JOHN A LASCO. JOHN A LASCO His 6arli*r fife unfr f abmirs. CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION IN POLAND, GERMANY, AND ENGLAND. DR. HERMANN DALTON, St. Petersburg, AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF THE REFORMED CHURCH IN RUSSIA," "TRAVELS IN GREECE AND ASIA MINOR," ETC. Translated from the German BY REV. MAURICE J. EVANS, B.A. HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXXVI. [All rights reserved.) Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbuff . Stack Annex BK 350 U-D33 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. BUT few words of introduction are necessary in pre- senting the following pages to the English reader. The aim of the learned author has not been to furnish a history of the Reformation, dealing mainly with names and dates, such as would be appropriate to a manual of Church history, but rather to exhibit the secret motives and springs of action which impelled the friends and foes of the evangelic movement at its most critical period. For the decades over which A Lasco's reforming activity extends mark the time of transition from the days of youthful conquest on the part of the Reformation to those sad years of divisions and declension which followed. Some of the matters recorded in this volume have only an historic interest for us in the present day. Many differences that stirred the hearts of men in those days are now happily consigned to oblivion among evangelical Christians. Many other questions, however, which were then raised are still urgently pressing for solution, and foremost among these that as to the blending of the greatest amount of Christian freedom with a spiritual discipline in accordance with the Word of God. On this subject in particular the example of A Lasco has still much to teach. From a purely literary point of view, it might appear a disadvantage that the book has been composed little by little, at such intervals of leisure as could be secured amidst r\ ,> TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. the absorbing engagements of a large city church. This disadvantage, however, is greatly outweighed by the con- sideration that the writer has, during more than a quarter of a century, given practical exemplification to the prin- ciples laid down by A Lasco, and that his congregation is perhaps second to none as respects Scriptural order and the works of evangelisation and benevolence. In the English edition some omissions have necessarily been made, more particularly as concerns the evidences on which our author's conclusions rest. On the other hand, a few extra notes have been added, and the year of death has been given in connection with many names in the Index. The last page and a half of the text was likewise appended by the translator, by way of explain- ing how Dr. Dalton's history is here brought somewhat abruptly to a close. Those who would trace the influence of A Lasco's Church Order upon the liturgical writings of the Church of the Netherlands may profitably consult the translation of Dalton's work made by Rev. P. C. van Oosterzee, of Enschede, Holland (Utrecht: Kemink en Zoon), where, moreover, the Latin text is in many places compared with the old Dutch reading as given in Kuyper. May this volume go forth on its way, and be blessed to the promotion of that oneness in the truth for which A Lasco himself so earnestly laboured. M. J. E. CONTENTS. I. JOHN A LASCO AS A CATHOLIC IN HIS NA TIVE LAND. CHAP. PAGR I. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME .... I II. FAMILY AND YOUTH 23 III. THE FIRST STUDENT TRAVELS ABROAD . .51 1. In Rome 51 2. In Bologna 60 IV. AT HOME AGAIN 79 V. THE OTHER STUDENT TRAVELS ABROAD . . 92 1. The first residence in Basle . . . .96 2. In Paris 101 3. The second residence in Basle . . . .108 4. The return home by way of Italy . . -133 VI. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC IN HIS NATIVE LAND 142 1. Trying experiences at home . . . .142 2. Laski's activity in the ecclesiastical domain . 154 3. The severance from Church and fatherland . 172 CONTENTS. II. JOHN A LASCO AS A PROTESTANT IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND. CHAP. p AGE VII. ON THE PILGRIMAGE 189 VIII. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND . . .221 1. The waiting time 231 2. The work with the sword in the hand . . 249 3. The work with the trowel in the hand . . 271 4. The Reformer in his private life in East Friesland 302 5. The Interim in its influence on Laski's fate . 322 IX. IN ENGLAND 351 1. First residence in England . . . -364 2. Second residence in England .... 376 I. JOHN A LA SCO AS A CATHOLIC IN HIS NATIVE LAND. I. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. A WIDE and painful distance now separates the land and people of our hero from the time in which he was himself living among them. For almost a century past his people has ceased to be a nation, with its own government, its native con- stitution. By its own fault, by a cruel bitter fate, it had sunk so low as to be obliged to succumb to the violent pressure of its neighbours, to submit to dismemberment at their hands and incorporation into other States, alien indeed, but more firmly com- pacted than itself. That lot has already, in the iron course of history, overtaken many a nation which has outlived itself, and has insensibly disappeared, absorbed in the life of the mighty conqueror. With tenacious perseverance and touching love of the fatherland, this people struggles against such iron destiny ; it cannot yet bring itself to die, and is unable to forget what it once was, in its heroic days. Reminding in many a striking feature of the people of the Jews, who nowhere on earth have settled so numerously and permanently as in this land, its sons wander hither and thither ; only against their will bearing the foreign yoke or eating the bread of exile, and watching for every intimation that may i JOHN A LA SCO. serve to quicken afresh their lightly enkindled hope. It enters not into our design to measure the dis- tance between the past and the present, and to trace out the causes which have brought, and must of necessity bring, this people to such depth of humiliation ; we have proposed to ourselves in the following pages the more attractive task of opening the book of Poland's history at the time of its most brilliant unfolding, and of reading a page which, full of promise as it is in its commencement, mani- fests so fatally at its close the germ of that sickness under which the fair land has pined almost to death. Yes, it is Poland's heroic age, this first half of the sixteenth century. More widely have its frontiers never extended than under the last power- ful rulers of the house of the Jagellons. Lelewel, whose heart glows with such ardent love for his country, furnishes us among the maps to his history of Poland with one of the time of John Albert, somewhere about the year 1500. It is a territory which in the north stretches along the coast from Dantsic to Memel, and then, in a line running almost direct east, touches the neighbourhood of Dunaburg, passes on by Witebsk to Smolensk, for the possession of which Russians and Poles often contended in those days, then again in the east bends deep into the land as far as the Donetz, and along the Dnieper attains the Black Sea at Kherson. The sea-coast forms as far as Kilia and Ismail the greatly contested frontier, which then stretches in- land as far as Transylvania and along the Carpathians, including Moldavia. Bukovina, Galicia, in the west, as far as the district of Teschen, then northwards LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. touches on Glogau, thence to return in a circuitous line to the neighbourhood of Dantsic. The exten- sive domain is estimated at 200,000 square versts (nearly 80,000 square miles), with a total population of fifteen millions. The true parent land and core of the wide domain, in which alone we move in the following pages, was composed of two main parts : the northern champaign land of Greater Poland, with the erewhile independent dukedoms of Cujavia and Masovia, and the more southernly situated Lesser Poland, which extended to the Carpathians. The leading palatinates in Greater Poland were Posen. Kalisch, Sieradz, Lenczyc ; in Lesser Poland, on the other hand, Cracow, Sendomir, Lublin. It was a wise step on the part of Hedwig^ the young Queen of Poland, in whose veins Piastic blood still flowed, to sacrifice her inclination for Duke William of Austria to the welfare of the State, and to give her hand to the Lithuanian prince Wladislaiv Jagiello (i 386). With this marriage covenant Poland and Lithuania entered into the relation of a personal union, which, after a lapse of nearly two hundred years, terminated, by means of the famous Lublin Union (1569), in the firmly welding of the two lands into a single indivisible commonwealth under the same ruler and with like constitution. With Wladislaw, who had before consented to receive baptism in order to be able to wed the fair Hedwig, there ascended the throne that race under which Poland was led forward to its highest summit of prosperity. It is a kingly house of rare capacity, that of these Jagellons, gracious in its character, fascinating in the power and vigour with which its members wielded the sceptre, and with which they JOHN A LA SCO. were capable of inspiring their people, and that not seldom under the most adverse conditions. One of those most accurately acquainted with the facts aptly describes the Jagellons as " benevolent, winning, generous to self-deprivation, simple, accessible, grateful and easily attached, good-natured and yielding, like men who are guided more by the impulses of the heart than by the hard rule of abstract maxims."* This fair heritage likewise pertained in its full extent to its last descendant but one, Sigismund /., who for two-and-forty years (1506-1548) gloriously bore the crown in difficult times. He belongs to the most prominent figures of the sixteenth century, of high estimation in the council of the regents, feared by his enemies, but warmly loved by his people, specially during the first decades of his reign, and so long as the influence of his second consort, the intriguing Queen Bona (married 1519), did not make itself too greatly felt. Sigismund was zealous in the fulfilment of the arduous duties of a king of Poland, a faithful, watchful guardian of his land and people. Yet now and then a certain trace of weakness pervaded his actions ; the wish for repose and order led him often to leave matters to take their own course where a tighter grasp of the rein was to be desired. Just upon the point which was at that time the most decisive of all, the religious question, his different measures are marked by a want of resolution, which could satisfy neither the Evangelicals nor the Romish Church, and which in reality proved not for the benefit of either. This wavering is not to be ascribed alone to his love of * Caro, Geschichte Polcns (Gotha, 1863 sgq.}, iv. 306. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 5 undisturbed repose ; a deeper, nobler characteristic of his nature rendered decision difficult for him in those stormy days. He was a faithful son of his Church; every revolt, therefore, against its ordinances seemed to him like an attempt to shake the strongest pillars of the State ; and thus pious attachment to the Pope and his own ardent patriotism contributed in equal degree to strengthen his endeavour to shut out the dreaded revolutionary element from his land. In this drift of his thoughts, however, it is easy to discover an undercurrent. Sigismund is a truly God-fearing man. In his letter to the Pope, as in many an edict, there breathes a tone not inspired by State policy, one which, flowing straight from the heart, bears noble testimony to his feelings, and the more so as this tone is so greatly wanting even in the pastoral letters of the bishops of those days. For a mind so constituted there must be much to astonish and repel in the proceedings of the Church and its dignitaries; nor did he shrink from revolting against these when the ecclesiastical assumptions too greatly infringed upon his kingly rights, and the papal authority would assert itself in a province in which he felt himself called to be the guardian of the nation's sovereignty. The times denied him the repose for meditating on the one thing needful ; the fatal consequence was that indecision which re- dounded to no blessing for his people. Another element of difficulty was to be found in the constitution of the land, as this had gradually shaped itself out in long, deep-reaching conflicts. Poland had become a republic with a king at its head. The real power lay in the hands of the nobility, those families which in the struggles of JOHN A LA SCO. centuries had raised themselves most effectually o.it of the rank and file of citizens to a state of in- dependence. The title to separation from the other classes of the population was to be found in the display of a right to particular armorial bearings, the evidence of belonging to a particular family. If this proof was given, the equal in lineage was acknow- ledged upon a par with all the nobles, and was invested with the like rights and obligations. True, it could not fail to come about, that single families and escutcheons should be particularly distinguished in the persons of some prominent bearers of the name and arms, and such families thereby acquired for themselves the highest offices in Church and State. This higher class of nobility were the barons, distinguished from the others by birth or possessions, or offices of pre-eminence. Certain offices likewise presupposed and conferred the dignity of a baron. The highest ecclesiastical dignities were those of the two archbishops of the land and the thirteen bishops ; the highest civil dignities were those of the thirty-five Palatines, the thirty greater Castellans of the kingdom (inajores castellani}, and forty-nine lesser Castellans (ininores), who likewise, with ten other officers of state, formed the Senate.