DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA.
A.D. 1360 TO 1517.
It is not to be supposed that the development which had been taken by the universities, and which we have been engaged in tracing in the foregoing chapters, the perils to which their younger members were exposed, and the yet graver results that might be expected to ensue to faith and morals if their influence continued without some salutary check, could fail, even in their own day, of attracting the attention of thoughtful men; and much curious illustration might be drawn from the literature of the fourteenth century, tending to show how questionable a place the great academies of learning at that time held in popular estimation. The most racy legends of mediÆval diablerie generally introduce us to some student of Paris or Salamanca, who has made a compact with the enemy of souls; while the graver histories of the saints are crowded with examples of those who fled into the cloister to escape the contagion of the schools.
The danger to which the scholastic convertites seem to have been most sensitively alive was not one, perhaps, which, to modern notions, would seem the most appalling. It was not the licentious manners, nor even precisely the heterodox opinions of the schools, which chiefly terrified them, but the subtle perils of intellectual vanity. It has been before remarked that, among the old monastic scholars, the existence of this danger was hardly recognised. The obligations of their state for the most part protected them from its attacks. “What they learnt without guile they communicated without envy,”[312] and they believed and practically set forth the doctrine which, as one of modern times has beautifully expressed it, acknowledges “humility, the basis of morals, to be also the foundation of reason.” So entirely did the rules of holy living purge the pursuit of science from the leaven of pride, that it is quite common to find ancient writers speaking of learning as though it were almost a virtue. Things had sadly changed in this respect since the close of the tenth century, and the warnings which St. Bernard addressed to the scholars of his day had to be repeated by the ascetics of each successive age with ever-increasing earnestness. He sorrowfully lamented that those who pursued learning were daily more and more losing sight of its right order, its right motive, and its right end. The order of true knowledge, he said, is to set in the first rank the things that concern salvation; its motive should be charity, and its end, neither curiosity nor vain-glory, but our own or our neighbour’s edification. And he failed not to remind the would-be philosophers whom he addressed, and whose chief object seemed to be to make themselves talked about, that the “biting tooth” of the Latin satirist had long before drawn their portraits, and ridiculed those who only care to know in order that somebody else may know that they know.[313] The evils he complained of had certainly not abated with time; nevertheless, the old Christian morality, which was so based on intellectual lowliness as to be hardly capable of realising a fear of the opposite vice until it arose before the eye in all its deformity, was too deeply rooted in Christendom to be eradicated by one or two generations of professors; and its influence may be traced in the horror which good men felt and expressed for what they regarded as a more radical poison than the grosser temptations of an undisciplined life. And we who have witnessed the later issues of that great Revolt of Reason which took its beginnings in the pride of intellect, and which will find its end in the reign of Antichrist, are bound to bear witness that they judged aright, and to applaud a sagacity which originated less perhaps in any very quick-sighted intelligence than in the undulled instincts of the Christian sense.
When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of the Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in almost every provincial capital of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong full tide of fashion. Thus, the life of the Blessed Peter Jeremias, of the Order of Preachers, presents us with the picture of the student of Bologna about to read for his doctor’s degree, when, one night as he sits at his books, the window of his room is dashed in, and the voice of one of his fellow-students, recently departed, warns him in terrible accents to renounce those academic honours, in the greedy pursuit of which he had lost his immortal soul. Peter, pierced to the soul by this voice from beyond the grave, abandons his intention of reading for honours, and presents himself the next morning at the gates of the Dominican Convent to implore admission among the friars. And it was to another conversion of this sort, somewhat less pictorial in its colouring, that we owe the foundation of a very remarkable religious institute, too closely associated with the history of education to be left unnoticed here.
Somewhere about the year 1360 there appeared at Paris a young Flemish student named Gerard, a native of the town of Deventer, whose success in every branch of study acquired him no mean fame in academic circles, and inflated him with a corresponding degree of vanity. He took his master’s degree in his eighteenth year, received several rich benefices, began a very pompous and expensive way of life, and at last removed to Cologne, less to study than to display and enjoy himself. There, however, he found his fate awaiting him. It was the precise period when a great spiritual reaction was going on in Rhenish Germany: not twenty years before Cologne had witnessed the conversion of the celebrated John Tauler, whose pride of learning had yielded to the simple word of a nameless unlettered layman, and who spent the rest of his life in preaching those doctrines of self-abnegation on which he built the edifice of the spiritual life. Ruysbroek, the greatest contemplative of his time, was still living in the Green Valley of the forest of Soignies, and training many a fervid soul in the mystic science which aimed at uniting man to God by utterly separating him from creatures. It was probably one of these disciples of Ruysbroek, a religious solitary, whose name, like that of Tauler’s “layman,” has not been preserved, who determined to undertake the conversion of the gay young canon, in whom, despite his vanity and his love of the world, he detected the promise of more excellent things.
The biographer of Gerard has told the story of his conversion briefly enough, and compressed the arguments of the orator into one brief sentence, Quid hic stas, vanis intentus? Alius homo fieri debes. And another man Gerard indeed became. He flung the world behind his back, and entered on a life of penance with no less ardour than that with which he had applied himself awhile before to the business of the schools. For three years he retired among the Carthusians and wholly disappeared from the world; and when he returned there was little of the old Gerard about him. He at once devoted himself to the work of preaching, and generally preached twice a day, his sermons being seldom less than three hours in length. But it was difficult to weary a German congregation of that enthusiastic period, and no complaints appear to have been made of Gerard’s prolixity. During his retirement he had placed himself under the direction of Ruysbroek, and appears to have caught much of his tone and spirit. He had made the Scriptures his only study, and these, expounded with simple eloquence from earnest lips, drew him crowds of hearers, “clergy and laity, men and women, little and great, learned and unlearned, lawyers and magistrates, bond and free, rich and poor, beggars and pilgrims.” He laid the axe to the root of the tree, and like St. John Baptist, called on all men to do worthy works of penance. In short, he gave the age what it wanted, and though he met with many contradictions, he also effected many practical reforms.
