Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/22

 14 ERASMUS January studied with the newer zeal were called to the help of the older modes of thought. In this academic venture, which was made possible by private liberality, Erasmus took the deepest interest, and his letters are filled with inquiries about suitable candidates. Strangely enough, Hebrew was the chair most easily filled ; for Greek and Latin it was rightly thought most essential that experts capable of teaching conversation should be found. Languages treated as dead tended, it was felt, to become really so to those who studied them. Hitherto Latin had been a living tongue, and by its great unity of thought and literature had bound into one those who gave themselves up to their inspiration. But with the Reformation there came a great cleavage of thought, and some of the newer school gradually ceased to use the old material embodied in patristic, scholastic, and legal literature. For some generations indeed it was freely used. Reformers, like Melan- chthon and Beza on the Continent and like Cranmer and Jewel in England, founded their thought and arguments upon authorities and collections which were used by their opponents also. Then theological schools of opinion based upon allegiance to party leaders split off from each other. These schools soon came to prefer the spirit of their own day to the authoritative tradition of older systems, and barriers of local limits shut off rising genera- tions from the once common ground of ancient and medieval learning. But for some time the common study of the ancient tongues delayed the change. German reformers cherished them, to begin with, because they, like Melanchthon, had grown up in the atmosphere of the Renaissance. In the opposite camp the Jesuits, who were led by the solid learning of Lainez, were for one or two generations imder influences much the same.* But the gradual loss of a common language and the growing disuse of common material shook the solid ground upon which common schools had once stood together. Men ceased to think or read in common, and tendencies of all kinds pushed them apart. All this was to be seen most plainly on the Continent ; in England things were a little different, and the great Caroline divines are found using the old material and entering freely into the heritage of the past. Because they did so, they seemed to many in their own day to be reactionary and out of sympathy with the world aroimd them ; but just because they did so, they possessed a solidity of thought and a continuity of tradition which make the study of them most valuable for us to-day. • The educational changes which gather around the Ratio Studiorum and its history illustrate the change. The changing opinions about Erasmus are seen in the curious variations about his works in the index : see G. H. Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Borne, i. 196 f. and 225 ; i. 338 f. ; ii. 14.