This decision was carried out, and whole libraries with numerous precious manuscripts of Latin and Greek authors perished in the flames. Popes, bishops, and councils during the Middle Ages, had enforced the obligation of establishing schools throughout Christendom. The vandalism of some Reformers destroyed innumerable monasteries and with them schools without number. The funds for the support of these schools had been accumulated by the piety, zeal and liberality of previous ages.
No one is more responsible for this sad change than Luther himself. If, with the aid of the Holy Ghost, Scripture could be interpreted by "a miller's maid and a boy of nine years better than by all the popes and cardinals," – these are Luther's words, – of what value could human learning be in religion? Nay more, according to Luther's early teaching higher, learning was not only useless, but positively dangerous. He spoke with a fierce hatred against higher schools and human learning. Professor Paulsen admits that the vehemence of tone in which Luther spoke of the universities as the real bulwarks of the devil on earth, has perhaps never been rivalled before or after by any attack on these institutions.[1] A few specimens of these invectives may suffice.
According to Luther, everything instituted by the papacy was only intended to augment sin and error, so also were the universities. It is the devil himself who has introduced study; there reigns the damned, haughty and wicked Aristotle, from whose works Christian youth is instructed.[2] And yet "a man who