Gerard the Great, as he was called, soon reckoned a considerable number of disciples, whom he made it his chief object to ground in the spiritual life; and in spite of his renown as one of the most learned doctors of his time, he thoroughly inculcated the lesson of intellectual humility. Out of the ranks of his followers was gradually formed a sort of fraternity or congregation; and he had conceived the design of founding for their reception certain monasteries under the rule of the Canons Regular, in which purpose he was greatly encouraged by Ruysbroek. Gerard died before he was able to put his plans into execution, but they were carried out by his disciples, and specially by Master Florentius Radewyns, a canon of Utrecht, a former student at the university of Prague. The new religious assumed the title of “Brethren of the Common Life;” their mother-house was at Deventer, they lived like monks, though without at first taking the religious vows, and their employment was the correction and transcription of books, which formed their principal source of revenue. Gerard, in the rule he had drawn up for his own guidance, had prohibited all profane studies. He desired that his children should exclusively addict themselves 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.” In the rigorism of these views we detect the spirit of one who has tasted of a poisoned cup, and knows no other security than a rule of total abstinence. He specially forbids all gainful studies, which obscure and obliquify the human reason, and do not tend to God; and he roundly asserts that very few persons who follow the pursuits of law or medicine are ever found who live a just, honest, and quiet life. No doubt his principles were extreme, and it is some consolation to find that he admitted of certain dispensations. The wiser of the Gentile philosophers, such as Plato and Socrates, might, he admitted, be read with profit. Seneca also was to be tolerated, and with an amiable inconsistency we find him, even in his rule of life, slipping in, half unconsciously, a quotation from Virgil.
All this was exactly what might have been expected from a converted man of the world; but Florentius had gone through a different kind of experience, and one which made his views less austere and exclusive. He had passed the ordeal of a university career unscathed, and his biographer expends an entire chapter in bringing forward proofs why the name he bore was specially appropriate to one whose life from childhood had been so holy and unspotted. Not only was he himself a flower of all perfection, but he was also destined to make the houses he governed flower-beds from which spiritual bees were to suck the honey of wisdom; his brethren were to give out to a naughty world the sweet odour of virtue, according to that of the Spouse in the Canticles, “The flowers have appeared in our land.” Florentius was the model of a good scholar, kind to his equals, respectful to his superiors, a proficient in the liberal arts, but keeping his heart for the Divine law, which he loved and studied far more diligently than he did the book of the Gentiles.
Under his superiority the labours of the brethren were made to embrace a larger sphere of usefulness, and to include the education of youth. The prohibition against profane learning speedily disappeared, and the schools of Deventer attained high celebrity; and there, in 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerlein by name, was admitted under the roof of Florentius, becoming afterwards the biographer of his revered master, and the reputed author of the “Following of Christ.”
Not to enter into the vexed question whether he were indeed the author, or only the transcriber, of that first of uninspired books, it is yet satisfactory to know that the Thomas À Kempis, whom from infancy we have been used to revere, is not reduced by the investigations of ruthless critics to a mere mythical existence. He really lived, wrote, taught, and prayed. In the college of Deventer he studied grammar and plain-chant under Florentius, and tells us how, when present in choir with his schoolfellows, he loved stealthily to watch his master, because of his devout aspect, being cautious, however, that his pious curiosity was not perceived, inasmuch as the good rector could make himself feared as well as loved. He takes us into the school, too, and shows us the master setting copies, and praising the flexible fingers of a little disciple, whom, with the blessing of God, he hopes to form into a good writer. Or we enter the cell of the devout brother, Gerard of Zutphen, whose whole consolation lay in holy books, and who was liable to get so absorbed in the study of them, that a charitable brother had to come and warn him when the bell had rung for dinner. He was the librarian, and had a passing great care for his books; but as for himself and his corporeal wants, if superiors and companions had not seen to them better than he did himself, he would have fared but poorly. He thought so highly of the benefits to be derived from useful reading, that he lent his books to ecclesiastics out of doors, to win them from idle and frivolous amusements. “Books,” he would say, “preach better than we can do.” And therefore he held them in great reverence, read them lovingly, and copied them with the utmost diligence. Nor must we omit to mention the pious cook, John Ketel, the saint of the community, as all, by common consent, seem to have regarded him. Florentius knew his merit, and to increase it never gave him a civil word; but his humility and sweetness were proof against every trial. Or that devout clerk, Arnold Schoonhove, a schoolfellow of Thomas, who never played in the streets with other idle boys, and when he sat in school with them heeded not their childish pranks, but steadily wrote down the master’s words on paper, and got a chosen comrade (who was probably Thomas himself) to read over the lesson to him, or hear him repeat it. “It was God whom he chiefly sought in his studies,” says his friend, “and what he liked best was to get into a quiet corner and pray.” After seven years’ study among the Brethren of Common Life, Thomas took the habit of the Canons Regular in the monastery of St. Agnes, at Zwoll, where he lived till his ninety-second year, engaged in useful labours, transcribing and composing pious books, which earned for him the sobriquet of the Hammer of Hearts. He has left us memorials of his monastery and his college-life, written with a sweet simplicity which reminds us of Bede. Of his own life we know but little, yet that little has a character of its own. His world was his cell; he was never quite happy out of it, and if sometimes induced by his brethren to go abroad and take a little air, he would soon contrive to get away, with the transparent excuse, that “Some one was waiting for him in his chamber.” The others would smile, knowing well Who He was of Whom he spoke, even the Beloved, of Whom it is written that He stands at the door and knocks. In all the books that he transcribed he wrote his favourite motto, “Everywhere I sought for rest, but I found it nowhere save in a little corner, with a little book.” And a certain old and much-defaced picture was long preserved, which represented his effigies surrounded with the legend, which must here be added in its original phraseology:—“In omnibus requiem quÆsivi, sed non inveni, nisi in Hoexkins ende Boexkins.”
