Ye fathers and ye mothers good,
See us with the birchen wood
Loaded, coming home again;
For our profit it shall serve,
Not for injury or pain.
Your will and the command of God
Have prompted us to bear the rod
On our own bodies thus to-day,
Not in angry, sullen mood,
But with a spirit glad and gay
The greater part of the male students were animated by a wild and reckless spirit, the result of a fickle roving from town to town. The pretext for this course was the necessity of hunting up skilful teachers; but with many it was only love for a career of frolic and idleness. The oldest and strongest scholars, young men of twenty and upwards, each of whom had a different plea to urge, set the example. By the promise of a living free of cost and instruction in the rudiments they attracted to themselves younger boys, who, as soon as they had crossed the boundaries of their father-land, were converted into servants and compelled to beg or steal money and provisions for the common treasury. Thomas Platter, a native of Valais, when a child, nine years of age, followed such a wandering student and traveled with him through Germany as far as the borders of Poland without ever learning to read, until in his eighteenth year, he received for the first time better instruction in Schlettstadt and afterwards in Zurich. He has left us a picture of his student-life in an autobiography, extracts from which are found in a number of works. It can easily be imagined how several thousand scholars of this roving cast, who all subsisted on alms, should frequently meet together in one town. The younger ones, called archers, spent the night in the schoolhouses, and the older (bacchanalians) in little chambers specially reserved for their accommodation. In summer they all lay together in the church-yards with the grass for a bed. Wo to the chickens, the geese and the fruit-trees, where such a troop passed by! Here one man hissed his dogs on them, while there another gave them a friendly welcome, and in return for as much beer as they could drink, obtained information about foreign countries and stories of their travels. The roughest class of teachers often joined them in their revels and often others at the head of their trusty followers sallied out to drive the truants into school, who, when assailed, retreated to the roofs of the houses, sending down showers of stones, till the citizens or the watchmen broke in among them and quelled the riot.
It was Zwingli's good fortune to be saved from such a life of adventure. George Binzli, his teacher in Basel, was, in the words of an old writer, an excellent, not unlearned man, of a very amiable disposition. He took a great liking to Zwingli, who soon stood in the foremost rank among his school-fellows, a master in debate and the possessor of an extraordinary talent for music. At the end of three years he finished his course in the Theodore School, and departed, cherishing an esteem and gratitude, not lost in after life, toward Binzli, by whose advice also he now went to Bern, and entered a higher class under the care of Henry Wœlfli.
At an earlier day Latin was taught chiefly for the purposes of divine worship, which consisted, for the most part, of chanting and the saying of masses in this language, to the common people an unknown tongue. A knowledge of it was derived from stupid manuals, that only furnished the scholars with a stock of words, which, though not well understood even by themselves, were stuffed into their sermons, in order to gain credit for learning with the ignorant multitude.
But after the invention of the art of printing, the most important works of the ancient Romans, extant only in a few very costly manuscripts, were given to the world by the press. These, teachers of ability first took up and studied, and then explained to their scholars. What a wide contrast between such education and that of a former period! Here, instead of corrupt monk's Latin, the young men became acquainted with a highly cultivated, clear, powerful language, and, at the same time also, with the history of the most celebrated republic of antiquity, which, to the Swiss, themselves the citizens of a free country, was full of interest. Wœlfli, we know, followed this path in his teaching. "From him," says Myconius, the biographer and friend of Zwingli, "he obtained his first knowledge of the classic authors (so well preserved through so many centuries), acquired a flowing, harmonious style, and learned how to distinguish facts and exercise his judgment upon them." Wœlfli had visited Jerusalem as a zealous pilgrim, and would often speak of the journey to his scholars, who also saw that he was busied with the history of his native land and that every story of the olden time was sacred in his eyes. But to Zwingli the most pleasant hours were those spent in the practice of music. With astonishing rapidity he learned to play on all the kinds of instruments then known. This attracted the attention of the heads of the Dominicans at Bern. Envious at the greater concourse of people, that crowded to the Franciscans, these monks sought to raise against the fallen reputation of their monastery. To secure for themselves talent, so promising as that of Zwingli, was a thing much to be desired; but happily for himself and for his father-land, the young man rejected their offers. A short time after, four of these cursed hypocrites had to atone by death at the stake for a diversion, just as cruel as it was horrible, the performing of bloody miracles for the deception of pious simplicity.
