- John Pupper of Goch in Cleves, prior of a cloister founded by him at Mecheln, died A.D. 1475. His works show him to have been a man of deep spirituality. Love, which leads to the true freedom of sons of God, is the material, the sole authority of Scripture is the formal, principle of his theology, which rests on a purely Augustinian foundation. He contends against the doctrine of righteousness by works, the meritoriousness of vows, etc.
- John Ruchrath of Wesel, professor in Erfurt, afterwards preacher at Mainz and Worms, died in A.D. 1481. On the basis of a strictly Augustinian theology he opposed the papal systems of anathemas and indulgences, and preached powerfully salvation by Jesus Christ only. For the church doctrine of transubstantiation he substituted one of impanation. He spiritualized the doctrine of the church. Against the ecclesiastical injunction of fasts, he wrote De jejunio; against indulgences, De indulgentiis; against the hierarchy, De potestate ecclesiastica. The Dominicans of Mainz accused and condemned him as a heretic in A.D. 1479. The old man, bent down with age and sickness, was forced to recant, and to burn his writings, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life in a monastery.
- John Wessel of Gröningen was a scholar of the Brothers of the Common Life at Zwoll, where Thomas à Kempis exerted a powerful influence over him. He taught in Cologne, Lyons, Paris, and Heidelberg, and then retired to the cloister of Agnes Mount, near Zwoll, where he died in A.D. 1489. His friends called him Lux mundi. Scholastic dialectics, mystical depths, and rich classical culture were in him united with a clear and accurate knowledge of science. Luther says of him: “Had I read Wessel before, my enemies would have said, Luther has taken everything from Wessel, so thoroughly do our ideas agree.” His views are in harmony with Luther’s, especially in what he teaches of Holy Scripture, the universal priesthood of Christians, indulgence, repentance, faith, and justification. He taught that not only popes but even councils may err and have erred; excommunication has merely outward efficacy, indulgence has to do only with ecclesiastical penalties, and God alone can forgive sins; our justification rests on Christ’s righteousness and God’s free grace. Purgatory meant for him nothing more than the intermediate position between earthly imperfection and heavenly perfection, which is attained only through various stages. The protection of powerful friends saved him from the persecution of the Inquisition. Many of his works were destroyed by the diligence of the mendicant friars.The most important of his extant writings is the Farrago, a collection of short treatises.[351]
- The priest of Rostock, Nicholas Russ, in the end of the 15th century, deserves honourable mention alongside of these Dutchmen. Living in intimate relations with Bohemian Waldensians, he was subjected to many indignities, and died a fugitive in Livonia. He wrote in the Dutch language a tract against the hierarchy, indulgences, worship of saints and relics, etc., which was translated into German by Flacius. A copy of it was found in Rostock library in A.D. 1850. It is entitled, “Of the Rope or of the Three Strings.” The rope that will raise man from the depths of his corruption must be made up of the three strings, faith, hope, and love. These three strings are described in succession, and so the book forms a complete compendium of Christian faith and life, with a sharp polemic against the debased church doctrine and morals of the age.
§ 119.11. An Italian Reformer.—Jerome Savonarola, born A.D. 1452, monk and from A.D. 1481 prior of the Dominican cloister of San Marco in Florence, was from A.D. 1489 in high repute in that city as an eloquent and passionate preacher of repentance, with even reckless boldness declaiming against the depravity of clergy and laity, princes and people. With his whole soul a Dominican, and as such an enthusiastic admirer of Thomas, practising rigid self-discipline by fasts and flagellations, he was led by the study of Augustine and Scripture to a pure and profound knowledge of the evangelical doctrine of salvation, which he sought, not in the merits and intercession of the saints, nor in the performance of good works, but only in the grace of God and justification through faith in the crucified Saviour of sinners. But with this he combined a prophetic-apocalyptic theory, according to which he thought himself called and fitted by Divine inspiration, like the prophets of the Old Testament, to grapple with the political problems of the age. And, in fact, he made many a hardened sinner tremble by revealing contemplated secret sins, and many of his political prophecies seem to have been fulfilled with surprising accuracy. Thus he prophesied the death of Innocent VIII. in A.D. 1492, and proclaimed the speedy overthrow of the house of the Medici in Florence, as well as the punishment of other Italian tyrants and the thorough reformation of the church by a foreign king crossing the Alps with a powerful army. And lo, in the following year, the king of France, Charles VIII., crossed the Alps to enforce his claims upon Naples and force from the pope recognition of the Basel reforms; the Medici were banished from Florence, and Naples unresistingly fell into the