In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over Flanders, France, and Germany, and the schools they founded multiplied and flourished. They were introduced into the University of Paris by John Standonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who gave into their direction the College de Montaigu, of which he was the principal, and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, Mechlin, and Louvain. He drew up statutes for their use, which are supposed by Du Boulay to have furnished St. Ignatius with the first notions of his rule, an idea which receives some corroboration from the fact that the saint studied at the College de Montaigu during his residence at the University of Paris. Standonch himself received the habit of the Poor Clerks, as they were now often called, and had the satisfaction of seeing more than 300 good scholars issue from his schools, many of whom undertook the direction or reform of other academies. In 1430 the Institute numbered forty-five houses, and thirty years later the numbers were increased threefold. The Deventer brethren were far from being mere mystics and transcribers of books. The aim of their foundation was doubtless to supply a system of education which should revive something of the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated all the higher branches of learning, and their schools were among the first of those north of the Alps which introduced the revived study of classical literature. One of their most illustrious scholars was Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his legate, and Nicholas V. created him Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, in the Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his people, but, according to Tennemann, his love of mathematics led him into many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the views of the Neo-Platonists; he considered, moreover, that all human knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and attempted to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity on mathematical principles. He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of science, and was the first among moderns to revive the Pythagorean hypothesis of the motion of the earth round the sun. Cusanus had studied at most of the great universities, but held none of them in great esteem, for he professed a sovereign contempt for the scholastic philosophy which still held its ground in those academies. At his death he left his wealth to an hospital which he had founded in his native village, and to which he attached a magnificent library. Deventer could boast indeed of being the fruitful mother of great scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and Dringeberg, all of whom afterwards took part in the restoration of letters. The brethren, moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college. And in 1475, when Alexander Hegius became rector of the schools, he made the first bold experiment of printing Greek.
It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could fail of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. Whatever was fermenting in the minds of the people now found expression through the press, and Hallam notices “the incredible host of popular religious tracts poured forth” before the close of the fifteenth century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. The first censorship of printed books appears to have been established in 1480, by Berthold, Archbishop of Mentz, who explained his reasons for taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains of the abuse of the “divine art” of printing, whereby perverse men have turned that to the injury of mankind which was designed for their instruction. Specially he alludes to those unauthorised and faulty translations into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even the canons of the Church, wherein men of no learning or experience have taken on them to invent new words or use old ones in erroneous senses, in order to express the meaning of the original, “a thing most dangerous in the Sacred Scriptures.” He therefore forbids any such translations to be thenceforward published without being approved by four doctors, under pain of excommunication, desiring that the art which was first of all discovered in his city, “not without divine aid,” should be maintained in all its honour.
This mandate was only directed against the faulty translations of the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate and its various translations. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this appeared, with the formal approbation of the university. The very first book printed by Gutenburg and Fust in 1453, was the Latin Bible, and among the twenty-four books printed in Germany before the year 1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible. Translations of the Holy Scriptures into various modern tongues were among the very first books issued from the press; as the Bohemian version in 1475, Italian in 1471—which ran through eleven editions before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the French in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore fallen into a strange error, when they represent him as the first to unlock the Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the German Bible alone had been printed and published before his time.
It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day be the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but, after the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of his Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as Desiderius Erasmus. Like Thomas À Kempis, he passed from the schools of Deventer to the cloisters of the Canons Regular, a step which, he assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his own assent. A happy accident enabled him to visit Rome in the suite of the Bishop of Cambray and once released from the wearisome discipline of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent the rest of his life wandering from one to another of the capitals of France, Italy, and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all the literary and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by turns, indisputably the literary CoryphÆus of his age, but penetrated through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It was an age fruitful in pedants and humanists, whose destiny it was to help on the revolution in faith by a revolution in letters. Schools and professors multiplied throughout Germany. At the very time when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his old comrades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the schools of Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted himself strenuously in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintending his classes occupied spare moments in correcting the text of almost every Latin work which at that time issued from the press, and in making deadly war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of the old-fashioned school-books and his innovations on time-honoured abuses raised against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy ensued in which Langius won so much success as enabled him to affix the stigma of barbarism on his opponents. His friend and namesake Rodolph Agricola, who had studied at Ferrara under Theodore of Gaza, and was held by his admirers superior in erudition to Politian himself, at this time presided over the school of Groningen. Besides his skill in the learned tongues he was a poet, a painter, a musician, an orator, and a philosopher. Such a multitude of accomplishments won him an invitation to the court of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where a certain learned academy had been founded, called the Rhenish Society, for the encouragement of Greek and Hebrew literature, the members of which, says Hallam, “did not scorn to relax their minds with feasting and dancing, not forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup.” This is a polite way of rendering a very ugly passage, which in the original tells us plainly that the Rhenish academicians were addicted to excessive inebriety and other disgraceful vices. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that Agricola, who died three years after his removal to Heidelberg, received on his death-bed the habit of those very friars whom, during life, he and his friend Langius had done their best to hold up to popular contempt.