* As opposed to the nobility, there arose in the towns with the lapse of time a new and weighty element, of which the princes often availed them- selves as a means of holding in check the incon- veniently powerful barons. The influence of these citizens was at that time one so deeply affecting the history of the Reformation in Poland, that we must, * The order of succession of these dignitaries in Cromer, rolonia (Colonise, 1594), p. 529. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. ^ at this early stage, direct attention to their particular position. The settlers in the tOvvns were almost exclusively German immigrants, who had flowed in unbroken streams into the country from the time when the German impulse to emigration, awakened in the days of the Crusades, had (with their con- clusion) lost the copious outlet into the hazy distance of the far East. This important element of culture received a friendly welcome in the wide, thinly populated territories of Poland. Very considerable in- dependent powers were conferred upon the strangers, who throughout the whole land founded cities, and with German diligence, with German vigour, ener- getically prosecuted the arts of trade and commerce, and in the rapidly growing prosperity of the land abundantly rendered the tribute of their gratitude for the rights of hospitality accorded them. Yet it was a hospitality granted with Polish liberality, one might almost say recklessness. These German settlers had brought with them from home their own laws, which were confirmed and guaranteed to them by the Polish princes. In the northern towns, in Masovia and Cujavia, we meet for the most part with the Kulm law ; in the southern Polish towns, extend- ing as far as the Russian territory, the Magdeburg law. In the enjoyment of such privileges these towns lived a life by themselves in the midst of Poland, a part of Germany, and to such an extent that, e.g., the renowned book of the guilds in Cracow, the admirably executed miniatures of which afford us a lively picture of that age, is composed in the German and Latin languages. Such separate life in the midst of a foreign land may, under some circum- stances, contribute to the material prosperity of the JOHN A LA SCO. land, and in Poland really did so, even as the German colonies in the interior of Russia have done; for the intellectual life, however, of the ancestral people, as also of the foreign nation in the midst of which they dwell, such colonists are in the hour of decision as a mole upon the body ; and such an hour of decision had then dawned. These German towns in Poland were intellectually cut away from the old home, only guarding with scrupulous, but narrow and illiberal fidelity, the heritage they had brought with them ; they did not live on by con- tinuing to develop themselves, but persisted in stubbornly maintaining themselves at the same intel- lectual stage which the old fatherland had attained at the time of their departure. Against their new surroundings, above and below, they were firmly and closely shut up ; they lived side by side with the other inhabitants, but without inner contact, with- out blessing-fraught reciprocal feeling, as in a strongly entrenched fortress. This, however, is, from the national standpoint, no salutary connection for the land, nay, a heavy drag, when a people in the course of its history is placed in presence of a decision which it can solve satisfactorily only by means of national unity. These German citizens lived through successive centuries in Poland without having become Poles ; and they in turn were not everywhere strong and vigorous enough to germanise the whole land. The third fragment of the population was formed by the peasants, the kmetes, a pitiable class, almost deprived of civil rights, serfs to the nobility, and living on, or rather pining on, under a heavy load of oppression. The distance between the lords and LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. q these bondmen was so great and so sharply defined that one can hardly suppose the same old Polish blood to be flowing in the two parts ; one is rather reminded of the relation which subsists between a conquering people and the subjugated primitive races of the land, such as prevails in India and else- where. With twofold harshness and fatal effect must this distance make itself felt where the corrective middle link, the inhabitant of the towns, assumes a position adverse to both sides. As op- posed to the nobles, to whom in his prerogatives he was as a thorn in the eye, he shut himself rigidly apart, and on every occasion of contact met with the same proud repulse which in the course of time, and specially in the days of the Reformation, manifested itself with the victorious consciousness on the part of the nobles of being able to break up and reduce to powerlessness the prerogatives of these foreign settlers. For the peasant, the property of the nobility, these townsmen had no heart nor any feel- ing of kinship : he spoke not their language, he sang not their songs, his past was foreign to them, and for his sad lot they had no compassion. Such was the condition and reciprocal feeling of the three constituent parts of the nation, the harmonious combination of which ever forms the strength of a people, but whose splitting up into sections of neces- sity dissipates the strongest force. The Reformation in particular, which from its very nature depends upon a hearty agreement of the whole people, and demands this for its success, bitterly experienced the effect of such a divided life and the total diversity of interests in the single parts. But we have not yet spoken of the religious and io JOHN A LA SCO. ecclesiastical life, the other essential factor in the definite and peculiar stamp and impress of a people. 'More than half a millennium had passed since the Polish prince Miecyslaw, the fourth in the succession of the Piasts (if we may accept the testimony of tradition), sued for the hand viDubrawka, daughter of the Bohemian duke Boleslaw, and, in consequence of this marriage union with the zealous Christian princess, underwent the rite of baptism (966). A part of this, till then heathen, people willingly followed the example of their prince and received the doctrines of his first spiritual instructor, Jordan, although a long time elapsed before the last remains of heathendom disappeared. Upon the reception of baptism quickly followed the ecclesiastical organisation of the land ; Otho the Great helped to found in Posen the first Polish bishopric, which was placed under the juris- diction of the archbishopric of Magdeburg. The German ecclesiastical influence felt at the out- set was maintained in subsequent times, and indeed assumed ever greater proportions. In long well-nigh uninterrupted succession a mighty host of monks and priests out of almost every province of Germany pressed eastward to the Oder, and even more deeply into the land, to the Vistula, and founded monas- teries and churches in every part in such great abundance that, from the time of the contact with the members of the Russian Church (begun in the days of the Jagellons), the latter were wont to call the Catholics the people " of German faith." With simple trust the nation submitted to the teachings of the Church, willingly received its ordinances, even those which were imposed in the form of heavy burdens and obligations. The fair Slavonic heritage LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. of a hearty piety was the property also of the Polish people. It is not the piety which, with sacred earnestness, penetrates exploringly into the depths of the Divine truth, and then, in prolonged meditation upon the one thing needful, holds fast to this one thrice sacred object as a precious acquisition and bliss-giving possession, to be maintained against every assault ; it is the pious mind which confidingly surrenders itself to the guidance of the priests and the Church, willingly, and with but little hesitancy, accept- ing the Church's doctrine without much examination thereof, and in the prescribed manner devoutly fulfils the Church's demands ; in God fears the almighty Lord, but hardly has a conception of the abundant grace of being called by Christ to be a disciple, not a servant. The priest was for the Slav the spiritual " lord " who has authority over him, a sort of vice- gerent of God, who regards the submissiveness shown to His representative as homage done to Himself. Very much of that which was said of the foreign town-population in Poland may be repeated with regard to this priesthood, likewise alien in nationality, though it may be in the ecclesiastical domain the evil consequences of this diversity did not render themselves so sharply and strikingly apparent as in that of the State. The Romish priest is himself brought up without a home. It is true the impres- sions of youth, of the people whose language has become for one a mother-tongue, can never be entirely obliterated ; even under the most foreign cowl the home feeling with the land of one's descent still abides. It is otherwise here. Those who in the Romish Church and its Latin tongue had found a second fatherland saw themselves here in Poland J2 JOHN A LA SCO. transplanted to a distant country ; no family bonds facilitated their taking root in the land ; the interest was wanting to them for coming into close contact with the mind and heart of the people, of so entering into their peculiar life as not only to live among them, but with them, and from such common social life to draw the right and qualification for further developing the intellectual life of the people in its thinking and acting. Centuries passed by without any national literature arising ; the cause thereof in those days is certainly to be sought in the foreign priests, the bearers of the culture of that time. Their mother-tongue, the Latin, made its way into the castles of the nobility, into the houses of the educated and refined ; and the first intellectual aspiration of the people found expression in this language. The deep gulf which separated the noble, in his almost boundless freedom, from the peasant, chained to the soil, would not have opened so widely if a native clergy, springing from the bosom of the people, had preserved the connection of the two parts of the national whole, then almost entirely divorced from each other. With sure and firm step, the Church acquired from generation to generation an increasingly powerful, increasingly significant position in the land. In one respect there was no distinction between the different social ranks : in the devout subjection to the Church and its distant head, the vicegerent of the Lord in Rome. From the king down to the humblest peasant, willing obedience was rendered to him and his underteachers. To the Church and its highest dignitaries in the land there had been conceded in the course of time important prerogatives. The LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 13 Archbishop of Gnesen, as primate of the kingdom, occupied the place next after the king, and in the event of the king's death, presided over the govern- ment until a new head of the State was chosen. The bishops we have already directed attention to this particular stood upon a par with the highest civil dignitaries, yea, had the precedence of them in the Senate. From olden time the most distinguished bishoprics, after the archiepiscopal sees of Gnesen and Lemberg, were in Lesser Poland, Cracow ; in Greater Poland, Posen ; in Cujavia and Pomerania, Wladislav ; in Masovia, Plotzk ; in the Russian terri- tory, Przemisl and Chelm ; in Podolia, Kamenetz. The nobility were in possession of these spiritual dignities. A long warfare was waged by them for the exclusive right of possession ; and this warfare had followed consistently from their endeavour to bring all the power of the State within their grasp. Yet, with however great fidelity and obedience the people in all its parts was attached to the Romish Church, it nevertheless early learned to exercise toleration towards those in its midst who were not members of that communion, and the more decidedly to do this in proportion as by victory it more and more widely extended its frontier. In the exercise of this Christian duty, so rare in those days, the nation was supported by the fine and noble impulses of the Slavonic nature, which is not easily aroused to religious fanaticism. Where we come upon manifes- tations of that kind in its midst it will not be difficult to detect the presence of foreign influence, by which the nation was impelled to enter upon paths it would hardly have entered on of its own accord. First of all, the Poles were brought into I4 JOHN A L A SCO. contact in this respect with the Jews. As early as the ninth century not a few of these went up from the Chazar empire of the Lower Danube.* The immigration assumed larger proportions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the side of the west, whence, in ever-augmented degree, the Jews were expelled by Rome and the Romish Church. The inflow from Germany was so great that to this day the Polish Jew has preserved the German language as the main constituent in his corrupt jargon. Trade and the practice of usury formed the principal means of livelihood with these new-comers. They were not even in Poland entirely spared the severe oppression to which they were everywhere exposed under the influence of the Romish Church, but in Poland the pressure was diminished ; they were not the bondmen of the princes, as elsewhere ; were only under their immediate legal administration, and thus could not, as the other immigrants from Germany, appeal to the Magdeburg law in the case of disputes arising. Specially Casimir the Great stood forth for their pro- tection, even in defiance of the severe measures which had, under the influence of the Dominicans, been enacted in the ecclesiastical assembly at Ofen (1279) against the Jews of the Carpathian lands. It was not the spirit of toleration alone which guided him and a part of his successors, particularly Sigismund /., in thus acting ; they recognised the * Empire of the Chazars (or Khozars). The Chazars were an early people, formerly occupying territory between the Black Sea and the Caspian, known to the ancients as Scythians. See Gregorieffs Russia in Asia. The history of the Jewish settlements under their sway is sketched by Dr. A. Harkavy (Altjtidische Denkmdler aus der Krt'm}. