Luther did not stay long in Rome, but he took the opportunity of learning Hebrew, and attended the lectures of the Jew Elia Levi ben Asher, surnamed Bachur or Elias Levita.
There he met Cardinal Viterbo, the patron of the Jews, and many other celebrities, for Oriental languages were then in fashion after the Turks had established themselves in Constantinople.
Luther enjoyed the friendship of the old Jew, for Elias was the only “Christian” whom he found in Rome. It was a pity, to be sure, that he lived under the Law, and was not acquainted with the Gospel, but he knew no better.
THE INSTRUMENT
In the year 1483, the same year in which Luther was born, Docter Coctier sat in his laboratory at Paris, and carried on a philosophical discussion with a chemical expert who was passing through the city.
The laboratory was in the same building as his observatory, in the Marais quarter of the town, a site occupied to-day by the Place des Vosges. Not far away is the Bastille, the magnificent Hôtel de Saint-Pol, and the brilliant Des Tournelles, the residence of the Kings before the Louvre was built. Here Louis XI had given his private physician, chancellor, and doctor of all the sciences, Coctier, a house which lay in a labyrinth-like park called the Garden of Daedalus. The doctor was speaking, and the expert listened: “Yes, Plato in his Timaeus calls gold one of the densest and finest substances which filters through stone. There is a metal derived from gold which is black, and that is iron. But a substance more akin to gold is copper, which is composed of shining congealed fluids, and one of whose minor constituents is green earth. Now I ask, ‘Why cannot copper be freed from this last, and refined to gold?’”
“Yes,” answered the expert, “it can, if one uses atramentum or the philosopher’s stone.”
“What is that?”