About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 1458, Gregory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor. Reuchlin visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides in the presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek exclaimed, in a transport of delight (and possibly of surprise, at such an achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), “Our banished Greece has flown beyond the Alps!” Reuchlin was a Hebrew scholar, a circumstance which, in the end, proved his ruin; for, embracing the Cabalistic philosophy, he abandoned classics and good sense in the pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange infatuation he had many companions. Not a few of those who had shown themselves foremost in deriding the scholastic philosophy, ended by substituting in its place either open scepticism or the philosophy of magic. A few years later, the wild theories of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Jerome Cardan, found eager adherents among those who conceived it a proof of good scholarship to despise St. Thomas as a Goth. Reuchlin, whilst pouring forth his bitter satires against the old theologians, was printing his treatise on the Cabala, entitled De Verbo Mirifico, wherein magic is declared to be the perfection of philosophy, which work was formally condemned at Rome. However, all the French savants of the Renaissance were not Cabalists, nor did all, when they introduced the study of Greek, forget that it was the language of the Gospels. The real restoration of Greek studies in France must be ascribed to BudÆus, who made up, by the piety and indefatigable studies of his later years, for a youth of wild irregularity. He had studied under Lascaris, and though he had reached a very mature age before he devoted himself to letters, he soon became as familiar with the learned tongues as with his native idiom. His treatise on the Ancient Money first rendered his name famous, and secured him the friendship of Francis I. He profited from the favour shown him by that monarch, to solicit from him the foundation of the Royal College of France, for the cultivation of the three learned tongues, and thus fairly introduced the “Cecropian Muse” into the University of Paris. If we may credit the authority of a grave rector of that university, this momentous change was advantageous, not merely to the minds but also to the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we know, imposed upon himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious means of taming the passions; and Rollin affirms that many who, in former years, had been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when once they began to read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies to the winds, and led the simple and austere manner of life that becomes a scholar. He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of Henry de Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life of those days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour imposed on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century:—“My father,” he says, “gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till I should be old enough to govern myself. With him and my brother, John James de Mesmes, I was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was put into the third class and I afterwards spent almost a year in the first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to the college: the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of the boys, and the other was the school discipline, by which he trusted that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been shown us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those eighteen months I passed at college were of great service to me. I learnt to recite, to dispute, and to speak in public; and I became acquainted with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. I learned, moreover, the frugality of the scholar’s life, and how to portion out my day to advantage; so that, by the time I left, I had repeated, in public, abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek verses, which I had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and I could repeat Homer from one end to the other. I was thus well received by the chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor introduced me. In 1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and brother, to study law under an old grey-haired professor, who had travelled half over the world. There we remained for three years, studying severely, and under such strict rules as I fancy few persons nowadays would care to comply with. We rose at four, and, having said our prayers, went to lectures at five, with our great books under our arms, and our inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We attended all the lectures until ten o’clock, without intermission; then we went to dinner, after having hastily collated during half an hour what our master had written down. After dinner, by way of diversion, we read Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Tully, Virgil, and Horace. At one we were at our studies again, returning home at five to repeat and turn to the places quoted in our books till past six. Then came supper, after which we read some Greek or Latin author. On feast days we heard mass and vespers, and the rest of the day we were allowed a little music and walking. Sometimes we went to see our friends, who invited us much oftener than we were permitted to go. The rest of the day we spent in reading, and we generally had with us some learned men of that time.”
We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious training of Henry’s early life was the means of forming a manly and Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the biographer of BudÆus has left us of the domestic life of that great man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world of letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits, which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners, but a certain genuine sentiment of humility.[314] His secretary and constant fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found out passages in his books of reference, copied his papers, and withal did not forget his domestic comfort. BudÆus needed some such good angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars who are more familiar with the Latin As than with the value of louis d’ors. His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the doings of the Greeks and Romans he could not always call home his absent thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in many respects so amiable, BudÆus should have permitted his love of Greek to lead him to take part with the Humanists in the ferocious onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediÆval learning. It was surely possible to revive the study of Homer and Cicero with rejecting the philosophy of St. Thomas, nor did there seem any reason why the lovers of polite literature should seek to establish their fame as scholars by savage and unseemly pasquinades on their literary rivals. And here it may be remarked that the title of Humanists, applied to the rising school, was one of their own choosing. By it they intended at one and the same time to indicate themselves as the only cultivators of “humane” letters, and to imply that the professors of the old school were barbarians. They were not content with advocating good Latin, and reviving the study of Greek; no one could join their camp who was not ready to rail at monks and schoolmen as offensive idiots. The former, in the choice vocabulary of Luther, were “locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice,” the latter, in the more polished phraseology of BudÆus, “prating sophists,” and “divines of the Sorbonian Lake,” “Monks,” says Erasmus (himself an apostate canon[315]), “are only acceptable to silly women, bigots, and blockheads.” The Dominicans had the audacity to protest against the freedoms he had taken with the Latin Vulgate, and to complain of his version as that of a poet and orator rather than of a divine. “Most men who know anything of the value of a poet,” replies Erasmus, “think you to be swine rather than men, when they hear your stupid raving. Poetry is so little known to you, that you cannot even spell its name;[316] but let me tell you, it would be easier to cut two Thomists out of a log of wood, than one tolerable orator.” No matter what were a man’s talents, or how reasonable were his arguments, the moment he opened his mouth in opposition to these writers, he was placarded as a dunce. Erasmus, in his new Version of the Greek Testament, had given just cause of complaint by his use of a phraseology more elegant than theological. A certain Franciscan friar ventured to object in particular to his rendering of the Magnificat, whereupon Erasmus vented his spleen in a Colloquy, and branded the critic as “a pig and a donkey; more of a donkey than all donkeys put together;” and proceeded to justify his translation by quoting the comedies of Terence. Standish, Bishop of St. Asaph, took exception to another blot in the new version, the substitution, namely, of the word Sermo, for that of Verbum, in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel; and Erasmus and his friends considered that they sufficiently vindicated their good Latin by nicknaming the objector, the Bishop of St. Ass. In the same style of wit, Vincent the Dominican was Bucentum the ox-driver, and the Carmelites were commonly designated the Camelites. “I have hopes of CochlÆus,” writes Luther, speaking of some of his adversaries, “he is only an idiot; as for the other two, they belong to the devil.” This was the ordinary style of the humanist controversialists; their puns and sarcasms being, in most cases, accompanied with a shower of mud.
With these, however, we need not more particularly concern ourselves, but turn our glance on Louvain, where, in the early part of the century, a new university had arisen, under Duke John of Brabant, which received its first diploma from Pope Martin V. in 1425, the theological faculty being erected six years later by Eugenius IV. The latter Pontiff had the satisfaction of receiving the firmest support from the Louvain doctors during the troublous times of the Council of Basle; and during the following century Louvain continued to be not merely the chief seat of learning in Flanders, but one of the soundest nurseries of the faith. She held stoutly to scholasticism, and was distinguished by her resolute opposition to the Lutheran heretics; yet it was in vain that her enemies attempted to charge her with retrogression, for even Erasmus owns in his letters, that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris.