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 15 trading instinct of this thrifty people, which unlocked the treasures of the land, and whose amassed wealth often served the kings themselves in good stead. Other religious elements, too, were introduced in the process of extending the frontiers of Poland : the occupation of Podolia had incorporated Tsheremissian Tartars into the kingdom, and on the Lower Danube Mohammedans belonged to Poland ; in Lithuania heathen were still to be found. Apart from the comparatively few Armenians who, likewise by the incorporation of Podolia, be- came united to the kingdom of Poland without their position towards the Pope and the Church of Rome being as yet clearly defined,* the most important and pressing occasion for the manifestation of a tolerant spirit towards men of other faith within the kingdom was the receiving of nearly a third part of the adherents of the Greek ritual under the sway of the Polish king as Grand Duke of Lithuania, which was brought about by the accession of the Jagellons. Heathen Lithuania indeed had been led by Jagiello to Christianity and the Romish Church ; bordering upon Lithuania, however, were a series of provinces, acquired by conquest, whose inhabitants had for centuries been so firmly attached to the Greek Church, that the princes of the house of Gedimin had been obliged, as a condition of their sovereignty, to go over to this Church. The metropolis of the Greek Church, Kieff, was included within the domain of Lithuania ; at the baptism of Wladislaw Jagiello the * Cromer, p. 500: " Armeni suis ritibus suaque lingua in sacris utuntur. Non abhorrent ii tamen, sicut accepimus, a romana ecclesia et rom. pontifice ; quin principatum ejus in universa Christi ecclesia agnoscunt." 1 6 JOHN A LA SCO. astonished Catholics of Cracow beheld even Greek bishops in his retinue. By reason of thus living side by side with those of other faith, men in Poland became accustomed to regard the belonging to the Church of Rome as not equivalent to the belonging to Christianity, an important advance for that time. Owing to the transference of the Metropolitan of Kieff to Moscow, the desire, favoured by the prince, for the formation of a national Church of the Greeks belonging to Lithuania had gained considerable ground. At a synod in the year 1415, in which the Archbishop of Polock, the Bishops of Czernigow, Luck, Wladimir, Przemisl, Smolensk, Chelm, and Turowsk took part, they selected (after the example of the Bulgarians and Servians) a metropolitan of their own, Gregory Zemblack, and assigned to him Kieff as his metropolis. With great interest and even joy was the incident followed in Rome. The old rivalry between the two Churches was not em- phasised ; the proceedings at the Council of Constance (1414 1418) and that of Florence (1437) display a mutual friendly approach. Although the final result did not correspond to the expectations cherished, yet the attempts themselves were of the greatest possible significance for the people of Poland and Lithuania, whence the movement emanated, and the after-effects thereof may be traced in the follow- ing century in many a surprising phenomenon which, without taking into account these previous events, would wear a strange complexion. Very different was the line of conduct towards the almost contemporaneous surging upheaval in the land of a kindred race, Bohemia. The fierce Hussite conflicts cast their mighty waves as far as Poland in LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 17 the form of countless fugitives, who for their faith's sake left their native soil, torn up as it was by the violent movement, and begged the rights of asylum in a foreign land. The immense crowds of fugitive exiles who at this time stood at the erewhile so hospitable frontiers of Poland and sought admission appeared not in the character of sons of a powerful Church, at home in the full enjoyment of its rights, but as dangerous apostates from the same mother Church, which in Poland still preserved its authority unimpaired ; as firebrands of a conflagration which had well-nigh consumed Bohemia and was now hurling its sparks into Poland, and here threatening the Romish Church with the same peril. Against these dangerous people one must maintain the most re- solute defence, the most inexorable persecution, even for the sake of one's own security in Church and State. The Church, with keen eye, had first discerned the magnitude of the danger for Poland also. It was principally two men who in those days exerted the greatest influence, though by no means a salutary one, in the ecclesiastical and civil domain, and held the aged king ( Wladislaw Jagiello] almost entirely in their power. These were Zbjgniew Olesnicki, Bishop of Cracow, a man of remorseless fanatical zeal, and Stanislas Ciolek, Secretary of the Royal Chancery, afterwards Bishop of Posen. It is a sad picture which Caro draws of these men, similar, as he observes, to the forms which over in Italy were wont at that time to relate their lewd histories to Boccacio in the refectory of the Augustin monastery of San Spirito at Florence. At a provincial synod at Leczyc the measures to be adopted against the Hussite heresy were soon resolved on ; an assembly of the nobility, 2 JOHN A LA SCO. which shortly followed, accepted a project of law drawn up by Ciolek, to which it would not be difficult to secure the royal assent. It is a harsh language, till then unfamiliar to Polish ears, when it runs in this edict, " After mature deliberation, and with consent of our prelates, princes, and barons, we determine, and declare, more- over, that we wish it to be held as a fixed, abiding, and unalterable decree, that in our kingdom of Poland, and in all the lands subject to us, every heretic, or every one tainted with heretical doctrines, or suspected thereof, and in like manner every one who is an abettor of heretics, shall, by our captains and officers throughout the land, be seized as a traitor and punished according to requirement. All persons who enter our kingdom from Bohemia shall be arrested, and subjected to an examination concerning heretical teachers on the part of those deputed there- to by the Apostolic see. Every Pole, whosoever he may be, that shall not have returned out of Bohemia before Ascension Day next (1424) shall be looked upon as a convicted heretic, and be liable to the punishments appointed for heretics. All his goods and chattels fall to the State treasury, his male and female descendants forfeit their right of heirship and their rank, and his family is declared infamous and deprived of all the privileges of the nobility." * Inexorable as sounded the language, and terrible as the punishments threatened against the Hussite heresies, they did not prove altogether successful. The sacred power of the Gospel everywhere calls forth the spirit of freedom, in such wise that it can * Kautz, Pr&cifiua ac publica rel. evang. in Polonia fata (Hamburg, 1738), p. 7. LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 19 neither be repressed by the severest Draconian edicts nor can ever suffer its confessors to sink so deeply as to be capable of acting against conscience. The Hussite movement had touched the soul of the Slavonic people ; there was in it an element which found a response in the whole race. The eloquent burning language of the Bohemian preacher in the Bethlehem Chapel of Prague had fearlessly laid bare gross abuses in the Romish Church ; with an appeal to Scripture, Hits and his successors drew attention to the almost forgotten truth of the Gospel, a cock- crowing of the early dawn, while Hus was himself still devoted in pious fidelity to the Romish Church. The Bohemian and Polish nobles at Constance sought to protect him as a popular hero of kindred race with them both ; * the flames of his stake shone with piercing light into the soul of both nations, awakening in the first instance a sense of scandal and perplexed astonishment with regard to a mother Church which could deal thus with such a son, but in its wider progress enkindling in single souls the earnest purpose of testing the doings of the Church and the demands of the martyr by the standard of Holy Scripture. From this time we meet with slighter or more perceptible traces of Hussite activity in the land. In Lithuania they were for the most part political considerations which led the Grand Duke Witold, this towering colossal form of the Slavonic national spirit, to look upon the move- * Krasinski, Historical Sketch of the Reformation in Poland (London, 1838), i. 63, where, moreover, the following passage is adduced from a letter of Hus in his prison : " Poloni tamquam strenues defensores veritatis Dei opponerunt [opposuerunt] se saepius toti concilio pro liberatione mea. D. Wenceslaus de Leszna intrepidus et zelosus defensor." 20 JOHN A LA SCO. ment with favourable eyes. We are told of a judge in Posen who afforded the rights of hospitality in his house to fugitive Bohemian preachers ;* the names of a series of Polish barons in high position, at their head the mighty vayvode Ostrorog^ have been preserved to us as openly favouring the movement. Nay, the imperious Sbigneus was obliged to threaten with excommunication the old king Wladislawjagiello, now in his eighty-fourth year, who, in consequence of his natural kindliness of disposition and of his great age, had grown somewhat remiss, for having received Hussites into Kazimiertz, the suburb of Cracow, in order that they might not be deprived of religious services during the Easter-time of 1431, when the fanatical Bishop had laid the capital under an interdict. During the whole century we can see the Hussite movement running through like a scarlet thread, perceptible now here, now there. It essen- tially contributed to set men in larger numbers examining the life and doings of the clergy, and comparing these with the walk of those men who forsook their native land for the truth's sake, and were minded to live a moral life in the following of their Lord. Only in faint outline have we described the signs which slowly, as the appearing of the daybreak towards the month of May in the far north, for * Salig, Vollst. Historic der Augsburger Konfession (Halle, 1730), ii., p. 524. t At the National Diet of 1459 this gifted and distinguished man gave expression to his opinion regarding the ecclesiastical and political relations of his native land, afterwards publishing the same in a special work, " Pro reipublicae ordinatione," a tractate full of profound thoughts on the relation between Church and State. Compare the full account in Krasinski. i 94- LAND AND PEOPLE OF HIS HOME. 21 Poland too proclaimed the dawn of a new day in the religious life of the Christian peoples. Only solitary notes of contemporaries penetrate to us like prophet voices. This is explicable. The people in the lower strata, held down in ignorance and slavish dependence, lived on in silence, hardly betraying in national song the breathing of an intellectual life ; in the upper strata the first modest endeavours after an independent national literature were only begin- ning to appear. Those who wielded the pen in the Latin language, a tongue foreign to the nation at large, were for the most part devoted servants of their Church, and accordingly wrote under its eye and as animated by its spirit. If nevertheless in- convenient statements about the grievous apostasy were heard from the mouth of those who had re- nounced the degenerate mother Church, the retrograde movement which set in during the following centuries, with a keen scent for heresy, was busily engaged in stifling the obnoxious note. Only here and there has such unfavourable report, hidden away in some fortunate hour in a remote library, escaped the vigilance of the Jesuits, now first to come forth in other and more favourable times, out of its long resting-place, to the broad light of day. However sparse and fragmentary the notices hitherto made public, they yet suffice to bear testimony to the fact that the beginning of the sixteenth century in Poland also found ready to hand the heritage, every- where abundantly amassed, of the Middle Ages, in the urgent need, nay, the absolute necessity, for a reformation of the Church in its head and its members. It is true Poland presented in its peculiar relations, as above indicated, special and very difficult 22 JOHN A LA SCO. problems for solution ; but it would be false to speak of these difficulties as insuperable. For who can forbid the Spirit of God to breathe where He will ? who is able to assign a limit to His action ? In all the lands of the Reformation we see that it has been men richly endowed with grace whom the Lord of the Church has called to enter upon the heritage received. Like victorious leaders of armies, they have brought in the hosts of the be- lievers to the sanctuary of God's word, and shown them therein, as the most precious treasure of the Reformation, the alone salvation in the grace of God through Jesus Christ. Has such an one been want- ing to Poland ? Has there arisen among its manly sons no hero ready to respond to the call of the Lord, " Here am I ; send me " ? II. FAMILY AND YOUTH. AT Petrikow we quit the track of the railway which in the present day connects the old capital of Masovia, Warsaw, with Vienna. Not without an effort do we withstand the attraction to pay a visit to a town so rich in historic reminis- cences, within whose walls more than one fascinating page in the history of Poland has been written ; for here during the bloom-time of the Jagellons most of the national diets held their sittings, often of so stormy a character, of so great import for the whole of Europe. Another task impels us into the interior of the land. We mount the open carriage standing ready at the railway station, and are quickly rolling on our way, behind our cheery team, towards the interior, bound for the out-of-the way town of Lask, a distance of some six German miles (twenty-five to thirty English