hands of the French. Thus the ascetic monk of San Marco became the man of the people, who now began with ruthless energy to carry out, not only moral and religious reformatory notions, but also his political ideal of a democratic kingdom of God. In vain did Alexander VI. seek by offer of a cardinal’s hat to win over the demagogical prophet and reformer; he only replied, “I desire no other red hat than that coloured by the blood of martyrdom.” In vain did the pope insist that he should appear before him at Rome; in vain did he forbid him the pulpit, from which he so powerfully moved the people. An attempt to restore the Medici also failed. At the carnival in A.D. 1497 Savonarola proved the supremacy of his influence over the people by persuading them, instead of the usual buffoonery, to make a bonfire of the articles of luxury and vanity. But already the political movements were turning out unfavourably, and his utterances were beginning to lose their reputation as true prophecies. Charles VIII. had been compelled to quit Italy in A.D. 1495, and Savonarola’s assurances of his speedy return were still unfulfilled. Popular favour vacillated, while the nobles and the libertine youth were roused to the utmost bitterness against him. The Franciscans, as members of a rival order, were his sworn enemies. The papal ban was pronounced against him in A.D. 1497, and the city was put under the interdict. A monk of his cloister, Fra Domenico Pescia, offered to pass the ordeal of fire in behalf of his master, if any of his opponents would submit to the same trial. A Franciscan declared himself ready to do so, and all arrangements were made. But when Domenico insisted upon taking with him a consecrated host, the trial did not come off, to the great disappointment of a people devotedly fond of shows. A fanatical mob took the prophet prisoner. His bitterest enemies were his judges, who, after torture had extorted from him a confession of false prophecy most repugnant to his inmost convictions, condemned him to death by fire as a deceiver of the people and a heretic. On 23rd May, A.D. 1498, he was, along with Domenico and another monk, hung upon a gallows and then burned. The believing joy with which he endured death deepened the reverence of an ever-increasing band of adherents, who proclaimed him saint and martyr. His portrait in the cell once occupied by him, painted by Fra Bartolomeo, surrounded with the halo of a saint, shows the veneration in which he was held by his generation and by his order. His numerous sermons represent to us his burning oratory. His chief work is his Triumphus crucis of A.D. 1497, an eloquent and thoughtful vindication of Christianity against the half pagan scepticism of the Renaissance, then dominant in Florence and at the court. An exposition of the 51st Psalm, written in prison and not completed, works out, with a clearness and precision never before attained, the doctrine of justification by faith.It was on this account republished by Luther in A.D. 1523.[352]
§ 120. The Revival of Learning.
The classical literature of Greek, and especially of Roman, antiquity was during the Middle Ages in the West by no means so completely unknown and unstudied as is commonly supposed. Rulers like Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Alfred the Great, and the German Ottos encouraged its study. Such scholars as Erigena, Gerbert, Barnard Sylvester, John of Salisbury, Roger Bacon, etc., were relatively well acquainted with it. Moorish learning from Spain and intercourse with Byzantine scholars spread classical culture during the 12th and 13th centuries, and the Hohenstaufen rulers were its eager and liberal patrons. In the 14th century the founders of a national Italian literature, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, earnestly cultivated and encouraged classical studies. But an extraordinary revival of interest in such pursuits took place during the 15th century. The meeting of Greeks and Italians at the Council of Florence in A.D. 1439 (§ 67, 6) gave the first impulse, while the Turkish invasion and the downfall of Constantinople in A.D. 1453 gave it the finishing touch. Immense numbers of Byzantine scholars fled to Italy, and were accorded an enthusiastic reception at the Vatican and in the houses of the Medici. With the aid of printing, invented about A.D. 1450, the treasures of classical antiquity were made accessible to all. From the time of this immigration, too, classical studies took an altogether new direction. During the Middle Ages they were made almost exclusively to subserve ecclesiastical and theological ends, but now they were conducted in a thoroughly independent spirit, for the purpose of universal human culture. This “humanism” emancipated itself from the service of the church, assumed toward Christianity for the most part an attitude of lofty indifference, and often lost itself in a vain worship of pagan antiquity. Faith was mocked at as well as superstition; sacred history and Greek mythology were treated alike. The youths of all European countries, thirsting for knowledge, crossed the Alps, to draw from the fresh springs of the Italian academies, and took home with them the new ideas, transplanting into distant lands in a modified form the libertinism of the new paganism that had now over-run Italy.