It is not difficult to explain the hostility which the Louvain scholars had to encounter on the part of the partisans of the new learning. Louvain, from the first, consecrated herself to the defence of the scholastic theology. Immediately on the erection of the theological faculty in 1431, the Dominicans arrived at Louvain, and opened a school whence they sent forth fourteen doctors in the space of twenty years. In 1447 they were formally admitted to all the rights of the university, and obtained chairs of theology, and the other privileges formerly granted to them at Paris and Bologna. Their brethren were frequently aggregated to the college of the strict faculty, and one of their order was always a member of the council strictÆ facultatis. From this period the studium generale of the order at Louvain ranked as one of the highest character in the order, and the influence of the Dominican doctors made itself powerfully felt throughout the whole university. St. Thomas of Aquin was the doctor, par excellence, of the Louvain schools, and in 1637 was chosen by the faculty of theology their perpetual patron and protector. It is needless to say that this determined Thomism was not more agreeable to the humanists and their partisans than the Scotism of the Paris theologians; and they sought, with very poor success, to squib down the university by representing it as nothing but a nest of friars.
The University of Louvain enjoyed some advantages in which the more ancient academies had been wanting. Not having grown up out of accidental circumstances, like so many of her elder sisters, but having been begun at a time when the principles necessary for governing such institutions had been made manifest by long experience, her founders were careful to provide her, from the first, with a body of statutes sagaciously drawn up, so as to ensure the preservation of regular discipline; and a well-organised collegiate system protected the students from those disorders which had disgraced the beginnings of Paris and Oxford.
In course of time separate schools and colleges were established for the different faculties, one for medicine, eight for arts, and eight for mixed studies. Among the latter was Standonch’s college of poor scholars, and the celebrated Collegium Trilingue founded in 1516 by Jerome Busleiden, the friend of More and Erasmus, for the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The idea of this academy had been suggested to the founder by a visit to Alcala, where Cardinal Ximenes was then completing the establishment of his university. Hallam tells us that its foundation was fiercely opposed by the monks and friars, “those unbeaten enemies of learning,” and it is true that the old professors did at first regard the new institution with some jealousy. They had been used to write and speak mediÆval Latin, and grumbled sorely when required to turn Ciceronians. The college happened to be first opened in the fish-market, and hence arose the favourite bon-mot of the Louvain Conservatives, “We do not talk Fish-Market Latin.” In time, however, the fish-market Latin established its supremacy, and Louvain grew proud of her classical professors, such as Louis Vives and Conrad Goclen. The colleges gradually multiplied in number, and even at the present day the city is filled with splendid buildings, all of which owe their existence to the university of which they once formed part.
It was at Louvain that Pope Adrian VI. received his education, and from a poor scholar rose to fill the posts of professor and rector of the university. The son of a boat-builder of Utrecht, he was admitted among a certain number of poor boys whom the university bound itself to educate gratuitously, and endured rather more than his share of the hardships and privations to which scholars of that class are usually exposed. Seldom able to provide himself with the luxury of a lamp or a candle, he was accustomed to prosecute his studies after dark in the porch of some church, where a lamp was then usually suspended, or at the street corner, which supplied him with a feeble light. However, he seems sometimes to have been able to procure himself a better sort of light, for we read that, one cold winter’s night, Margaret, the widow of Duke Charles of Burgundy, then governess of the Netherlands, remarked a tiny ray that issued from one of the college windows at a very late hour, and bidding her chamberlain find out which of the students sat up so late in such intense cold, she was told that it was only “little Florentius” over his books. With a woman’s instinct of compassion, she sent him the next day three hundred florins for the purchase of books and firewood.
When he was afterwards raised to the head of the university, he exhibited the same zeal for the promotion of ecclesiastical discipline which afterwards won him so much unpopularity from his Roman subjects. In spite of their contemptuous strictures on his supposed barbarism, Adrian was revered in Louvain as a generous patron of letters. He erected and endowed one of the most magnificent colleges of which Louvain could boast, and in it was deposited the autograph copy of his works, which is still preserved in the great seminary of Mechlin.
A considerable number of other new universities sprang up in Germany about the beginning of the sixteenth century, all more or less stamped with the literary character of the age. Of these the most famous was Wittemberg, marked out by an evil destiny as the cradle of the Lutheran apostasy. It was founded in 1502 by Frederic, elector of Saxony, who commissioned Staupitz, the provincial of the Augustinians, to seek out men of learning and ability to fill its vacant professorships. Luther was invited hither in 1508 to teach the Aristotelian logic, and, four years later, after his return from Rome, received his doctor’s cap, and took the customary oaths to defend the faith against heresy to the last drop of his blood. In 1516 the professor was to be found waging open war against the philosophy he was engaged to teach, and drawing up ninety-nine theses against the scholastic theology, in which is clearly laid down the fundamental dogma of Lutheranism—the denial of free-will. They were published many years later with a preface by Melancthon, declaring them to contain the veritable sum of the reformed religion, which had thus been reduced to system a year before that quarrel with Tetzel, usually represented as the origin of Luther’s revolt.