miles). Through the midst of truly Polish scenery speeds the carriage. The far-reaching un- dulating plain is a well-cultivated and fertile district ; here and there at the verge of the horizon is descried a slight extent of forest, but a forest ever receding farther before the ploughshare, from which the colon it. hopes to obtain more abundant returns out of the soil We meet with but few inhabitants ; rarely does the 24 JOHN A LA SCO. road pass through any village. One's thoughts can take their flight undisturbed ; during this journey they wander back a few centuries, and try to fit for a moment the bygone days within the existing frame. At that time the district, now so smiling in the sun- shine of July, and kept in order with diligent hand, wore a very different aspect. Then the woodland still prevailed over the greater part of the country, and that in an almost unchecked primitive wildness hardly accessible to the bold hunter, who, however, saw his courage in the dark forests rewarded by a heart- gladdening spoil of many a choice head of game, such as has long ago disappeared. In the abundant forest tarns the wild swine made their home in great numbers. Along the fringe of the heathland wandered the bear, and refreshed itself with the wild honey which dropped in enticing plenty from the stems of the trees. On the poor, roughly culti- vated arable land one came here and there upon settlements, wretched huts, hardly more than cabins, built of mud and covered with straw, in which the kmete, oppressed with heavy burdens and enforced labours, passed his sad existence, timid and sub- missive to his lord, by whom he was often held in less estimation than the precious beaver whose building he had carefully to protect or the falcon cherished for the master's sport. These are for us children of the nineteenth century gloomy pictures, on which our eye does not care to rest. Shortly before one comes to Lask, the ground resembles the landscape of the Dunes, but with the difference that the refreshing glimpse of the sea is wanting : sand-hills, with only a scanty growth upon them, run far into the cultivated land. We now FA MIL Y A ND YO UTH. 25 enter the little borough, whose unpretending appear- ance leads us to ask by what right it claims to be a town. Nothing there can rivet the attention of the ordinary traveller : the same few broad streets as anywhere else in Poland ; properly speaking, only the highway, which at this place is flanked on either side by little unattractive houses, but in two places opens out into great wide squares. The one is that of the Market, made of considerable extent, in order on particular days to harbour, as it were, a second popu- lation of the little town in the shape of men and cattle, which pour in out of the country from afar to buy and sell that which is necessary for the sus- taining of rustic life, but at other times a desolate monotonous level, on rainy days unspeakably dirty, and just as unspeakably dusty in the hot summer weather. The dreary place has nothing to say to us, bent as we are on a search after ancient historic reminiscences. So much greater, however, is our interest in the other. It is the Church Square. A hurried examination of the documentary records in the parish church * having proved unavailing, there remained yet one more visit to be paid in Lask, thus to come perchance upon ancient traces of our hero. Only with difficulty did we find out a Jew, of whom, it need not be said, there are very many in the Polish country town, who recalled to mind from the time of his long-past boyish days the remains of * The armorial bearings of the Laski family are still to be discovered built into the masonry of the outer wall of the Church. The escutcheon Korab, representing a mediaeval ship with lofty poop, bearing as cargo a sort of watchtower, is in this instance surmounted by the mitre of the archbishop. 26 JOHN A LA SCO. an old castle in the neighbourhood. Out in the outskirts of the town, we succeeded, with his help, in discovering the spot. Surrounded by ploughed land, there is seen, in a poor neglected combination of orchard and kitchen-garden, a very ancient row of trees, which gives the impression of having been a former avenue to a large park. The original road is overgrown with brushwood and rank grass. Not far removed from it stands an ancient wall, now serving as a convenient solid background of a store- room for potatoes and field fruits during the winter. The masonry, thirteen cubits long, four cubits high,* is built up of great stones, and forms a substructure which may at one time have supported an imposing building, but constitutes to-day the only melancholy remains of the ancestral castle of the once so power- ful baronial family of the Laskis. No one in the little town now knew anything of the family ; the very name would have died away and been forgotten had not the town itself retained it. It is a painful impression. Let us seek to banish it by the story of a renowned member of the family, as this has been put together by us from sources widely removed, and often of exceeding scanty outflow. Far away up there, where all objects are lost in the hazy blue of the distance, tradition places the origin of the Laski family. We surrendered our- selves for a moment to its guidance ; but whenever we sought to follow up an indication, specially when it pointed with great decidedness to England as the cradle of the race, we invariably returned after a while undeceived. That which is furnished by the * Thirty feet by a little over nine feet. TR. FA MIL Y A ND YO UTH. 2 7 unreliable Damalewicz,* in the driest chronicler's style, is wanting in all historic support. The Catholic narrator, belonging to the seventeenth cen- tury it is true, without mention of his authorities makes the founder of the house, Indelbertus Laski, come over to the Anglo-Saxon coasts out of Nor- mandy with William the Conqueror, and receive, as the prize of his heroic valour at the Battle of Hastings (1066), Pomfret Castle and the territory of Blackburnshire. His grandson, Henry, is made by the same fabling chronicler founder of the abbey of Christal. A later descendant, Albert Laski thus prattles this gossiping authority Baron of Haulton and Constable of Chester, had to leave England because he accused King John of the murder of his royal nephew. The fugitive wandered to Poland, where he was received with open arms by the coura- geous and enterprising Bolcslaw Krzywousty.^ Like his ancestor in England, the new-comer so greatly distinguished himself by valour that he was rewarded with large possessions in the land of his adoption. His grandson, Robert, is already spoken of as Castellan of Sieradz, one of the highest posts in the land, whose occupant for the time being had to administer the rights of the king within the said territory. Here in Poland so Damalewicz tells us * The relation, as yet unprinted, will be found in the collec- tion of MSS. in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg (Q. I. r No. 47) : Stephen Damalewicz, Historia imaginis B. V.M. miraculosce, in opfiido Lasko in Palatinatu Siradiensi in Polonia (1663). t John Lackland is believed to have put to death the unfor- tunate Arthur about 1203, whereas Boleslaw Krzywousty died as early as 1139 ; and the MS. itself even further relates that Robert Laski was already Palatine of Siradia in 1081, and that his son Robert was Bishop of Cracow in 1143 ! 28 JOHN A LA SCO. the original escutcheon was accordingly altered. From its Norman home the family had brought with it to England the heraldic device of a lion ; this henceforth gave place to the " ship," on which the ancestor, fleeing from England, had made his fortune- bringing voyage to the hospitable shores of Poland. These nebulous forms of legendary ancestors dis- appear in the daylight of well-authenticated docu- ments. In these there emerges, so far as I can learn, as the first of the family, John, called, on account of his bodily stature, " the Little," Bishop of Cracow, who died in 1392, after many afflictions, patiently endured.* The Bishop is renowned as a great and learned man ; he was distinguished not only for considerable theological attainments, but also as an eminent physician, highly esteemed as such by his king, Lewis, and his see had to boast of many advantages received at his hand. His brother Albert outlived him by a quarter of a century. The latter was lord of the manor of Lask and Krowicz, from 1391 till his death in 1417 Castellan of Leczyc (Ladensis).f He died in his strong castle of Smarszew ; his son interred him in the family vault at the church of the Minorites in Kalisch. He married Catharine, the titled daughter of the Standard- bearer of Sieradz ; the high dignity of the father-in- law descended to his son John (1393 1451). As such, John Laski had to carry in battle the banner of this palatinate, a perilous post of honour, as the brave * Pomniki Dziejowe Polski (Lwow, 1878), iii. 264, 371. ; So according to the MS. which lies before me : "Genea- logia familiae Laski de stemmate Korab, oriundee ex oppido Lask in antique Palatinatu Siradiensi sito, titulo comitum in eodem Lask condecoratae, conquisita et extracta ex actis terrestribus et castrensibus." FA MIL Y A ND YO UTH. 29 man may often have experienced in the troublous days of Wladislaw III. and Casimir. In his time the village lying adjacent to the ancestral seat of Lask was transformed into a town (1422). After the death of his wife Anne (1448), the robust and devout hero, already well on in the fifties, undertook a journey to the Holy Sepulchre. As miles Jerosoli- mitanus, he returned home. On his way back he fell sick in Nicomedia and lost his eyesight. Blind, they brought him back once more to Lask, where he soon after died ; his four sons, Andrew, John, Matthias, and Peregrinus, interred the father in the church at Lask (145 i ). Before the father had entered upon his pilgrimage he had betrothed his son Andrew to Barbara, of the noble house of Rembieszow (Randyeszow). Besides two daughters, of whom only faint traces, hardly more than conjectures, have come down to us, there sprang from this marriage four sons. The eldest, named after his father, Andrew, was Gustos of Gnesen, Cracow, and Cujavia, and held a canonicate in Posen. When he died, in 1512, he was interred by his brother in the cathedral church of Gnesen. This his brother John, born in 1456 at the family seat of Lask, attained to the highest spiritual dignity in Poland, and died Archbishop of Gnesen 1531. We shall often in the sequel have occasion to return to him. Of the youngest brother, Michael^ who seems to have died early, there is nothing to relate. For us his elder brother Jaroslaw, the father of our hero, occupies the foreground. He was lord of the manor at Lask. From 1492 to 1506, we find him Tribune of Sieradz, upon which office his younger brother entered when he himself became Palatine of 3 o JOHN A LA SCO. Leczyc. Eleven years later he was Palatine of Sieradz, in the possession of which dignity he died in 1523. As Palatine or Vayvode, he was leader of the troops of his hundred in war ; in time of peace he called the provincial council of the nobility to- gether, in which assemblies he held the position of president and gave judgment. He had to fix the price of merchandise, and there was committed to him the oversight of weights and measures. The Jews of the district were placed under his protection.* Our highly distinguished vayvode (that of Sieradz occupied in the Senate the seventh place in order among the thirty-one palatines of the land) had been espoused since 1493 to Susanna of Bakova-Gora, of the family Novina or Ptomicnczyk.f The married pair resided for the most part at the ancestral castle in Lask, where also most of the children were born. Three sons and four daughters sprang from this union. The traces of the daughters are almost lost; in the evening of the life of our Johannes we see some nephews greeting the uncle upon his return to Poland. Of the second of the three sons our narra- tive treats. John a Lasco beheld the light of the world in the fortress of his father's family, probably about the year 1499. Here, in the finely situated castle, the boy spent his childhood in the society of his parents and the companionship of his brothers and sisters. In great fear and reverence of the father and mother were the Polish children of those days brought up. It was looked upon as a distinction to be allowed to * Cromer, p. 507. t Acta Cap. Gnesn., i. 49. FAMILY AND YOUTH. 