mass at the beginning of every term; each faculty was under the protection of a patron Saint-St George presiding over the faculty of Philosophy; the professors bad to swear to teach nothing opposed to the doctrine of the Roman Church; and care was taken to prevent the beginnings and spread of heretical opinions.
The University teaching was medieval in all essentials, but represented the new, as Cologne championed the old, scholasticism. Gabriel Biel, the disciple of William of Occam, had been one of the teachers. Humanism of the German type, which was very different from the Italian, had found an entrance as early as 1460 in the persons of Peter Luder and Jacob Publicius, and in the following years there was a goo$. deal of intercourse between Erfurt scholars and Italian humanists. Maternus Pistoris was lecturing on the Latin classics in 1494 and had for his colleague Nicholas Marschalk, who was the first to establish a printing-press in Germany for Greek books. They had speedily gathered round them a band of enthusiastic scholars, Johannes Jäger of Drontheim (Crotus Rubeanus), Henry and Peter Eberach, George Burkhardt of Spelt (Spalatinus), John Lange, and others known afterwards in the earlier stages of the Reformation movement. Conrad Mutti (Mutianus Rufus), who had studied in Italy, was one of the leaders; Eoban of Hesse (Helius Eoban us Hessus), perhaps the most gifted of them all, joined the circle in 1494. These humanists did not attack openly the older course of study at Erfurt. They wrote complimentary Latin poems in praise of their older colleagues; they formed a select circle who were called the "Poets"; they affected to correspond with each other after the manner of the ancients. In private, Mutianus and Crotus seem to have delighted to reveal their eclectic theosophy to a band of half-terrified, half-admiring youths; to say that there was but one God, who had the various names of Jupiter, Mars, Hercules, Jesus, and one Goddess, who was called Juno, Diana, or Mary as the worshippers chose; but these things were not supposed to be for the public ear.
The University of Erfurt in the beginning of the sixteenth century was the recognised meeting-place of the two opposing tendencies of scholasticism and humanism; and it was also, perhaps in a higher degree than any other university, a place where the student was exposed to many other diverse influences. The system of biblical exegesis first stimulated by Nicholas de Lyra, which cannot be classed under scholasticism or humanism, had found a succession of able teachers in Erfurt. The strong anti-clerical teaching of Jacob of Jüterbogk and of John Wessel, who had taught in Erfurt for fifteen years, had left its mark on the University and was not forgotten. Low mutterings of the Hussite propaganda itself, Luther tells us, could be heard from time to time, urging a strange Christian socialism which was at the same time thoroughly anti-clerical. Then over against all this opportunities were occasionally given, at the visits of papal Legates, for seeing the