Melancthon was given the chair of Greek in 1518, on the recommendation of his master Reuchlin, and was introduced to Wittemberg at the moment when Luther’s quarrel had been taken up by the students and professors. In him Luther gained a disciple whose learning and natural moderation of character were worthy of better things than to become the author of the Confession of Augsburg, and the colleague of Bucer. That horrible apostate, a renegade Dominican, who condescended to every one of the rival schools of heresy, provided only he was suffered to enjoy the license which first tempted him to abjure the faith, filled for twenty years the theological chair at Strasburg. Everywhere the reins of power had fallen into the hands of the pedagogues, and the Lutheran army was to be seen officered by humanists and university professors. The facilities offered by the numerous academies that had sprung up since the beginning of the century encouraged a rage for learning among all classes, and many a poor artisan’s son, like Wolfgang Musculus, or the notorious Henry Bullinger, scraped together a scanty pittance by street singing, which they afterwards spent in procuring the means of study at one or other of the universities. Musculus, indeed, found charitable patrons in the person of some Benedictine monks, who educated him, and gave him the habit; but he soon abandoned the cloister, and after a wild adventurous life, during which we find him working as a mason, and, during the scanty moments he could snatch from his toil, studying the Hebrew grammar, he became “Minister” of Strasburg, and theological professor in the Protestant University of Berne. About the same time the Greek professorship of Calvin’s college at Geneva was filled with another of these strange itinerant scholars, Sebastian Castillon, a native of Dauphiny, who studied the Oriental tongues in the early morning hours, before he went to his day labour in the fields. He afterwards quarrelled with Calvin, who accused him of theft, and went to teach Greek and Hebrew at Basle. Here he produced a Latin and French version of the Scriptures, and endeavoured to render the sacred books into the classical diction of profane authors. We can scarcely form any correct idea of the period of the Reformation without a glimpse at men of this stamp, who then swarmed in every part of Germany; restless, self-sufficient, often more than half self-taught, their minds untrained with the healthy discipline of the schools, disposed to run after every novelty, and to overvalue themselves and their attainments, they inevitably fell into the extravagances to which vanity commonly betrays her victims.
From this class of men the German professorships were chiefly recruited, and little foresight was needed to anticipate the consequences which must ensue when the work of education had passed into such hands. The state of the German universities during the century subsequent to the Lutheran revolution, has been described by the Protestant historian Menzel, from whom Rohrbacher has quoted some remarkable passages. “The colleges where the future ministers of the Lutheran religion spent six or seven years, were the abode of a ferocity and licentiousness from which our moral sensibility shrinks aghast. In the German schools and universities, the elder students obliged new-comers to go about in ragged garments, filled their mouths with ‘soup’ made of mud and broken bits of earthenware, compelled them to clean their boots and shoes, and by way of salary, to imitate the barking of dogs and the mewing of cats, and to lick up the filth from under the table. In vain did the princes endeavour to banish these savage customs; they held their ground in spite of ordinances and edicts.”[317] At the University of Jena, the younger students were robbed of their money, their clothes, and their books by their elder companions, and compelled to discharge the most disgraceful services. Those who had received what was called “absolution,” treated new-comers in the same way; and these outrages were often committed in the streets, and even in the churches during the preaching, when the poor victims were pulled and knocked about, and otherwise maltreated by their persecutors. And that no one might escape, a particular part of the church was devoted to the reception of “freshmen,” who were installed there with these edifying ceremonies. Hence, during the whole time of divine service, one incessant clamour went on, made up of the trampling, the cries, the murmurs, and coarse laughter of the combatants.
If such were the manners of the future pastors, those of their flocks may be imagined. Any one who tried to lead a good life, observes Menzel, was stigmatised as an enthusiast, a Schwenkfeldian, an Anabaptist, and a hypocrite; Luther’s dogma of justification by faith only having brought good works into actual discredit. It was dangerous at that time for a preacher to exhort his people to keep the commandments—as if they were able to do so—it was quite sufficient to render him a suspected person.[318] But we have no heart to dwell on this subject, or to realise the degradation of those old German dioceses and schools, the names of which are so linked in our hearts with the memory of St. Boniface and St. Wilibald, St. Bernward and St. Anscharius. So we will turn our back on Germany and seek on Catholic soil for some more consoling spectacle. We shall hardly find it in France: there, indeed, a revival of letters is going on, under the splendid patronage of Francis I.; and BudÆus, the prodigy of his country, as Erasmus called him, is writing his learned treatise on Ancient Money, and persuading the king to found the College Royal. There perhaps the greatest scholar of his time, though known to posterity chiefly by his artistic fame, Leonardo da Vinci, is expiring at Fontainebleau in the arms of the king. But the French Renaissance school is mostly remarkable for its poets, by whom, indeed, the revival of letters was first set on foot. Much edification was not to be anticipated from a movement that reckoned as its originator Villon, whose verses were as infamous as his life, and who found a worthy successor in Clement Marot. The French kings, who by their Pragmatic Sanctions[319] had condemned the Papal provision of benefices as a crying abuse, used their royal patronage of the same as a convenient mode of rewarding Court poets. Thus Octavien de St. Gelais, the translator of Terence, obtained the bishopric of AngoulÊme from Charles VIII.; and his son, Melin de St. Gelais, surnamed the French Ovid, was rewarded by Francis I. for his “Epigrams” with an abbey. Ronsard, formally proclaimed “the Poet of France, par excellence,” who was born on the same day as the defeat of Pavia—as though (to make use of the king’s words) “Heaven would make up to France, by his birth, for the disgrace sustained by her arms”—who was the literary idol of his time, had statues erected to his honour, and silver images of the goddess Minerva presented to him by learned academies, to whom Elizabeth sent a rich diamond, and Mary Stuart presented a gilded model of Parnassus—the most appropriate present that could be offered to the new Apollo—Ronsard, the vainest of men, as he might well be, for assuredly he was the most flattered, died, literally overwhelmed under the weight of his laurels and his priories. I will not attempt the enumeration of his benefices, and perhaps he would hardly have undertaken the task himself, for the prince of poets enjoyed the revenues of half the royal monasteries of France. It would be unbecoming to notice any writer of less renown, after so very illustrious a personage, and the bare name of Rabelais will probably content most readers. These were the stars of the French Renaissance, well worthy of the monarch who patronised them, and the Court over which he presided. Warton has thought good to praise the enlightened wisdom which induced this prince to purge his Court from the monkish precision of old-fashioned times, and enliven it with a larger admixture of ladies’ society. There was certainly not much to be complained of on the score of precision in the coteries of Fontainebleau; yet it is curious that the fair dames who graced the royal circle were chosen by the grim disciples of Calvin as the likeliest agents for disseminating their views. The ladies of the Court of Francis I. were the first Huguenot apostles, and it was in this school that Anne Boleyn, in her quality of maid of honour to Queen Claude, acquired, together with her inimitable skill in dancing, that “gospel light” which, the poet informs us, first shone on England and her king “from Boleyn’s eyes.”