31 remain a considerable time with the parents ; ordi- narily the children in such great houses were con- signed to their own rooms and to the care of attendants or tutors. Not rarely might one see upon the landed estates, besides the nobleman's mansion, the proper family seat, likewise a separate edifice which served as a domicile for the children, and from which they came, as it were, on a visit to their parents. The first years of life the children may have passed in quiet, amidst the fresh and invigorating country life. Even though a noisy and uproarious mirth may have prevailed in the nobleman's house, taking into account the hospitality of the land, the manifold forms of dissipation, and the exalted position occupied by the head of the family, yet but little of this turmoil penetrated into the apart- ments of the children, who were kept far away from the din and distraction of social life. The education of the family began early. In the towns there were schools, or the growing lads were sent to the nearest cloister-school ; the wealthy noble took into his house a young priest or tutor, to whom the whole training was then committed. The education of youth of noble birth was a careful one in those days. Much diligence in particular was applied to the acquiring of the Latin language, the boys and girls taking part together ; and both sexes acquired so great a degree of proficiency therein, that they employed, in oral and written intercourse, this foreign language, which was even more homely and familiar to them than the sound of their mother-tongue. Seldom did the children while they were young go beyond the limits of their parents' castle. They 32 JOHN A LA SCO. lived there in their world apart, coming rarely in contact with people outside. The road to the church, when they became of age to accompany their friends thither, first brought them into the little town and past the dwellings of strangers. Then fell for them too the drawbridge of the castle gate ; and beyond the rampart and moat, which protected their parents' castle against any sudden assault, they went forth into the outside world. With a moat, the little town was, like the castle, guarded against attack. On their way to church the children had early opportunity of seeing the poverty-stricken condition of the inhabitants, who came out of their miserable huts when the sons of their lords passed by from the castle, and saluted them in deep sub- jection. Here it was the poor timid kmetes, or peasants, who, without proprietary rights of land and soil, yet with a sort of hereditary title to their farms, were bound to yield rent and military service to their feudal lord ; there the bondmen of the estate, living in a still more abject condition, small crafts- men and servants, who must always be at the master's call as brewers, bakers, turners, brick- makers, keepers, attendants on dogs and horses, etc., and otherwise had to render him a heavy tribute. From among the miserable cabins of earth or wood in the little town, the stone church rose in splendour, an object of almost astonishing adorn- ment amidst the indigent surroundings, yea even surpassing in its outward appearance the house of the nobleman itself. It could not fail to produce an early and abiding impression upon the susceptible minds of the children when they observed how highly the sanctuary of the house of God was FAMILY AND YOUTH. 33 esteemed, with what self-denying solicitude the family was intent upon the embellishment of the church. The grandfather, Andreiv so it was related to the eagerly listening children had more than half a century ago devoted a stone church to St. Anne, upon the spot where a poor little building dedicated to St. Michael had stood before. His son, their uncle John, was at that very time lavishing yet greater sacrifices and wealth of art upon their parish church. With his lively family feeling, with his warm love of country, he rested not until he had conferred enhanced lustre and renown upon the church of his childhood. He was the means, in I 506, of inducing the Archbishop of Gnesen to found a collegiate institute in connection with this church. As soon as he had himself become archbishop, and had returned from his journey to Rome, he caused the church to be enlarged, and its interior completed, in part by Italian architects from Cracow. The new edifice received the name of the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and also Church of St. Michael. As the greatest object of vene- ration, in addition to many other relics and precious vessels, he bestowed upon it the statue of Mary, executed in white marble, which Pope Clement VII. had given to him, faithful Catholic as he was, and regarding which it was quickly rumoured that it was gifted with miraculous powers, and that helpless invalids were healed by touching it, not at all to the hurt of Lask. For during many successive centuries pilgrimages were made from afar to this statue, which is now but little visited and appealed to for help, hidden as it is in the world- forgotten 3 34 JOHN A LA SCO. little town, and, moreover, so concealed behind the altar-piece that it displays its not unattractive features only to those who ask to see it. Many another pious gift, too, of the uncle, such as that sumptuous monstrance, might serve to call up to the -boy's memory the faithful attachment of his family to the church. To the end of his life the Arch- bishop retained this unselfish affection. Ever while the nephew was enjoying the companionship of Erasmus, the uncle extended to prelates and canons the benefits of the college founded two decades before. In this church our Johannes cherished the first dreams and thoughts in his devout boyish mind : that he too, destined by his friends for the clerical career, would one day have willingly tc devote his powers to God on behalf of the Church and at that time also, in childish delight, he was ready to do so in the ways of his fathers. For ol any worship under other forms and modes he could not conceive ; this entirely filled up his youthful soul, It is true, another current was already sweeping through the aisles of many a church even in Poland like the soft resounding note of an ^Eolian harp but we have discovered no indication that the wondrously affecting note had as yet reached the ear of the boy in the Chancellor's church of his native Lask, the note which sounded forth, e.g., in the letter of Bernard of Lublin to Simon of Cracow, even before the time when Luther fixed his theses upon the castle church at Wittenberg, that we have only to believe the Gospel, and all human ordi- nances might safely be annulled. The boys passed no more than their childhood in rustic seclusion at the family castle of Lask, FAMILY AND YOUTH. 35 Perhaps even from the time of the coronation of King Sigismund (1507), or, it may be, only from the time of the uncle becoming Archbishop of Gnesen (1510), the latter received his nephews into his archiepiscopal residence at Cracow, there to bestow upon them a higher education, mainly under his own oversight.* The Archbishop cherished great affection for his family, specially for his brother the Palatine of Sieradz and his talented, highly endowed sons. Willingly did the father grant to the royal chancellor and after-archbishop free rein in the education of his sons. The Archbishop belonged in those days to the number of the most renowned personages of the Polish court. Great services rendered to his fatherland had obtained for him the high position of Primate of the kingdom, and he filled this office in a brilliant manner as an ecclesias- tical prince and a statesman of the first rank. King Casimir had already desired to have the secretary and chancellor of his lord-chancellor in his own immediate service, as had also, but likewise for the time being without success, Kingfo/in Albert. Some few embassies, however, Laski could not decline. He was in Rome when the troops of Charles VIII. entered there (1494), and a second time at the great Jubilee (1500); in like manner we see him at Brussels in the year 1497. In 1502 he becomes chief secretary to the King ; in the following year he is already Chancellor of the kingdom. We can- not follow this energetic man through all the labours by which in that position he rendered such eminent services to king and country, until at the age of * Walewski, Jan Laski, reformator Kosciola (Wars- zawa, 1872), p. 358. 3 6 JOHN A LA SCO. only fifty-four, he attained to the highest dignity in the kingdom. There is presented to us in his person the en- chanting picture of a mighty prince of the Church of that day. His significance lies much more in the civil than the ecclesiastical domain. He ad- ministers his high office with great prudence, and always as one animated by an ardent love of the fatherland. In his actions he is guided in the first instance by his views as a Pole. It is thus he gives his counsel to the King ; thus he raises his powerful voice in the Senate, at the different provincial diets. The Church is not a matter of indifference for him ; far from it. He is and will be a Polish Catholic ; firmly and faithfully is he wedded to his Church, even to its so great errors, so superstitious customs of those days ; while those of his own rank in Rome have only the same pitying smile alike for these and for. the truths of the Gospel. It is not merely a sense of prudence which impels him to obtain an approving papal brief for his edition of the civil laws ; his wish is to have done nothing which might be dis- pleasing to the Pope.* Just as little is it with him imitation of traditional custom : he is really of the devout belief that he shall rest in more sacred soil when he brings with him earth from Jerusalem and from the grave of St. Gregory, and causes it to be emptied out in front of the cathedral church at Gnesen, on the spot where one day his bones are to be laid. With real devotion does he give re- ception to the relics which have been presented * Compare Theiner, Vetera Monumenta Polonies et Lithu- ania (Rome, 1861), ii. 362. FAMILY AND YOUTH. 37 to him in Rome : for such gift he has no sparkling jest at hand. He does not take pleasure in fleecing the credulous multitude by means of such jugglery, and thus drawing a large sum into his own purse ; he takes them home as precious keepsakes, and is ready, among the first, to bow the knee before such objects of veneration. He defends the rights of his Church with all zeal, and desires to safeguard it against the poison of false doctrine. His devout, tolerant Slavonic mind preserves him from the supposition that such protection is to be found in the stake which consumes the body of the heretic. As a Polish ecclesiastical prince, the Archbishop lived in great and brilliant style. It is an abundant inventory of valuables which he devises to friends and relatives in his will.* The long enumeration makes us soon forget that it is the legacy of a servant whose Master, poorer than fox and bird of the air, had not where to lay His head. The Archbishop's position necessitated his holding court, and not in Gnesen alone : in Cracow too he had his residence, where the highest of the kingdom went in and out. Hither he had his three nephews removed so soon as the years came when they must receive a higher education in order to fit them for the career which, in consultation with their father, he selected for them. Jerome and Stanislas were destined to the statesman's office, while our Johannes as it seems, his uncle's favourite was early marked out for an ecclesiastical career. We have not the slightest ground for * Compare Zeissberg, Johannes Laski undsein Testament (in Proceedings of Royal Academy of Sciences] (Vienna, 1874), p. 708, seq. 38 JOHN A LA SCO. supposing that the nephew submitted only with reluctance to such determination. In a high degree had Divine grace endowed him for the sublime vocation, though in such widely different fulfilment from that which the uncle, who is not undeservedly accused of nepotism, dreams of for him. Often may he have looked with satisfaction in those days upon the quiet, gentle boy, with his great thoughtful eyes, as being the heir not only to his name, but, through the exertion of his powerful influence, one day also to his position. It was a vast change, particularly for the mind of an emotional youth, from the quiet of a country life, from the seclusion of his father's castle, to be transferred all at once into the bustling city of Cracow and into the palace of the revered Archbishop. Cracow was then in the days of its splendour. King Casimir the Great, who so much loved the city, had found it at his accession built of wood and earth, but at his death had left it constructed of stone. During the preceding half-century the prosperity of the city had increased with extraordinary strides ; hand in hand therewith had arisen a creative spirit, delighting to give to this wealth an abiding expression in magni- ficent buildings, such as bear fair testimony to a lively taste for art. The very different conditions of later centuries have not succeeded altogether in effacing this expression. Even in the present day the city enchains us by its ancient towering structures, and the judge of architecture still discovers many an edifice which brings to his mind those palmy days of the Jagellonian age. One trait in particular even now manifests itself with great significance ; the twofold current, namely, which FAMILY AND YOUTH. 39 then ran through the whole civil and social life of Poland, finds its living manifestation in the buildings of the city. Above, upon the Wawel, where stands the proud castle, and within the court-yard of the castle the cathedral, there the Polish king has built ; in close contiguity to him, at the foot of the hill and in some bordering streets, likewise the high nobility, spiritual and temporal ; in the city, strictly speaking, the German merchant and tradesman raised his buildings, edifices which furnish eloquent testimony to his wealth, but at the same time to his sense of nationality, his own self-esteem. Among the archi- tects upon the hill, Master Bartholom&us, of Florence, towers specially above the rest. It was he who executed the Jagellon Chapel, a superb masterpiece of the Renaissance. The Germans in the city below would have none of the new style now coming into vogue, nor of the foreign masters from Italy : they fetched their artists from Nuremberg. For years did the renowned master Veit Stoss labour in their princely pay upon his main work, the high altar in the Church of St. Mary at the Circle. These German settlers in Cracow had acquired great privileges, retaining their own civic law and forming almost an independent State within the State. They never became amalgamated with the Poles, but lived in the land a life apart, a separation which was ac- curately reflected in the physiognomy of the town. Down there at the Circle they were their own lords, only overtowered by the royal seat upon the Wawel, and surrounded by the same protecting rampart of the city walls. The stranger who visited Cracow thought himself transported to Nuremberg. The people upon the streets spoke in the language 4 o JOHN A LA SCO. of their home-land ; the enormous commerce which was then so vigorously carried on by water and land at this, the converging point in those days of the intercourse between the East and West, was all in German hands ; the flourishing trade, too, was ex- clusively German, maintained, in conjunction with the old well-organised guilds of the fatherland, in the ancient and strictly regulated ordinances and customs of the German citizens. Everywhere, upon the streets, in the houses, in the guild chambers and halls, prevailed a most active and bustling life. That which must most favourably strike one in a city like Cracow at this time is the remarkable prominence given to the burgher element, side by side with the imposing splendour and glory of the residence of a king whose voice was mighty in the council of crowned heads a burghership which was conscious of its own importance, and with pride also knew how to maintain its rights in presence of a haughty nobility. It was not thus at all in accord with the other relations in the land. Nor was it yet known at that time, that the powerful nobility would gradually, to the ruin of the country, force back this so important element, and deprive it of its privileges. With great earnestness and jealous care did the uncle watch over the education of the nephews com- mitted to his charge. He demanded much of them and imposed severe discipline, because he intended one day to confer much upon them, and would con- fer this only upon men who were called, by reason of their vigour and ability, to be an ornament of their country. Cracow offered even in those days a choice of very fine schools ; the Archbishop, however, pre- FAMILY AND YOUTH. 