§ 120.1. Italian Humanists.—Italy was the cradle of humanism, the Greeks who settled there (§ 62, 1, 2), its fathers. The first Greek who appeared as a teacher in Italy was Emmanuel Chrysoloras, in A.D. 1396. After the Council of Florence, Bessarion and Gemisthus Pletho settled there, both ardent adherents of the Platonic philosophy, for which they created an enthusiasm throughout all Italy. From A.D. 1453 Greek littérateurs came in crowds.From their schools classical culture and pagan ideas spread through the land. This paganism penetrated even the highest ranks of the hierarchy. Leo X.[353] is credited with saying, “How many fables about Christ have been used by us and ours through all these centuries is very well known.” It may not be literally authentic, but it accurately expresses the spirit of the papal court. Leo’s private secretary, Cardinal Bembo, gave a mythological version of Christianity in classical Latin. Christ he styled “Minerva sprung from the head of Jupiter,” the Holy Spirit “the breath of the celestial Zephyr,” and repentance was with him a Deos superosque manesque placare. Even during the council of Florence Pletho had expressed the opinion that Christianity would soon develop into a universal religion not far removed from classical paganism; and when Pletho died, Bessarion comforted his sons by saying that the deceased had ascended into the pure heavenly spheres, and had joined the Olympic gods in mystic Bacchus dances. In the halls of the Medici there flourished a new Platonic school, which put Plato’s philosophy above Christianity. Alongside of it arose a new peripatetic school, whose representative, Peter Pompanazzo [Pomponazzo], who died A.D. 1526, openly declared that from the philosophical point of view the immortality of the soul is more than doubtful.The celebrated Florentine statesman and historian Macchiavelli,[354] who died A.D. 1527, taught the princes of Italy in his “Prince,” in direct contradiction to Dante’s idealistic “Monarchia,” a realistic polity which was completely emancipated from Christianity and every system of morality, and presented the monster Cæsar Borgia (§ [110, 12]) as a pattern of an energetic prince, consistently labouring for the end he had in view. Looseness of morals went hand in hand with laxity in religion. Obscene poems and pictures circulated among the humanists, and their practice was not behind their theory. Poggio’s lewd facetiæ, as well as Boccadelli’s indecent epigrams, fascinated the cultured Christian world as much by their lascivious contents as by their classical style. From the dialogues of Laurentius Valla on lust and the true good, which were meant to extol the superiority of Christian morals over those of the Epicureans and Stoics, comes the saying that the Greek courtesans were more in favour than the Christian nuns. The highly gifted poet, Pietro Aretino, in his poetical prose writings reached the utmost pitch of obscenity. He was called “the divine Aretino,” and not only Charles V. and Francis I. honoured him with presents and pensions, but also Leo X., Clement VIII., and even Paul III. showed him their esteem and favour. In their published works the Italian humanists generally ignored rather than contested the church and its doctrines and morality. But Laurentius Valla, who died A.D. 1457, ventured in his Adnotationes in N.T. freely to find fault with and correct the Vulgate. He did even more, for he pronounced the Donation of Constantine (§ 87, 4) a forgery, and poured forth bitter invectives against the cupidity of the papacy. He also denied the genuineness of the correspondence of Christ with Abgarus [Abgar] (§ 13, 2), as well as that of the Areopagite writings (§ 47, 11) and questioned if the Apostles’ Creed was the work of the apostles (§ 35, 2). The Inquisition sought to get hold of him, but Nicholas V. (§ [110, 10]) frustrated the attempt and showed him kindness. With all his classical culture, however, Valla retained no small reverence for Christianity. In a still higher degree is this true of John Picus, Prince of Mirandola, the phœnix of that age, celebrated as a miracle of learning and culture, who united in himself all the nobler strivings of the present and the past. When a youth of twenty-one he nailed up at Rome nine hundred theses from all departments of knowledge. The proposed disputation did not then come off, because many of those theses gave rise to charges of heresy, from which he was cleared only by Alexander VI. in A.D. 1493. The combination of all sciences and the reconciliation of all systems of philosophy among themselves and with revelation on the basis of the Cabbala was the main point in his endeavours. He has wrought out this idea in his Heptaplus, in which, by means of a sevenfold sense of Scripture, he succeeds in deducing all the wisdom of the world from the first chapter of Genesis. He died in A.D. 1494, in the thirty-first year of his age. In the last year of his life, renouncing the world and its glory, he set himself with all his powers to the study of Scripture, and meant to go from land to land preaching the Cross of Christ. His intentions were frustrated by death. His saying is a very characteristic one: Philosophia veritatem quærit, theologia invenit, religio possidet.
