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Rh Selling, Grocyn, Whitford, Linacre, Colet, Pace, William Latimer, and numerous others, were not only ardent humanists, but thorough and practical churchmen.

Similar conditions existed on the European continent. The Latin City Schools towards the close of the Middle Ages were numerous throughout Germany. About this time, the intellectual condition of the people in Germany, the Netherlands and France was most beneficially influenced by the "Brethren of the Common Life". Founded by Gerard Groot of Deventer, this fraternity at first was employed in the transcription of books, all profane studies being prohibited. They were supposed to restrict themselves exclusively to the reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, not wasting their time over "such vanities as geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, lyric poetry, and judicial astrology." These principles were extreme, and it is some consolation to find that the founder admitted the "wiser of the Gentile philosophers," such as Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca. In 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerken of Kempen, Rhineland, entered the school of Deventer; he was no other than the famous Thomas a Kempis, most probably the author of the Following of Christ.

Shortly after the death of Gerard Groot (1384), the labors of the Brethren were made to embrace a wider sphere, and especially to include the education of