41 ferred, as was then customary with the nobility of higher rank, to provide private tuition for his wards, who were accordingly placed in the hands of a pedagogue. This course was the more imperative in the present case, inasmuch as the uncle was often obliged to stay for a long time together in other places, while Cracow remained the constant dwelling- place of his nephews. Such a tutor was looked upon as a member of the family. He remained year after year in the house, and accompanied the sons to the University. In his later days he obtained, as a rule, some kind of engagement, generally as secre- tary or steward to his former pupil, and at last a generous provision for his old age. We are perhaps justified in regarding John Braniczky as such peda- f ?o early proceeded in a surprising manner from tli.: youth, exert its influence upon those only who ame in contact with him for the first time : equal :v did it exert this upon the nearest occupants of th ,- house, who, in the intimacy of 64 JOHN A LA SCO. a common life, received undisturbed the same agree- able impression from the moral purity of this personality. After the two brothers had been separated for a time Jerome wrote to his uncle from Bologna : " When I met my beloved brother Johannes again here, I became a new man ; by him all my weariness of life was driven far away, all tedium disappeared, and all delight in labour returned with him in enhanced degree. He has augmented the stores of his mind and his knowledge, which he has manifested in discourse of prose and verse, and that far beyond the measure of other young men, during his sojourn in Germany; he has certainly not idled away his time and counted the sand, but has read and listened to the most distinguished authors. One cannot but admire the power of memory, the perseverance, the gravity \constantia et severitas\ with which the youth is inspired, so that we are all filled with respect and reverence for him \ut eum omnes facile timemus et veneramur\ ; * one thing we most earnestly implore, that many years of life may be granted to him. I do not make this boast of him as my brother, but rather as a good and most honourable young man, with whom, so long as we are together here, I will advance in common in the good arts with all the power of my manhood." That the brother also, in like manner as the preceptor, does not suppress the wish for long life to this rare youth, inspires us with the apprehension that the bodily sufferings with which * If I might recall to memory a theologian of the nineteenth century who also from youth up compelled the same reverential homage for his person, the noble form of my ever-to-be-re- membered tutor, Nitzsch, presents itself to my mind. Compare Beyschlag, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (Berlin, 1872), p. 7. THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 65 we see the overtasked man afterwards visited may have thus early made their appearance. But we must return to our scholar and his studies at the seat of the Muses in Bologna. As Poles our youthful students were counted to belong to the University of the Ultramontani, which, in opposition to the University of the Citra- montani, consisted of scholars from eighteen different non -Italian nations, and enjoyed as such full civic rights, together with the great privileges which Bologna, in opposition to the Sorbonne, conceded to the scholars. For in Bologna the students from ancient time formed the Corporation, and elected the heads thereof from their own midst ; the tutors were subject to them.* Originally only a twofold School of Law, there were added, as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, an Art School for the Philosophers and Medical Men, and further, as a fourth High School, the Theological School, founded by Innocent VI. in the second half of the same century, which by a peculiarity was constituted after the model of the Sorbonne, so that in it not the scholars, but the professors, formed the Cor- poration. Alike in the School of Law as in the School of Arts and that of Theologians had our Johannes to attend lectures, since, in the first place, the humanistic studies had not yet come to a close ; and then the further studies, on canonical law and that which the theological faculty afforded, were superadded. Unhappily we cannot accompany our young priest in his professional studies at Bologna. All attempts Cf. thereon Savigny, Geschichte des Romischen Rechts im Mittelalter (Heidelberg, 1816), Hi., p. 141. 5 66 JOHN A LA SCO. to get into a right track there, for presenting us with a picture of the theological studies of that time, have proved failures. It would not have been an attrac- tive picture ; the student certainly could not in those days draw any enthusiasm for his " precious office " (i Tim. iii. i) from the theological lectures, which were limited almost entirely to the knowledge of canonical law. Cochlceus, in after-years so bitter an opponent of Luther, and exerting himself with more than importunateness to guard the far-ofif Poland against the poison of the Reformation, was then living in Bologna for the sake of his studies ; after the lapse of only a short time, he was already weary of his theological pursuits at the University. To his benefactor, the renowned Wilibald Pirkheimer, in Nuremberg, whose nephew he accompanied as tutor to Bologna, he describes the condition of the theologic studies in his certainly a little overdrawn and altogether too peevish elegiac epistle : " It is a misery to be occupied here with the sacred science, without a tutor, without books, without resources. The lectures are delivered by pitiable monks ; with them I will not lose my time : they are nothing but sophists ; they chase after shadows. I attend no lectures, therefore, but keep myself shut up at home."* Like complaints are uttered with regard to the teachers of canonical law. The most learned of them has no teaching gift ; the other speaks so low that he cannot be understood ; the third is so learned that he often digresses to the most extraneous sub- jects ; a fourth is a twaddler ; a fifth a young man without information. * Heumann, Documenta litteraria (Altdorfii, 1758), p. 12. THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 67 If we abate somewhat from the arrogant and dis- dainful judgment of the German, prejudiced as he is against the Italians, there is still left a residuum which is confirmed from other quarters. The theolo- gical studies were in those days far outstripped by the humanistic. While in the latter a new life was awakening, like the shaking and moving which the prophet beheld when he looked upon the dry bones; while here, in a beauty unimagined before, the world of the Greeks and Romans arose as from a grave before the intoxicated vision, and all the intellectual activity of the contemporaries was directed, as with gigantic power and almost spasmodic energy, to the raising of this so wonderful treasure ; theology, on the other hand, had fallen behind and moved on in the primitive ruts, untouched by all that which, like an earthquake, stirred the hearts of contemporaries to their depths, drifting along in an almost guile- less way, without a single foreboding, towards the point at which its miner's-candle of scholasticism is extinguished by the gust of the new age. Precisely such old renowned universities as Bologna are readily exposed to the temptation of clinging rigidly to that which is traditional. It may have been monks who piled up around the esta- blished dogmas this infinite series of questions, of reasons and counter-reasons, of definitions, distinc- tions, syllogisms, and corollaries, as the autumn wind covers a grave with withered leaves ; but such afflic- tion must have been unendurable to a youthful spirit, which had already for years past breathed in the clear, pure, bracing air of the ancient authors, two- fold affliction at a time when in all the domains of life a new movement was astir, and scholasticism 68 JOHN A LA SCO. likewise, in more than one place, manifested the germs of dissolution. Even the papal edict, which the uncle had read a year before to the assembled Fathers of the council, had proclaimed a rupture with the essential character of scholasticism, however much it is the case that this edict is still penetrated by the self-consciousness which animated scholasti- cism in its palmy days, and, under the impulse of this feeling, simply decrees that which one feels one's self too weak to prove. The name of only one theologian, at whose lectures our scholar was certainly wont to attend, have we been able to discover ; it is Chrysostomus Casalenus. Leo X. had permitted Peter Pomponatius to write a defence of his work, already mentioned, on the immortality of the soul, only on condition that this professor at Bologna should add oppositions thereto and print them along with it. Unfortunately we could not find this treatise (defensorium) . Apart from the interest inspired by such a sic et non writing (2 Cor. i. 1 8), issued as it was at the papal command, and shedding great light upon the spirit of the time, the book would have been further valuable as enabling us to form a conception of the master at whose feet our Laski sat. For the exposition of Holy Scripture Bologna also possessed a professor's chair ; but for a long time past this important branch had become de- generated or overgrown into an exposition of the exposition, in which the subtlety of the prevalent theologic tendency found a wide and pleasant field for running riot, now indeed no longer an authority entirely unquestioned. As early as 1516 there appeared in Genoa a psalterium in four languages ; THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD, tg two years before this the first volume of the great Complutensian Bible of Cardinal Ximenez had already appeared, with a dedication to Pope Leo X. ; and Erasmus' Greek edition of the New Testament was already in the hand of many in Italy. The book was read and explained, like so many another newly discovered Greek author, as we should say from a purely philological point of view, without measuring the full range which this study would so soon have over there beyond the mountains. Men began also to read the Old Testament in the original language. They might appeal in favour of this step, so far as Bologna was concerned, to that ordinance of Clement V. at the Council of Vienne (1311), accord- ing to which six professors of the Oriental languages were to be appointed, to this university among others, not in order to render possible to the clergy an understanding of the Scripture in the original tongue, but in order to form skilled champions against Jews and Mohammedans. This ordinance had become almost forgotten in the course of time. But now, the same year in which our friends went to Bologna, Theseus Ambrogius a sort of Mezzofanti of the sixteenth century, who is said to have been acquainted with eighteen languages was appointed by the Pope Professor of Oriental Literature.* We know positively that our young theologian did not avail himself of the favourable opportunity thus afforded him, for it was almost a decade later that he learnt the Hebrew ; the Archbishop might naturally conjecture that but little profit was to be derived from the knowledge of this language for the Roscoe, ii. 151. 7 o JOHN A LA SCO. career which he designed to open to his favourite nephew in the Church of his native land. A special activity prevailed during the residence of our friends at Bologna in the province of philo- sophy, in which province a quick-sighted eye might even then have seen that spirit most astir which brought to a close the mediaeval period, and power- fully furthered for Italy its transformation into the form of the Renaissance. We can hardly suppose that our young theologian remained at this early period unmoved by the working of this spirit. Until then Aristotle and his dialectics had dominated the thought of men through the centuries, exerting an influence such as certainly no other far-famed philo- sopher had ever exerted. The researches of the Humanists had brought to light fresh writings of the master, which considerably extended the circle of their knowledge. Specially since the fall of Constantinople (1453) had an acquaintance with the writings of Plato likewise become widely diffused in Italy ; and so many a " Platonic academy " attested the enthusiastic affection cherished for this world- famed sage. Both heroes of the intellect found their ardent admirers, not at first in a sense mutually exclusive, but the longer the time that elapsed the sharper became the accentuation of the difference. There is certainly a diverse tendency of mind in the two Dioscuri, that primeval divergence which was also manifested in the most vigorous days of scholas- ticism. In Bologna itself main representatives of the two tendencies were then engaged in teaching. Alexander Achilinus, himself a Bolognese, who died in his native town in 1518, exerted considerable power. Ritter judges of him that his philosophical THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 71 writings still bear altogether the stamp of scholas- ticism, and concede to the renowned Averroes a great influence upon his investigations.