§ 120.2. German Humanism.—The home of German humanism was the University of Erfurt, founded A.D. 1392. At the Councils of Constance and Basel Erfurt, next to Paris, manifested the greatest zeal for the reformation of head and members, and continued to pursue this course during the twenty years’ activity of John of Wesel (§ [119, 10]). About A.D. 1460 the first representatives of humanism made their appearance there, a German Luder and a Florentine Publicius. From their school went forth among others Rudolph of Langen, who carried the new light into the schools of Westphalia, and John of Dalberg, afterwards Bishop of Worms. When these two had left Erfurt, Maternus Pistorius headed the humanist movement. Crowds of enthusiastic scholars from all parts of Germany gathered around him. As men of poetic tastes, who appreciated the ancient classics, they maintained excellent relations with the representatives of scholasticism. But in A.D. 1504 Busch, a violent revolutionist, appearing at Erfurt, demanded the destruction of the old scholastic text-books, and thus produced an absolute breach between the two tendencies. Maternus retired, and Mutian, an old Erfurt student, assumed the leadership in Gotha. Erfurt and Gotha were kept associated by a lively intercourse between the students resident at these two places. Mutian had no literary ambitions, and firmly declined a call to the new University of Wittenberg. All the more powerfully he inspired his contemporaries. His bitter opposition to hierarchism and scholasticism was expressed in keen satires. On retiring from public life, he devoted himself to the study of Holy Scripture and the Fathers. Shortly before his death he wrote down this as his confession of faith: Multa scit rusticus, quæ philosophus ignorat; Christus vero pro nobis mortuus est, qui est vita nostra, quod certissime credo. The leadership passed over to Eoban Hesse. The members of the society joined the party of Luther, with the exception of Crotus Rubianus. Ulrich von Hutten was one of the followers of Mutian, a knight of a noble Franconian family, inspired with ardent patriotism and love of freedom, who gave his whole life to battle against pedantry, monkery, and intolerance.Escaping in A.D. 1504 from Fulda, where he was being trained for the priesthood, he studied at Erfurt, fought in Maximilian’s army with the sword, in Mutian’s and Reuchlin’s ranks with the pen, and after the fall of Sickingen became a homeless wanderer, until he died in want, in A.D. 1523, on Ufenan, an island in the Lake of Zürich.[355]
§ 120.3. Next to Erfurt, Heidelberg, founded in A.D. 1386, afforded a congenial home for humanist studies. The most brilliant representative of humanism there was Rudolph Agricola, an admirer and disciple of À. Kempis and Wessel. His fame rests more on the reports of those who knew him personally than on any writings left behind by him. His pupils mostly joined the Reformation.—The University of Wittenberg, founded by Frederick the Wise in A.D. 1502, was the nursery of a wise and moderate humanism. Humanist studies also found an entrance into Freiburg, founded in A.D. 1455, into Tübingen, founded in A.D. 1477, where for a long time Reuchlin taught, and into Ingolstadt, founded in A.D. 1472, where the Duke of Bavaria spared no efforts to attract the most distinguished humanists. Conrad Celtes, a pupil of Agricola, taught at Ingolstadt until his removal to Vienna in A.D. 1497. Eck and Rhegius, too, were among its ablest alumni. As a bitter opponent of Luther, Eck gave the university a most pronounced anti-reformation character; whereas Rhegius preached the gospel in Augsburg, and spent his life in the service of the Reformation. Reuchlin also taught for a time in Ingolstadt, and the patriotism and reformatory tendencies of Aventinus the Bavarian historian received there the first powerful impulse. At Nuremberg the humanists found a welcome in the home of the learned, wealthy, and noble Councillor Pirkheimer. In Reuchlin’s controversy with the scholars of Cologne he showed himself an eager apologist, and headed the party of Reuchlin. He greeted Luther’s appearance with enthusiasm, and entertained the reformer at his own house on his return from the discussion with Cajetan (§ [122, 3]), on account of which Eck made the papal bull against Luther tell also against him. What he regarded as Luther’s violence, however, soon estranged him, while the cloister life of his three sisters and three daughters presented to him a picture of Catholicism in its noblest and purest form. His eldest sister, Christas, abbess of the Clara convent at Nuremburg [Nuremberg], one of the noblest and most cultured women of the 16th century, had a powerful influence over him. He died in A.D. 1530.
