Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/726

 Deity. So he put himself to school under a Jewish physician, acquired enough Hebrew to pursue his studies independently, and, as a result, published in 1506 his De Rudimentis Hebraicis. He himself named this book a monumentum aere perennius, and history has justified the name. It helped to define and determine the religious tendencies in Teutonic humanism, to change the fanciful mysticism that had begotten the book into a spirit at once historical, critical, and sane. It practically made the Hebrew Scriptures Christian, an original text which could be used as a Court of appeal for the correction of the translation and of the canon which the usage of the Church had accepted and endorsed. Knowledge of the language thus made the interpretation of the Old Testament more historical and more ethical; it could now be read as little through the Gnosticism of the Cabbala as through the Roman associations of the Vulgate.

The event which took the Old Testament out of the hand of phantasy turned it into an instrument of reform; for if it is doubtful whether Protestantism could have arisen without the knowledge of the Old Testament, it is certain that without it the Reformed Church could not have assumed the shape it took. In all this, of course, specific dangers might lie for the scholar who could no longer freely use the allegorism of Alexandria to convey the New Testament into the most impossible places of the Old, and who was therefore tempted to reverse the process and employ the language and spirit of the Old Testament in the interpretation of the New. But these dangers were still in the future; for the present it will be enough to recall the story, told in an earlier volume, of the controversy between Reuchlin and Pfefferkorn, and of the burning of Reuchlin's books by the Inquisition. In consequence of this unjust treatment, the humanists addressed a series of letters, at once eulogistic and apologetic, to Reuchlin, which were published in 1514 under the title Epistolae clarorum Virorum. (The second edition in 1519 substituted " illustrlum " for " clarorum.")

This book suggested to one of the younger and brighter humanists, John Jäger-better known as Crotus Rubeanus, Luther's " Crotus noster suavissimus", a professor at Erfurt-a series of imaginary epistles written by vagrant students in the execrable dog-Latin of the Schools, to Ortwinus Gratius, otherwise Ortwin de Graes, professor of belles lettres at Cologne, a man whom Luther in his most emphatic and plain-spoken style described as " poetistam asinum, lupum rapacem, si non potius crocodilum." The Epistolae, while describing the experiences or adventures of their supposed authors,—and it is here where the characters so humorously reveal themselves-praise Gratius as well as the divines and divinity of the Schools, and censure the "poetae seculares" or "juristae" who had eulogised Reuchlin. In their composition various scholars collaborated, notably Ulrich von Hutten, then ablaze with the enthusiasm for Germany and the passion against Rome which made the