Let us rather direct our steps across the Pyrenees, and watch the erection of a Catholic university on the orthodox soil of Spain. Up to this time the education which prevailed in the peninsula appears to have been thoroughly of the old school. The Spanish universities had indeed some peculiarities arising from their proximity to the Moorish schools, and appear to have cultivated the geometrical sciences and the Eastern tongues more generally than was elsewhere the practice. But the prevailing tone was scholastic and ecclesiastical. The monasteries still maintained those public schools, which served as feeders to the universities, and in these a discipline was kept up differing very little from that of Fulda and St Gall. At Montserrat, peasants and nobles were received together, and each wore a little black habit, and, in church, a surplice. They sang every day at the Mass, and recited the Office of Our Lady, eating always in the refectory of the brethren, and sleeping in a common dormitory. Every month they went to confession, as well as on all festivals, and their studies were of the monastic stamp, with plenty of Latin and plain chant, and also instrumental music. A number of the bravest Spanish knights had their education in these monastery schools, and one of them, John of Cardonna, who commanded the galleys of Sicily, and relieved Malta when besieged by the Turks, chose as his patroness, in memory of his school days, Our Lady of Montserrat, and bore her banner into battle. He used to call himself Our Lady’s page, and said he valued the privilege of having been brought up in her house more than his rank as admiral.
But these are old-fashioned memories, and must give place to something more in accordance with the requirements of the age. The Renaissance was making its way even into the Spanish schools, and the literary movement had been fortunate enough to find a nursing mother in the person of Isabella the Catholic. German printers and Italian professors were invited into her kingdom, and Spanish students sent to gather up the treasures of learning in foreign academies. Among these was Antonio de Lebrija, whom Hallam calls the restorer of classical literature in Spain. Italian masters directed the education of the royal children, and from them the Princess Catherine, doomed to be the hapless Queen of Henry VIII., received those learned tastes which won the admiration of Erasmus. A Palatine school was attached to the Court, in imitation of that of Charlemagne, and was placed under the direction of Peter Martyr,[320] whose letters are filled with accounts of the noble pupils who thronged his school, won from frivolous pastimes by the charm of letters. In 1488 he appeared at Salamanca to deliver lectures on Juvenal, and writes word that the audience who came to hear him so blocked up the entrance to the hall, that he had to be carried to his place over the heads of the students, “like a victor in the Olympic games.” The rage for learning went on at such a pace that the proudest grandees of Castile thought it not beneath them to ascend the professor’s chair, and even noble ladies delivered lectures on classical learning in the halls of universities.[321] The queen’s noble encouragement of learning had been fostered by her confessor, F. Francis Ximenes; and when, in 1495, the Franciscan friar became Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, one of his first thoughts was the erection of a model university, to which he resolved to devote the immense revenues of his see.
It has been said that seats of learning require the accessories of a fine air, and even the charms of natural scenery; and we might quote one of the most exquisite pieces of word-painting to be found in any language,[322] which is written to show the special gift enjoyed by Athens, rendering her worthy to be the capital of mind. It was the clear elastic air of Attica which communicated something of its own sunniness and elasticity to the intellect of her citizens, just as it imparted a golden colouring even to the marble dug out of that favoured soil. So it had been with Paris, the Athens of the Middle Ages, where students from the foggy shores of Britain conceived themselves endowed with some new faculty when relieved from the oppression of their native atmosphere. And even Louvain, though less favoured than these by nature, had been chosen in preference to other Flemish cities, chiefly on account of her purer air and her pleasant entourage of copses and meadows, with their abundant store of “corn, apples, sheep, oxen, and chirping birds.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that Ximenes, when seeking the fittest spot in which to plant his academy, took very gravely into consideration the question of scenery and climate. The clear atmosphere of Alcala, and the tranquil landscapes on the banks of the Henares, so soothing to the meditative eye, had their share in determining him to fix his foundation at the ancient Complutum. In its grammar schools he had made his early studies, and old boyish recollections attached him to the spot, the ancient traditions of which rendered it dear to Christian scholars.[323] There, then, in the year 1500 he laid the foundation of his first college, which he dedicated to his saintly predecessor, St. Ildefonsus. This was intended to be the head college of the university, to which all the others were in a manner to be subordinate. It consisted of thirty-three professors, in honour of the years of our Lord’s earthly life, and twelve priests or chaplains, in honour of the twelve Apostles. These latter had nothing to do with the education of the students, but were to recite the divine office in common, and carry out the rites of the Church with becoming solemnity. The professors, who were all to be theologians, were distinguished by their dress, a long red robe, which, being flung over their left shoulder, hung to the ground in large and graceful folds. The colleges of St. Balbina and St. Catherine were intended for students in philosophy, each containing forty-eight students. There was a small college, dedicated to Our Lady, for poor students in theology and medicine; and a larger one, used for the reception of the sick. The college of SS. Peter and Paul was exclusively for Franciscan scholars, corresponding in character to the monastic colleges or houses of study at Oxford. There were also two classical schools for young students, forty-two of whom received a free education for three years; these were severally dedicated to St. Eugenius and St. Isidore. And lastly, there was the college of St. Jerome for the three languages, in which ten scholars studied Latin, ten Greek, and ten Hebrew; a foundation which, as we have seen, formed the model on which the Collegium Trilingue at Louvain was afterwards established.