§ 120.4. John Reuchlin, born in A.D. 1455 at Pforzheim, went to the celebrated school at Schlettstadt in Alsace, studied at Freiburg, Paris, Basel, and Orleans, taught law in Tübingen, and travelled repeatedly in Italy with Eberhard the Bearded of Württemberg. After Eberhard’s death he went to the court of the Elector-palatine Philip, and along with D’Alberg [Dalberg] did much for the reputation of the University of Heidelberg. Afterwards he was for eleven years president of the Swabian court of justiciary at Tübingen. When in A.D. 1513 the seat of this court was removed to Augsburg he retired to Stuttgart, was called in A.D. 1519 by William of Bavaria to Ingolstadt as professor of Greek and Hebrew. On the outbreak of the plague at Ingolstadt in A.D. 1520, he accepted a call back to Tübingen, where he died in A.D. 1522. He never gave in his adhesion to the reforming ideas of Luther. He left unanswered a letter from the reformer in A.D. 1518. But as a promoter of every scientific endeavour, especially in connection with the study of the original text of the O.T., Reuchlin had won imperishable renown.He was well entitled to conclude his Rudimenta linguæ Hebraicæ of A.D. 1506 with Horace’s words, Stat monumentum aëre perennino, for that book has been the basis of all Christian Hebrew philology.[356] He also discussed the difficult subject of Hebrew accents in a special treatise, De Acc. et Orthogr. Hebr. 11. iii, and the secret doctrines of the Jews in his De arte Cabbalistica. He offered to instruct any Jew who wished it in the doctrines of Christianity, and also to care for his temporal affairs. His attention to rabbinical studies involved him in a controversy which spread his fame over all Europe. A baptized Jew, Pfefferkorn, in Cologne in A.D. 1507 exhibited a neophyte’s zeal by writing bitter invectives against the Jews, and in A.D. 1509 called upon the Emperor Maximilian to have all rabbinical writings burnt because of the blasphemies against Christ which they contained. The emperor asked the opinion of the universities of Mainz, Cologne, Erfurt, and Heidelberg, as well as of Reuchlin and the Cologne inquisitor Hoogstraten. Erfurt and Heidelberg gave a qualified, Reuchlin an unqualified answer in opposition to the proposal. The openly abusive Jewish writings, e.g. the notorious Toledoth Jeschu, he would indeed condemn, but all other books, e.g. the Talmud, the Cabbala, the biblical glosses and commentaries, books of sermons, prayers, and sacred songs, as well as all philosophical, scientific, poetic, and satirical writings of the Jews, he was prepared unconditionally to defend. Pfefferkorn contended against him passionately in his “Handspiegel” of A.D. 1511, to which Reuchlin replied in his “Augenspiegel.” The theological faculty of Cologne, mostly Dominicans, pronounced forty-three statements in the “Augenspiegel” heretical, and demanded its suppression. Reuchlin now gave free vent to his passion, and in his Defensio c. calumniatores suos Colonienses denounced his opponents as goats, swine, and children of the devil. Hoogstraten had him cited before a heresy tribunal. Reuchlin did not appear, but appealed to Pope Leo X. (A.D. 1513). A commission appointed by Leo met at Spires in A.D. 1514, and declared him not guilty of heresy, found Hoogstraten liable in the costs of the process, which was enforced with hearty satisfaction by Franz von Sickingen in A.D. 1519. But meanwhile Hoogstraten had made a personal explanation of his affairs at Rome, and had won over the influential magister sacri palatii, Sylvester Prierias (§ [122, 2]), who got the pope in A.D. 1520 to annul the judgment and to condemn Reuchlin to pay the costs and observe eternal silence. The men of Cologne triumphed, but in the public opinion of Germany Reuchlin was regarded as the true victor.
