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Tungern, of course, went to greet him, and this made it easy to part from his table companions in a manner that aroused no comment; for while Kollin was surrounded and respectfully welcomed by the Dominican friars and many other travellers, the humanists left the house. Dietel did not lose sight of the envoys. After whispering together a short time they had risen and gone out.
John was a frequent guest at Ottobeuren, and one of Nicholas' invitations contains what is unusual among the humanists, an appreciation of the charms of the country: 'Come, he says, 'and hear the songs of the birds, the shepherds' pipes and the children's horns, the choruses of reapers and ploughmen, and the voices of the girls as they work in the fields.
Popes and Cardinals, however, had shown themselves much better connoisseurs of art than the humanists, and had brought these barbarians to Italy, had given them high appointments and become their pupils.
In other words, it has seemed to me that the things which I have studied were originally produced during the Middle Ages, and consequently in the mediæval countries, France, Germany, Provence; but did not attain maturity except in that portion of the Middle Ages which is mediæval no longer, but already more than half modern, the Renaissance, which began in Italy not with the establishment of despotisms and the coming of Greek humanists, but with the independence of the free towns and with the revival of Roman tradition.
This distinguished humanist became involved in a controversy with the Dominicans of Cologne, who wished to burn all the Hebrew literature except the Old Testament. The Humanists all rallied in support of their chief, to whom heresy was imputed, and their success in this wide-spread conflict helped forward their cause.
The insistence of the Protestants upon salvation through faith alone in God, their suspicion of ceremonies and "good works," their reliance upon the Bible, and the stress they laid upon preaching, all these were to be found in Germany and elsewhere before Luther began to preach. Among the critics of the churchmen, monks, and theologians, none were more conspicuous than the humanists.
One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles. It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists?
And what was the difference between such a man and the humanists? The latter had more free will, more subjectivity, than they could turn to purposes of happiness. The mendicant friar, who had lived from his boyhood in the monastery, and never eaten or slept except by rule, ceased to feel the com- pulsion under which he lived.
The well-educated humanists were especially eloquent in preaching reform. The writings of Erasmus had great vogue in England. Paul's cathedral in London, was a keen reformer who disapproved of auricular confession and of the celibacy of the clergy. But neither Colet nor More had any intention of breaking away from the Roman Church.
Neither of them sanctions this perversion of thought and feeling which either projects the impressionistic self so absurdly and perilously into the natural order, or else minimizes man's imaginative and intellectual power, leveling him down to the amoral instinct of the brute. "How much more," said Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the greatest of English humanists was Matthew Arnold.
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