The only matter in which German philology surpassed Italian was science. The man who turned the course of the new learning into those channels was Johannes Muller of Konigsberg, near Coburg, therefore known as Monteregio; as Regiomontanus Bessarion gave him a MS. of Ptolemy, and he designed a scheme to print the whole body of Greek mathematicians. His Ephemerides are the origin of the Nautical Almanack, and enabled Columbus and Vasco and Vespucci to sail the high seas; and Nuremberg, where he lived, became the chief seat of the manufacture of nautical instruments. He was made a bishop, and summoned to Rome to reform the calendar. There was one Italian who possessed the scientific spirit, without help from books, by the prerogative of genius; that was Leonardo da Vinci. But he confided his thoughts to diaries and remained unknown and useless in his time.

The conflict between the new learning and the old, which was repressed in Italy by the policy of Rome, broke out in Germany, where it was provoked by the study of Hebrew, not of Greek. At Rome in 1482 a German student translated a passage of Thucydides so well that the lecturer complained that Greece was settling beyond the Alps. It was the first time that the rivalry appeared. That student was Reuchlin. His classical accomplishments alone would not have made his name one of the most conspicuous in literary history; but in 1490 Pico della Mirandola expounded to him the wonders of oriental learning, and Reuchlin, having found a Rabbi at Linz, began to study Hebrew in 1492. His path was beset with difficulties, for there were no books in that language to be found in all Germany. Reuchlin drew his supply from Italy, and was the first German who read the Cabbala. He shared many popular prejudices against the Jews, and read their books to help him with the Old Testament, as he read Greek to help him with the New. He had none of the grace, the dexterity, the passion, of the Humanists, and very little of their enthusiasm for the classics. He preferred Gregory Nazianzen to Homer. Savonarola shocked him by his opposition to Alexander VI. His writings had little scientific value, but he was a pioneer, and he prized the new learning for the sake of religion. Therefore, when he was summoned to give an opinion on the suppression of Jewish books, he opposed it, and insisted on the biblical knowledge and the religious ideas to be found in them. Divines, he said, would not have made so many mistakes if they had attended to the Jewish commentators.

At that time persecution was raging against the Jews in the Peninsula. They had always had enemies in the German towns, and in July 1510, thirty-eight Jews were executed at Berlin. This intolerant spirit began, in 1507, to be directed against their books. None were printed in Germany until 1516; but from 1480 they had Hebrew presses in Italy, at Naples, Mantua, Soncino, and at Constantinople. If their study was encouraged while the printing was permitted, the Jews would become a power such as they never were before printing began, and when none but a few divines could read Hebrew. The movement in favour of destroying them had its home at Cologne, with Hochstraten, the Inquisitor; Gratius, a good scholar, whose work, known as Brown's Fasciculus, is in the hands of every medieval student; and Pfefferkorn, who had the zeal of a recently converted Jew. In his anxiety to bring over his former brethren he desired to deprive them of their books. He would allow them to retain only the Old Testament, without their commentaries. He would compel them to hear Christian sermons. By degrees he urged that they should be expelled, and at last that they should be exterminated.

Maximilian, the emperor, turned with every wind. Reuchlin, the defender of toleration, was attacked by Pfefferkorn, as a sceptic and a traitor, and was accused before the ecclesiastical court. In 1514 the Bishop of Spires, acting for the Pope, acquitted Reuchlin; the sentence was confirmed at Rome in 1516, and the Dominicans, who were plaintiffs, agreed to pay the costs. Nevertheless they appealed, and in 1520 Rome reversed the previous judgment and condemned Reuchlin. In the midst of greater things the sentence escaped attention, and was only brought to light by a scholar who is still living. But in the meantime the Humanists had taken up the cause of Reuchlin, and the result had been disastrous for the Dominicans. They had not directly assailed the new learning, but their attack on the study of Hebrew had been the most crass exhibition of retrograde spirit. If Jews were not allowed to read Jewish books, such as Maimonides, to whom St. Thomas owes so much, how could Christians be allowed to read pagan classics, with their highly immoral gods and goddesses?

The golden opportunity of making intolerance ridiculous could not be neglected. In the summer of 1515 a volume appeared purporting to contain letters to Ortwin Gratius; and it was followed two years later by another. With some good satire and some amusing caricature, they also contained much personal insult and calumny. The wit is not enough to carry on the joke through 108 letters, carefully composed in Teutonic dog Latin by the best Latinists north of the Brenner. Erasmus, who was diverted at first, afterwards turned away with disgust, and Luther called the authors buffoons. The main writer of the first volume was Crotus Rubianus, and of the other, Hutten. Reuchlin himself disapproved. But he shared in the victory, which was so brilliant that his condemnation by Rome passed without notice, and it was not till our day that the success of the despised Pfefferkorn became known to the world. It was the first effective appeal to opinion against constituted authority, and the most decisive demonstration of the power of the press. And it gave the Humanists occasion so to define the issue that all could understand, in spite of the reserve of Erasmus and of Reuchlin himself.