[324] I will say nothing of the libraries, refectories, and chapels, all of which were finished with great splendour; and the whole city was restored and beautified, so as to make it more worthy of being the site of so magnificent a seat of learning. Other houses of study soon sprang up in connection with the different religious orders, all of which were anxious to secure for their members advantages which were nowhere else to be found in such abundance. For though Ximenes was a mighty builder, and thereby exposed himself to many bad puns from Court wits, who made much of the “edification” he gave when he superintended his workmen rule in hand, he certainly did not neglect the spiritual for the material building. Eight years after he had solemnly laid the foundation stone of his first college, the university was opened, and a brilliant staff of professors—in all forty-two in number—were gathered round the Cardinal primate to receive their respective offices from his hands. The government of the university was vested in the hands of a chancellor, rector, and senate. The system of graduation was copied from that of Paris, except that the theological degrees were given a pre-eminence over the others, and made both more honourable and more difficult to attain. The professorships were distributed as follows:—Six for theology; six for canon law; four for medicine; one, anatomy; one, surgery; nine, philosophy; one, mathematics; four, Greek and Hebrew; four, rhetoric; and six, grammar. There was no chair of civil law, as this faculty was excellently taught at the other Spanish universities, and Ximenes had no liking for it, and did not wish to introduce it at Alcala, probably fearing lest it might prevent that predominance of the theological faculty which he desired should be the characteristic of his university. Provision was made for the support of the aged and infirm professors; and on this point the Cardinal consulted his former colleague in the regency of Castile, Adrian of Utrecht, and established similar regulations to those which existed at Louvain. The system of studies and rule of college discipline were drawn up by himself, the former being in a great degree borrowed from that established at Paris. Frequent disputations and examinations quickened the application of the students, and at these Ximenes loved to preside, and encourage the emulation of his scholars with his presence. In the choice of his professors he considered nothing but the merit of the candidates, and set at nought all the narrowness of mere nationality. Spain was by this time, however, able to furnish humanists and philologists equal to those of Italy or Germany. And most of the first professors were of native birth. Among them was Antonio de Lebrija, and though he afterwards accepted a chair at Salamanca, yet he finally returned to Alcala, and rendered invaluable aid to Ximenes in the philological labours in which he was about to engage, and which shed an additional lustre over the new academy.
Ximenes had always manifested a peculiar predilection for the cultivation of Biblical literature. In his earlier years his love of the Holy Scriptures had induced him to devote himself to the study of Hebrew and Chaldaic, and he had often been heard to say that he would willingly give up all his knowledge of jurisprudence to be able to explain a single verse of the Bible. He considered a thorough revival of biblical studies the surest means of defeating the new heretics, and in the midst of Court engagements and political toils, he at length conceived the plan of his great Polyglot Bible, in which the sacred text was to appear in the four learned languages, after the most correct versions that could be obtained. This great work, which was to serve as the model for all subsequent attempts of a similar kind, was no sooner designed than he set about its execution, and secured the co-operation of a number of skilful scholars, fixing on Alcala as the scene of their labours. Immense sums were expended in obtaining Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic manuscripts; and in his dedication, Ximenes acknowledges the invaluable assistance which he received from Pope Leo X. The plan was exactly one sure to engage the sympathies of that generous Pontiff, who accordingly placed at his command all the treasures of the Vatican Library. The costly work when complete presented the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek version of the Septuagint, the Latin version of St. Jerome, and the Chaldaic paraphrase of the Pentateuch, together with certain letters, prefaces, and dissertations to assist the study of the Sacred Books. The work was commenced in 1502, and the last volume was published in 1517. The same energy which had succeeded, in the brief space of eight years, in raising a university which received the title of “the eighth wonder of the world,” was able, in fifteen years, to bring to a happy conclusion a literary undertaking which might well have occupied thrice that space of time. Ximenes, who felt his end approaching, desired to leave all his great works complete, and urged on his scholars with frequent admonitions on the shortness of human life. If they lost him as their patron, or if he were to lose their labours, the whole design might fall to the ground. On the 10th of July 1517 the last sheet of the great Complutensian Polyglot was printed, and the young son of the printer, Bocario, putting on his holiday garments, ran at once to present it to the Cardinal. Ximenes received it with a solemn emotion of gratitude and joy. “I thank Thee, O Lord Christ,” he said, “that Thou hast brought this work to a desired end.” It was as though he had been permitted this as his last earthly consolation, for four months later he closed his great and useful career, being in the eighty-second year of his age.
Louvain and Alcala, the two great Catholic creations of the age of the Renaissance, both fell under the hammer of Revolution. The memory of Ximenes has not prevailed to preserve his university from destruction at the hands of the Spanish Progressistas, and we can but hope that its restoration may be reserved for another generation. That of Louvain has been witnessed even in our own time. Swept away in 1797 by the decree of the French Republic, which at the same time suppressed all the great ecclesiastical seminaries, it was not restored by the Nassau sovereigns who, in 1814, became masters of the Catholic Netherlands. William of Holland, so far from showing his Catholic subjects any larger degree of favour than they had enjoyed under French rule, did his best to render their position worse than it had been under the Revolution. He put down all the little seminaries, and proposed to supply the place of the ancient university of Louvain by a grand royal philosophical college, through which all ecclesiastical students were to be compelled to pass before being received into the great seminaries. This was in the June of 1825; in the January of 1830 the determined resistance of the Belgian Catholics obliged him to suppress his college, which had proved a total failure. The August following witnessed the expulsion of his dynasty and the establishment of Belgian independence; events which were followed in 1834 by the erection at Louvain of a new university, in virtue of an Apostolic brief of Pope Gregory XVI.
Planted on the Belgian soil, which has so long and so successfully resisted the inroads of heresy, and which appears destined in our own day to become the battle-ground of a yet deadlier struggle with open unbelief, the Catholic university of Louvain has already merited to be declared by illustrious lips “the glory of Belgium and of the Church.” She has been presented by the Sovereign Pontiff to the Catholics of these islands, as the model on which our own academic restorations may fitly be formed; and at this very moment her example is understood to have encouraged the prelates of Germany to attempt a similar foundation in that land. May their generous efforts be crowned with ample success, and may such institutions, wherein Faith and Science will never be divorced, multiply in the Church, supported by the prayers and good wishes of every Catholic heart.
