Since studies pass into character, it is natural to find a marked effect from this turning loose of a new source of spiritual authority. That thousands were made privately better, wiser and happier from the reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that standards of morality were raised and ethical tastes purified thereby, is certain. But the same cause had several effects that were either morally indifferent or positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by contemporaries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, as Luther complained, interpreted the Holy Book according to his own brain and crazy reason. The old saying that the Bible was the book of heretics, came true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that none but the ministers (i.e. themselves) had the right to interpret Scripture. It was in vain for the governments to forbid, as the Scotch statute expressed it, "any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible"; [Sidenote: 1550] discordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig-headed and intolerant.
There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion to the amount of inerrancy attributed to it, became a stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism was regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, as a cause of vehement suspicion of atheism. Some texts buttressed the horrible and cruel superstition of witchcraft. The examples of the wars of Israel and the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to support the duty of intolerance. Social reformers, like {574} Vives, in their struggle to abolish poverty, were confronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal verity, that the poor are always with us. Finally the great moral lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission of polygamy, was supported by biblical texts.
[Sidenote: The classics]
Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the classics. Most of the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most important exception being the Annals of Tacitus, of which the editio princeps was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates of the editiones principes of the other principal Greek writers:
1502: Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus. 1503: Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's Hellenica. 1504: Demosthenes. 1509: Plutarch's Moralia. 1513: Pindar, Plato. 1516: Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pausanias, Strabo. 1517: Plutarch's Lives. 1518: Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays. 1525: Galen, Xenophon's complete works. 1528: Epictetus. 1530: Polybius. 1532: Aristophanes, eleven plays. 1533: Euclid, Ptolemy. 1544: Josephus. 1552: Aeschylus, seven plays. 1558: Marcus Aurelius. 1559: Diodorus. 1565: Bion and Moschus. 1572: Plutarch's complete works.
Naturally the first editions were not usually the best. {575} [Sidenote: Scholarship] The labor of successive generations has made the text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not exclusively, in editing the fathers of the church, was done by Erasmus. But a really new school of historical criticism was created by Joseph Justus Scaliger, [Sidenote: J. J. Scaliger, 1540-1609] the greatest of scholars. His editions of the Latin poets first laid down and applied sound rules of textual emendation, besides elucidating the authors with a wealth of learned comment.
The editing of the texts was but a small portion of the labor that went to the cultivation of the classics. The foundations of our modern lexicons were laid in the great Thesaurus linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in three volumes 1543) and the Thesauris linguae Graecae by Henry Estienne the younger, published in five volumes in 1572. This latter is still used, the best edition being that in nine volumes 1829-63.
So much of ancient learning has become a matter of course to the modern student that he does not always realize the amount of ground covered in the last four centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani: [Sidenote: November 13, 1517] "The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient poets vainly promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that its very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the greatest scholars then was ignorant of a site now visited by every tourist in the Eternal City, how much must there not have been to learn in other respects? Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and successors of Erasmus labored to supply the knowledge then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammars were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epigraphy, on ancient religion, on chronology, on comparative philology, on Roman law, laid deep and strong the foundations of the consummate scholarship of modern times.
{576} [Sidenote: Idolatry of ancients]
The classics were not only studied in the sixteenth century, they were loved, they were even worshipped. "Every elegant study, every science worthy of the attention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there is of polite learning," wrote the French savant Muret, [Sidenote: 1573] "is contained nowhere save in the literature of the Greeks." Joachim du Bellay wrote a cycle of sonnets on the antiquities of Rome, in the spirit: