Middle Ages and Renaissance 237
over to the Jesuits. The Protestant Reformation had the
effect of a world war in accelerating the growth of National-
ism, at the expense of the local, communal, and corporate
liberties of the middle ages.
Martin Luther’s prince, the Elector Frederick of Saxony,
set an example by placing the University of Wittenberg un-
der a state commission that put all its property in escrow,
paid the professors’ salaries, expelled those who would not
accept the Reformation, and censored their activities. Of
course the medieval universities had never enjoyed complete
academic freedom—the spectre of the inquisition was always
there as a warning against too radical speculation; but in
practice, medieval scholars were financially secure, and in-
tellectually free. With the Reformation began the unhappy
practice of requiring professors and students to subscribe
to articles of faith and to take oaths of allegiance; a practice
from which our earliest colonial colleges emancipated them-
selves, but which various pressure-groups representing the
senile timidity, the super-nationalism, and the nascent fascism
of our own day, are attempting to impose on American
schools and universities. Once the religious schism had
started, Catholic universities followed the same policy as
Protestant universities, each attempting to secure by oaths
complete religious uniformity, and in some cases complete
national homogeneity, of their professoriat.
The Protestant Reformation was an enemy to certain
aspects of the Renaissance ; others it eagerly embraced. The
emphasis of the Lutherans on faith alone, their distrust of
human reason, and the Calvinist insistence on human de-
pravity, made them hostile to the humanist glorification of
“natural man.” But, by the same token, their exaltation of
the Sacred Scriptures over Church tradition as the consti-
tution of the Christian Religion, made them pursue Greek