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156 age. And a ready memory kept these stores of knowledge ever at his command. He was never at a loss for a passage to support any contention of his own or to confute what he supposed to be an error of an adversary.

But while this mastery of the Scriptures is creditable to Hübmaier, and entitles him to a certain consideration as a theologian, it is not his chief distinction. It is his power of expression, his sense of literary form, his art of putting things, that sets him alongside of Erasmus. His style, considered as mere Latinity, is faulty enough—indeed, every college student now knows that the Latinity of the great Erasmus himself, loudly as it was praised by unscholarly contemporaries, was very bad measured by the classical standards. But as an instrument for expressing thought, Hübmaier's Latin demands no criticism, and his use of it shows him one who would have been a clever literary craftsman in any language. In this literary characteristic, he has a note of modernity found in comparatively few of the writers of his age.

The great bulk of Hübmaier's writing, however, is in his mother tongue, the German then spoken