which he began to teach and defend with great vigor. He was now (1508) appointed professor of theology in the newly founded University of Wittenberg, where, in order to prove his positions, he attacked Aristotle *Painter's "Luther on Education," chap. V.