* But yet doubt as to the soundness of its propositions already obtrudes. Achilinus walks in the ways of a Duns Scotus ; he espouses Realism again; Aristotle speaks to him in this sense. Side by side with him there was teaching at the University in those years the Peter Pomponatius already several times mentioned, still, it is true, involved in scholastic tenets, but yet more decidedly accessible to doubt. Through the instrumentality of the well-known Platonist Ficinus, he became familiarised with Plato's writings ; he suspects indeed that the two famous sages do not in all respects agree ; but there is wanting to him the earnest impulse of truth for following up the differ- ence and surrendering himself to the consequences so important for that age. Pomponatius often in Bologna engaged in a scientific contest with Achilinus. " It is related that they measured themselves with each other, and the former sought by means of witty turns to escape the force of the scientific arguments which the latter knew how to urge." It would be a great satisfaction if we could only discover now whether these intellectual conflicts and scientific endeavours exerted any influence upon the development of our friend, and if so, of what kind. But all effort to come upon the track of farther in- formation as to his course of study at Bologna proved in vain ; and it remained to us only to make the modest attempt, above presented, to combine in * Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophic (Hamburg, 1850), ix., p. 382 seq. t Ritter, ibid,, p. 427. 7 2 JOHN A LA SCO. one the sparse notices, as regards so many questions unsatisfactory in their nature, which lie scattered here and there. We are enabled therefrom at least to recognise the nature of the influence under which Laski was brought or perhaps, to express ourselves more cautiously, may have been brought during his stay in Bologna in connection with his theological studies. Nor does our young theologian seem to have found any particularly excellent models in the preacher's office at the High School. We are again led to fall back upon the as it seems to us, exaggerated statements of Cocklaus, as he lashes the style of preaching with the following drastic strokes : " Most of the fast preachers are, if I may so say, rather buffoons or declamatory strolling players than preachers, than apostles, than Augustines. While many, surpassing each other in a foolish manner in gesticulations and in voice, think they are imitating Paul or Cicero, they yet speak and act only hypocritically to the people. Is it to be wondered at that they accomplish nothing in this manner ? When they wish to be passionate, they gallop through the discourse without observing a comma ; to and fro they move their heads like crows, spring up, run about the pulpit here and there, cry out, fight with their arms, turn their backs upon the congrega- tion, specially when they pray for the congregation to the little crucifix standing behind them ; outwardly they weep, inwardly they laugh and please them- selves infinitely."* Not entirely undisturbed by external things did * Heumann, p. 10. THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 73 the student years at Bologna pass away. A few events must also have projected themselves into the quiet life of our familiar friends. For the most part they lived a life of retirement. In order to attach his pupils to their home, Braniczki had obtained a pair of guitars, with the art of playing upon which the Radziwills and Laskis were not unacquainted ; a passage from a letter of our friend in later time to Beatus Rhenanus shows that he heartily loved music, and was no stranger to a theoretic knowledge of it. But the position of the families of our young Polish nobles in their native land was too distinguished to admit of their being able to spend their days unobserved in the city of the Muses, intent only upon their studies. The Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, Achilles de Grassis, was protector of Poland at the papal see, and the uncle maintained a continual familiar intercourse with this exalted personage, an acquaintance which assuredly also served the nephews in good stead. As is well known, Leo X. held in 1516 the re- nowned and momentous interview with Francis /. in Bologna. From the time of the glorious victory of the chivalrous hero and King at Marignano, the Pope was obliged to take every step for entering into friendly intercourse with the victor ; the meet- ing at Bologna was to give its expression to these endeavours. Great privileges were here granted to the French king. The Pragmatic Sanction, subject of so much controversy, was indeed annulled ; but the most important privileges and immunities conveyed by it were renewed by a special Act, which then became the basis of the " freedom of the Gallican 74 JOHN A LA SCO. Church." These days were of importance for the subsequent career of our Johannes, from the fact that here, as we strongly suspect, the acquaintance of the younger brother Stanislas with the King of France was formed, by whom brought about we have not the material for learning. Upon many a name we might fix by conjecture ; of what avail would it be, so long as we could arrive at no certainty ? A few weeks after this august meeting serious collisions had arisen among the Bolognese students between the different nationalities. The Germans turned out against the Lombards ; quickly the young fiery blood had recourse to the sword, to the unwieldy musket ; for two days the fierce turmoil lasted on the streets. On the side of the Germans were ranged, among other nationalities, also the Hungarians and the Poles. Whether our chivalrous Poles, too, expert as they were in the handling of weapons, betook themselves to the sword, we cannot say ; at any rate, however, they heard in these stormy days a manly German knight, as advocate of the Germans, and thus also of the Poles allied with them, vigorously represent before the partial governor the injustice done to them ; it was no less a man than Ulrich von Hutten* We have not met with any hint, either in Laski or Hutten, which might lead to the supposition of a mutual personal acquaintance between the two during their con- temporaneous stay in Bologna. Numerous as are the points of contact which might be discovered in the character of the two men, equally far-reaching * Compare the account which Hutten furnishes to Erasmus m the standard edition of Hutten' s works by Booking, i. 146. THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 75 are the differences, and in particular on that point from which a radiant light falls upon the pure form of our Laski, who was likewise younger by more than a decade than the errant German knight. The mention of Hutten's name gives rise for us to the question whether indeed the lightning-flash pene- trated to the dwelling of our Poles which proceeded from the " Letters of Obscure Men " (first issued at that time),* and flamed with bright glare in the whole intellectual horizon, the incomparable note of the morning, telling that a deep dark night is past, and, in the victorious wit of Humanism, that dawn is breaking, which announces a new and fairer day. In the composition of the second part of these letters Hutten had a considerable share, "f" and that while he was at Bologna. With the portraits of the letter-writers the German hero had become suffi- ciently acquainted during his travels and journeyings through Germany ; and if the features of these obscure men had paled for him in the sunny Italy, Rome and Bologna could furnish him with sub- stitutes, for these obscure men wandered homeless throughout the world ; their form met one in Cologne as well as in Bologna, with a Latinity which ever and anon reminds of the German of the Polish Jews, like the Jews too, an errant people, without a native land, and with a jargon half dead, half living. When we call to mind the description of the fast preachers, as given us by CocJdaus, and consider what a deep impression this appearance made upon Hutten in * " Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." See Sir William Hamilton's Discussions on Philosophy (1852), p. 204, etc. t For the proof see Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten (Leipsic, 1858), i., p. 266 seq. 76 JOHN A LA SCO. Bologna, with his overflowing wit, his talent for satire, methinks it is as though, clothed with flesh and blood, they stared upon us in Hutten's letters. The summer of 1516 was oppressively hot.* It appears that our Johannes, who, as already indicated, was not of very robust health, was driven away by the burning heat to more northerly regions. The great holidays of six weeks' duration began indeed in Bologna only on the day of Mary's nativity (/th September) ; j" but Johannes may well, on account of the extreme heat and his suffering condition of body, have closed his studies earlier, and have prepared for a journey to the cooler north. At any rate, we refer to this summer-time the notice in the letter of Jerome lying before us in manuscript, which unhappily contains neither day nor year of its composition, and in which we have found the beautiful expression of joy at the return of the beloved brother. As to what parts of Germany were visited in this journey, what important person- ages he became acquainted with, nothing can be learnt, despite all researches made. The residence in Bologna was hastening to an end. In most cases strangers remained three years at the University. So greatly had this become the custom that every scholar had the right to remain three years in his dwelling, during which time the owner of the house could not give him warning.^ Our Poles did not remain their full triennium. The uncle had left Rome as early as the first days of August, 1515; and, after a brief stay in Vienna and then with the Cardinal Archbishop of Gran, had * Heumann, p. 9. f Savigny, iii. 232. I Ibid., p. 185 THE FIRST STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. made his entry into Cracow, where the prelates and prebendaries had received him in state at the gate of the city nearest to the Wawel. For the support of his nephews and students at Bologna, he had deposited sufficient money with the banking-house of the Fnggers in Rome. He had continued in uninterrupted lively intercourse with them ; in the year 1517 he recommends in his testament his nephew Johannes, student at Bologna, to his successor in the archiepiscopal see. He speaks of him as possessing a studious, devout, and grateful spirit.* In the following year a disconnected passage in this same testament occasions us surprise. It may belong to the beginning of the year, and the incident relate to the close of 15 17. " Our nephew Johannes has, in consequence of I know not what error, persuasion, or occasion, withdrawn from the Univer- sity of Bologna ; nor do I know whither he has repaired. I fear that I shall be involved in costs from this business."t Our Johannes cannot have been long absent from Italy ; for it was in the spring of i 5 i 8 that he was excommunicated at Rome. His cousin, Martin Rambiewski, it must be known, had drawn a bill in Rome for six hundred and seventy gulden in the name of our Johannes, of which the latter knew nothing. Rambiewski seems to have fallen into somewhat doubtful society in Rome, and to have laid out more money in country pleasures and the purchase of expensive pictures than his means admitted, and so, pressed by his creditors and led astray in an evil moment, to have had recourse to the expedient hazardous in itself, * Zeissberg, Johannes Laski u. sein Testam., p. 679. t Ibid., p. 689. ;g JOHN A LA SCO. and fraught with such serious consequences for our Johannes* Since the latter was unable to pay the sum, of the borrowing of which he had no suspicion, on the day on which it fell due, he was visited with the punishment usual in similar cases, until such time as the uncle had cancelled the debt on behalf of his innocent nephew, f For the punishment of such offences at that time in Rome excommunication was, as we may well say, abused. It was degraded to a simple measure of police, a sort of arrest for debt, without any further disagreeable consequences, even for a priest, so soon as the occasion was removed. In this light also the uncle looked upon the punishment. In a pretty detailed letter to his king, in which he touched upon this case too, he says, " Many clergy as well as laity in high position have already been visited with this punishment, without its being possible on that account to designate them as bad men. Often even have emperors and kings been laid under this penalty, without any kind of stain being attached to them thereby." J And upon our Johannes, too, it inflicted no stigma, specially since he suffered it so undeservedly. When also in after-years, upon a much more serious occasion, he drew down upon himself the punish- ment of expulsion, albeit unpronounced, it was yet powerless to hurt his character, or by such imperious decision of the Church to separate him from his Lord and Saviour. * Compare also Tomiciana, vii. 23. + Zeissberg, p. 701. \ Tomiciana, vi. 68. IV. A T HOME A GA IN. AFTER an absence of five years, our Joliannes returned to his native land. We have accom- panied him on his student travels, and have, so far as the obscurity of the history has not obliterated all traces, followed his footsteps. Wherever a happy fate has granted us to look him more closely in the face, we recognise the same charming traits of the youth who, pure and severe in morals, goes his way with cheerful heart ; whom his high descent, his powerful kindred, do not release from earnest studies ; who employs his time as one who has to rely only upon his own exertions for his advance- ment. We should on so many, many points have been glad of more perfect knowledge of his course of study, in order perhaps to see, already standing before the eyes of the youth in these days, and in his habit of thought, the goal which the man after- wards apprehended with such firm hand. We were obliged to