Erasmus Rogers, the greatest figure in the Renaissance, was born at Rotterdam and brought up in extreme poverty, and he was a valetudinarian and an invalid in consequence of early privation. He lived in France and Belgium, in England and Italy, in Switzerland and Germany, so that each country contributed to his development, and none set its stamp upon him. He was eminently an international character; and was the first European who lived in intimacy with other ages besides his own, and could appreciate the gradual ripening and enlargement of ideas. He devoted himself on equal terms to classical and to Christian antiquity, and drew from both alike the same lessons of morality and wisdom; for he valued doctrine chiefly for the sake of a good life and a happy death, and was impatient of subtle dialectics and speculative disputations. With so much of Renaissance studies as did not serve the good estate of souls he showed little sympathy, and was indifferent to art, to metaphysics, to antiquarian pedantry. He endeavoured to make men familiar with the wisdom of the ancients by a collection of 1451 adages selected from their works. His Colloquies, the most popular book of his age, sold in 24,000 copies. At first he was more a scholar than a divine; and though he learnt Greek late, and was never a first-rate Hellenist, published editions of the classics. In later life the affairs of religion absorbed him, and he lived for the idea that reform of the Church depended on a better knowledge of early Christianity, in other words, on better self-knowledge, which could only result from a slow and prolonged literary process. He started from the beginning by his edition of the Greek Testament, begun here, at Queens' in 1512, published at Bale by Froben in 1516. It had already been printed from better MSS. by Cardinal Ximenes in the fifth volume of the Complutensian Polyglot, which did not appear until 1522. Therefore Erasmus's edition is the first ever published. It was produced at last, in a hurry, to secure the priority, and was not greatly improved afterwards. Part of the Apocalypse was wanting in all his MSS. He restored it by translating it into Greek from the Vulgate, and in six verses made thirty mistakes. His second edition had a letter of approbation from Leo X, and it was the edition which Luther used for his translation. It is a sign of the want of religious interest in the Renaissance, especially in Italy, that printing had been going on for sixty years, and 24,000 works issued from the press, some of them more than a hundred times, before anybody thought of the Greek Testament.

Erasmus occupied his later years with the works of the Fathers, also printed by Froben, the Greeks in Latin translations. "Letters," he said, "had remained Pagan in Italy, until he taught them to speak of Christ." Just as he was entirely destitute of the national fibre, so too he stood apart from the schools or currents of his time. His striving was to replace the scholastics by the Fathers, systematic theology by spiritual religion; and those Doctors of the Church who inclined to system, such as St. Augustine, repelled him. It may be said that he was not attracted by St. Paul, and preferred the Gospels to the Epistles. He esteemed Seneca more highly than many Christian divines. Although he chose to employ the weapon of irony, and abstained from the high horse and the big word, he was earnest in his desire for the reform of abuses in the Church. He disliked contention, and desired to avoid offence; but he made enemies in all parts of Europe, and was vehemently denounced by the theologians of Paris and Louvain, by the Spanish friars, by Archbishop Lee, by Zuniga, the Count of Carpi, and especially by the very learned Steuchus of Gubbio. In later days he was one of the first writers put on the Index. But throughout his career as a divine, that is, for the last quarter of a century that he lived, he was consistently protected, defended, consulted by Popes, until Paul III offered him a Cardinal's hat and desired that he would settle at Rome. He told Leo X that he thought it a mistake to censure Luther, with whom he agreed as to many of the matters calling for reform. But whilst Luther attributed the prevailing demoralisation to false dogmas and a faulty constitution, Erasmus sought the cause in ignorance and misgovernment. What came from this division of opinion pertains to the next lecture. Erasmus belonged, intellectually, to a later and more scientific or rational age. The work which he had initiated, and which was interrupted by the Reformation troubles, was resumed at a more acceptable time by the scholarship of the seventeenth century.

IV

LUTHER

DURING THE latter part of the Middle Ages, the desire for reform of the Church was constant. It was strongest and most apparent among laymen, for a famous monastic writer of the fourteenth century testified that the laity led better lives than the clergy. To the bulk of ordinary Christians reform meant morality in the priesthood. It became intolerable to them to see the Sacrament administered habitually by sacrilegious hands, or to let their daughters go to confession to an unclean priest. The discontent was deepest where men were best. They felt that the organisation provided for the salvation of souls was serving for their destruction, and that the more people sought the means of grace in the manner provided, the greater risk they incurred of imbibing corruption. In the days when celibacy was imposed under Gregory VII, it was argued that the validity of orders depended on conduct; and that idea of forfeiture by sin, essentially fatal to the whole hierarchical system, was not yet extinct. People learnt to think of virtue apart from the institutions of the Church, and the way was paved for a change which should reduce the part of the clergy in men's lives, and give them families of their own. The hope that a stricter discipline would be enforced by authority from within died away. When Eugenius IV directed Cesarini to dissolve the Council of Basle, the Cardinal replied that if he obeyed they would be thought to be mocking God and men, and to have abandoned the notion of reform, and the laity would have some reason to believe that it was a good deed to destroy, or at least to plunder, the clergy.