Zwingli had now lived three years in Bern, and was already fully ripe for the university. With loving remembrances he bade farewell to his faithful teacher, who was yet to become his pupil and in old age dedicate a few sad verses to the hero, who fell at Cappel.
At that time the young Swiss chiefly resorted to the universities of Basel, Paris, Vienna, Cracow and Pavia. That of Vienna was selected for Zwingli, which he entered in the same year (1490), that saw his country triumph over the dangers of the Swabian war. He there united himself in close intimacy with two other gifted fellow-countrymen, Joachim of Waat (Vadianus) from St. Gall, and Henry Loriti (Glareanus) from Glarus. Meanwhile he appears to have devoted more attention to general culture than to such branches of knowledge as might aid him in the exercise of a particular calling. Above all, philosophy had to be studied; a truly noble science, if by it be understood the acquisition of truth, as far as it can be reached by the deductions of human reason. But such was not the character of philosophy then in vogue. Under the tyranny of a degenerate church, the powers of the mind, not permitted to unfold in an element of freedom, were wasted amid trifling and often silly examinations and questions, conducted with a ludicrous show of importance. A certain kind of sagacity often displayed itself in their ingenious replies, and he who could produce the most singular was regarded by many as the most learned.
It does fall within the scope of this description to hold up to ridicule opinions, which others esteem holy. Examples, familiar to those versed in books, are therefore omitted. The dangerous side of this so-called philosophy did not lie so much in isolated expressions as in its whole tendency to cripple the spirit and harden the heart, so that victory might be rendered more sure and easy to the cunning talker, who strove, not for the cause of truth, but for his own private advantage. In the school of the clear-seeing, free-speaking Romans Zwingli soon learned how to sift the scandalous game, carried on under the banners of wisdom, to distinguish fallacy from truth, and to despise from the bottom of his soul this false philosophy, the art of passing off black for white, and of leading both parties by the nose with the same blinding torrent of words, in brief, the whole brood of lies and everything belonging to it.
Although it could only have been through the medium of translations or abridgments, he already seems to have made some acquaintance with the works of the Greeks. In profound speculation and in matters of art and taste they were the teachers of the Romans, who, in spite of national pride, were willing to acknowledge them as such. Even to this day, their sages, Plato and Aristotle, must be studied by all, who are not content with a mere superficial knowledge of philosophy. Their historians entered fully into the character of the persons and of the times, which they portrayed, and in their poets a loftier inspiration ruled. One of these, Pindar, is thus described by Zwingli at a later period: "He is the prince of poets. He has a true, holy, incorruptible mind. Every expression, that he uses, be it ever so common, he makes noble. No one can either give to him or take from him without injury. In him is found a worthy, powerful representation of antiquity. It lives again before our eyes. His poetry flows like a clear stream; all is noble, charming, perfect. In a lofty style he discourses of the gods, and it can be easily seen that he meant thereby the one, divine, heavenly power. No Grecian author serves so well for the interpretation of Holy Scripture, especially of the Psalms and Job, which rival him in sublimity."
The young men turned their attention also to the mysteries of nature, the discoveries in geography and the illimitable kingdom of worlds, revealed to us by a glance at the darkened heavens. In after life Glareanus won for himself considerable fame by his researches in the department of ancient geography, and Vadianus, when quite an old man, gathered around him a troop of burghers from St. Gall, full of wonder and a desire to learn, as they lay encamped, one starry night, on the summit of the Freudenberg, and spoke to them of the motion of the heavenly bodies and the laws, that govern them, and strengthened their hopes of an eternal existence in the immeasurable realms of space.