§ 120.5. A multitude of vigorous and powerful pens were now in motion on behalf of Reuchlin. In the autumn of A.D. 1515 appeared the first book of the Epistolæ obscurorum virorum, which pretended to be the correspondence of a friend with the Cologne teacher Ortuinus Gratius of Deventer. In the most delicious monkish Latin the secret affairs of the mendicant monks and their hatred of Reuchlin were set forth, so that even the Dominicans, according to Erasmus, for a time regarded the correspondence as genuine. All the more overwhelming was the ridicule which fell upon them throughout all Europe. The mendicants indeed obtained from Leo a bull against the writers of the book, but this only increased its circulation. The authors remained unknown; but there is no doubt they belonged to the Mutian party. Justus Jonas, a member of that guild, affirms that Crotus Rubianus had a principal hand in its composition. The idea of it was probably suggested by Mutian himself. Ulrich von Hutten repudiated any share in it, and on internal and external grounds this is more than probable. Busch, Urban, Petrejus, and Eoban Hesse most likely contributed to it. In order to keep up the deception, Venice was given as the place of publication, the name of the famous Aldus Manutius, the papal publisher of Venice, was put upon the title, and a pseudo-papal imprimatur was attached. The second book was issued in A.D. 1517 by Frobenius in Basel. The monkish party published as a counterblast Lamentationes obscurorum virorum at Cologne in A.D. 1518, but the lame and forced wit of the book marked it at once as a ridiculous failure.The monks and schoolmen were once and for ever morally annihilated.[357]
§ 120.6. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most brilliant of all the humanists, not only of Germany, but also of all Europe. Born in A.D. 1465, he was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer and Herzogenbusch, and afterwards forced by his relatives to enter a monastery in A.D. 1486. In A.D. 1491 he was relieved from the monastic restraints by the Bishop of Cambray, and sent to finish his studies at Paris. He visited England in A.D. 1497, in the company of young Englishmen to whom he had been tutor. There the humanist theologian Colet of Oxford exerted over him a wholesome influence that told upon his whole future life. After spending a year and a half in England, he passed the next six years, sometimes in France, sometimes in the Netherlands; was in Italy from A.D. 1507 till A.D. 1510; then again for five years in England, for most of that time teaching Greek at Cambridge; then other six years in the Netherlands; and at last, in A.D. 1521, he settled with his publisher Frobenius in Basel, where he enjoyed intercourse with the greatest scholars of the day, and maintained an extensive correspondence. He refused every offer of official appointment, even the rank of cardinal, but in reality held undisputed sway as king in the world of letters. He did much for the advancement of classical studies, and in various ways promoted the Protestant Reformation. The faults of the scholastic method in the study of theology he unsparingly exposed, while the misdeeds of the clergy and the ignorance and sloth of the monks afforded materials for his merciless satires. The heathenish spirit of many of the humanists, as well as the turbulent and revolutionary procedure of Ulrich von Hutten, was quite distasteful to him; but his Pelagianising tendencies also prevented him from appreciating the true character of the gospel. He desired a reformation of the Church, but he had not the reformer’s depth of religious emotion, world-conquering faith, self-denying love, and heroic preparation for martyrdom. He was much too fond of a genial literary life, and his perception of the corruption of the church was much too superficial, so that he sought reformation rather by human culture than by the Divine power of the gospel. When the Reformation conquered at Basel in A.D. 1529, Erasmus withdrew to Freiburg. He returned to Basel in A.D. 1536 for conference with Frobenius, and died there under suspicion of heresy without the sacraments of the church. His friends the monks at an earlier period, on the occasion of a false report of his death, had said in their barbarous Latin that he died “sine lux, sine crux, sine Deus.” The most important of his works are his critical and exegetical treatises on the N.T. The first edition of his Greek N.T., with Latin translation, short notes, and three introductory sections, was published in A.D. 1516. In the second edition of A.D. 1519, one of these introductory sections, Ratio veræ theologiæ, appeared in a greatly extended form; and from A.D. 1522 it was issued separately, and passed through several editions. Scarcely less important were his paraphrases of all the biblical books except the Apocalypse, begun in A.D. 1517. He did much service too by his editions of the Fathers. On his polemic with Luther see § [125, 3]. His Ecclesiastes s. concionator evangelicus of A.D. 1535 is a treatise on homiletics admirable of its kind. In his “Praise of Folly” (Ἐγκώμιον μωρίας, s. Laus stultitiæ) of A.D. 1511, dedicated to his friend Sir Thomas More, he overwhelms with ridicule the schoolmen, as well as the monks and the clergy; and in his “Colloquies” of A.D. 1518, by which he hoped to make boys latiniores et meliores, he let no opportunity pass of reproaching the monks, the clergy, and the forms of worship which he regarded as superstitious. Also his Adagia of A.D. 1500 had afforded him abundant scope for the same sort of thing.A piety of the purest and noblest type, derived from the schools of the Brothers of the Common Life, and from intercourse with Colet, breathes through his Enchiridion militis christiani of A.D. 1502.[358]—Continuation § [123, 3].