content ourselves with such small results from researches widely extended. Whether more fortunate and thorough investigations would afford us fuller insight into the development of the inner life of our hero is questionable, because that age is 80 JOHN A LA SCO. only too niggardly for our wishes in its communi- cations with regard to such mental conditions. What proofs of his maturity for entering upon his chosen calling Laski brought home from the University, we know not. Perhaps we have not to set down this ignorance exclusively to the sparse- ness of the communications made to us. Examina- tions in the sense of our anxious, careful age were not then required in order to pass the threshold of official dignities and burdens. The examination for the obtaining of the title of licentiate or that for doctor of canon law Laski did not undergo in Bologna,* probably because he was not disposed to undergo it, inasmuch as his prospective mode of life lay in another direction, in which he could dis- pense with such dignities. It was of service to him only to have resided for a certain time at a dis- tinguished university for the pursuit of his studies. How these years were then actually employed mattered not much, specially if one enjoyed the protection of influential personages. This aid was certainly not wanting to the son of a distinguished palatine, nephew of the Primate and Archbishop of Gnesen ; and the first ripened fruits of such a relationship had already fallen into his lap before he had crossed the frontiers of his native land. Of so many reproaches made to the Archbishop of Gnesen by his many and decided opponents, who were for the most part envious of him, there is not one which has a greater amount of foundation than when he is accused of nepotism in availing himself * The requirements for a degree are described by Savig-ny iii. 193. A T HOME A GA IN. 8 1 of his exalted position to advance his relatives in their career. The uncle, as already related, had returned to Poland from the Lateran Council in 1515, loaded with tokens of personal favour on the part of the Pope and of recognition of his exalted position. Among other marks of honour, he was himself as the first, and each of his successors in the archiepis- copal see in turn, appointed a legatus natus, a high distinction granted only to a few bishoprics, and one which at the same time invests the occupant for the time being of the archiepiscopal throne with the rank and dignity of a papal nuncio, who as such also has direct communication with the pope and the ruler of the land. The kindly Archbishop was not slow to raise his nephew to the first round of the ladder to whose topmost round he had himself climbed, and which he was minded one day at his death to yield up to the much-promising young man. Even while the scholar was pursuing his studies in Bologna, he made him canon (canonicus) at the Collegiate Institute in Leczyc, the principal town of the palatinate of the same name, in which the father held the dignity of palatine from the year 1506 to this year of the appointment of his son as canon (1517). The son will assuredly not have resided, any more than the father had done, in this unwholesome place, surrounded on every side by swamps. On the 3Oth of December, 1517, a further and higher rank was added. The young man, who was preparing for his homeward journey, was nominated coadjutor to the Dean of Gnesen.* * According to the excerpts from the " Acta Capit. 6 82 JOHN A LA SCO. And it seemed as though even yet sufficient honours were not placed upon the youthful head, which was still in Bologna, bending over the folios of canonical law. In the same fateful year in which the hammer-strokes on the Castle-church at Wittenberg reverberated with such powerful and lasting effect through the whole edifice of the church, Leo X. granted to the youth of hardly eighteen years the title to the custodianship of Leczyc, and in addition to this the canonicate of Cracow and Flock.* Enough benefices, truly, for one at the beginning of his career ! The securing of the papal ratification to these offices for his nephew was not accomplished by the uncle on moderate terms. We are hardly any longer surprised or astonished when we unexpectedly light upon an out-of-the-way passage in which we find the charges for such a commission at the papal see of those days entered with an innocence as great as though it had only been a question of the purchase of a sheep : in Rome everything was disposed of for money in those days ; and only he who paid the price obtained the simoniacal wares. "Fourteen hundred gulden" so the careful uncle enters in his testament under the year 1 5 1 7 " changed into a thousand gold gulden, have I sent to Rome for the prosecution of the business re- garding the custodianship of Flock and Leczyc. My marshal, Nicholas Wolski, knows the order" \prdinem ; probably the word indicates among what series of officials and in what gradation the sum has Gnesn." very kindly furnished to me by the Canon Koryt- kowski. * Theiner, Vetera monumenta Polom'ce, ii., p. 378. AT HOME AGAIN. 83 to be divided] " of distribution of this thousand gulden ; and this is made in the interest of my nephew Johannes." * The benevolence of the uncle was not restricted to the providing with these benefices. It was necessary to place abundant means at the disposal of the nephew, in order that he might be able to live in a style becoming his position. Even the income, however, from the posts just mentioned for the demands, already made upon young ecclesiastical princes at that time, amply balanced a great revenue piled up from accumulated posts did not suffice for the reckless liberality, the free, large-hearted hos- pitality which is natural to the Pole, and at all times has distinguished his n'obles, but has also at all times seriously damaged him, and that not in the domain of property alone. It was necessary to open further sources of revenue. The archbishops of Gnesen had great possessions in the palatinate of Rava, in Masovia, specially in Lowicz and Squiernievice, towns which belonged to them, and in which they held fortified castles.f The income derived from these extensive properties was not small. As early as the year 1517 the uncle leased out the two properties to the Bishop of Chelm, Nicholas Koscxielcczky, and to his nephew John, while the latter was still in Bologna, for two * Zeissberg, p. 676. t For information acquired or tested on the spot respecting two of the Archbishop's seats, Lowicz " Archiepiscopi Gnezn. sedes, cujus arx in mediis paludibus sita est" and Squire- nievice (Skiernievice) " Ubi Archiep. Gnezn. palatium habet" Dalton's own work must be consulted. The last-named locality is now famous as the meeting-place of the three emperors, September," 1884. TR. 84 JOHN A LA SCO. thousand gulden a year ; and when, in the following year, the Bishop died, the liberated portion of the property was leased to the chapter of Gnesen. Thus also provision was made for securing to the beloved nephew an income for his subsistence ; so that his career even in this respect began under the most favourable conditions.* In after-years, when our Johannes walked in the light of the Gospel, and found his highest glory in being a poor but faithful servant of his poor and faithful Master, his eye was open and clear to perceive the deep injury which the Church has suffered from such distribution and accumulation of her spiritual offices. It is but a small consolation in connection with such glaring failures that in this case so much distinction in such immature years was not bestowed upon one unworthy of the office. That, however, the youthful Canon of Cracow and Plock, who, from the time of his ordination as priest in 1521, had been advanced from his position of a mere coadjutor in Gnesen to be the actual dean of the metropolitan church there, must have been approved among his companions in the spiritual office and have drawn upon himself the eyes of the chapter, is to be inferred from the fact that he took part, as representative of the metropolitan cathedral chapter at Gnesen, in the Provincial Synod at Petrikow in 1521. He did not owe to his kinship with the Archbishop alone a mission of so great honour ; the distinguished chapter aimed at being represented on such an occasion by a learned and able person. The protocols of the synod I * Zeissberg, p. 689. AT HOME AGAIN. 85 have not at hand. Of the mighty reformatory movements which had been agitating Germany for nearly four years past, not a ripple had yet reached the distant shore of this synod ; not until the following year does there resound in the as- semblies an echo of that which had already pene- trated into so many a baronial castle of Poland, so many a citizen's dwelling in its towns. Other questions stirred the hearts in this provincial synod too, among these that of a war contribution, in which the clergy likewise were to take part. The arduous conflicts with the German order of knights, although crowned with success for Poland hitherto, were not yet fully brought to a close ; at a con- vention at Bromberg (it is the Polish Bidgostid] on the4th of December, I 520, the amount of contribution was fixed.* The Archbishop had complied with this injunction, and indeed as early as March had sent his nephew and dean, Johannes, with six hundred gulden to Thorn, where the King was holding his court at the time.'j' But in Poland, too, that spirit was moving which in the Reformation made its procession through all lands. We have not to accompany its course through that land ; our task imposes narrower limits upon our recital. The way for the Reformation here too was prepared by many a precursor's labour, mediately, as everywhere else, by so many open and manifest disorders under which the Church and her ministers were suffering in a terrible degree ; in this * Tomtciana, v. 338. On the events of the war see Voigt, Geschicte Preussens . . . bis zum Untergang dcs Dcutschen Ordens (Konigsberg, 1838), ix., p. 575 seq. + Tomiciana, v. 366. 86 JOHN A LA SCO. land, the movement was supported, too, by the pious and serious mind which animated the people and not a few of the ablest and most prominent re- presentatives of its nobility. To many another mediate preparatory work, having its basis in the peculiar relations of that land in which the Hussite movement still continued to quiver, we have already referred in the introduction. Nor was there wanting immediate contact. How was this to be avoided, considering the high position which Poland occupied in the council of the nations in those days, and the love of travel on the part of the nobility, who sent their sons by preference to foreign universities ? At an early period Polish youths were to be found in Wittenberg also, among the hundreds of students that flocked thither out of the lands of all princes. In addition to this, we have to take into account the strong German element, which gave the tone in almost all the cities, especially of Greater Poland, and preserved a lively sympathy with all that was taking place in the old home-land. Dantsic became the advanced post of this movement in the Polish territory. As early as 1518 the Dominican monk Jacob Knade raised his manly voice there against the abuses of the Church ; with firm courage, lie frees himself from the vows of his order, and is one of the first monks to take a wife. The excitement enkindled by him communicated itself quickly to the whole town, flashed over to the other German sister-towns of Poland : Thorn, Posen, Elbing, Braunsberg ; like fiery beacons blaze wherever the burning language of a bold preacher of the Gospel touches the in- flammable material so abundantly present in the AT HOME AGAI^. 87 towns. Already the Polish bishops observe the portentous sign of conflagration here and there, and have a foreboding of danger. One of the earliest notes of warning on their part is, I believe, the letter of the renowned Vice- Chancellor, Peter Tomiczki, to the Castellan of Posen and Captain-General of Greater Poland.* But yet how little does this bishop of Posen know of the true ground and reach of this movement ; how little does he know of the feeling of Lucas von Cork a when he writes to him, " I hear that the Lutheran sect is spreading [pullulare] from day to day in the district of Posen, and is doing all with impunity. Your Magnificence will perceive how destructive this poison is, since such proceedings spring not from virtue, but from shamelessness ; . . . such evils come about if we do not resist the beginnings." In Cracow, the Bishop alleges, the Palatine has, in association with the citizens and clergy, diligently and with great effort suppressed these excesses. He cannot under- stand why the forbidden books are suffered to pass with impunity from hand to hand in Posen ; and people see how in the churches unbridled and blasphemous discourses are held, which presently find their ready echo in the ale-houses and social meetings. The letter of the Vice-Chancellor was a precursor of the severe measures to which the Government roused itself in the following year, when the thunder- clouds of the Reformation gathered ever more threateningly in the land. The edict of the King, which appeared in the summer of 1523, likewise * Tomiciana, vi. 87. JOHN A LA SCO. bears distinct indications that the counsellors of Sigismund did not even then understand the nature of the Reformation, and therefore urged the King to measures at the povverlessness of which for the attainment of the end in view we cannot suppress a smile. The King, certainly animated by a devout spirit, wishes to preserve his land undefiled and uninfected by the plague which rages in the neigh- bouring territory. He fancies he will yet succeed in doing so by means of a strict prohibition of the introducing of writings of the Reformation ; and to this end he appoints a sort of inquisitional tribunal, before which all matters relating thereto are to be brought, and to which the right is conceded of making a search in every house after such heretical books. Proceedings of unwonted severity are threatened against the possessors of such books, the disseminators of such heretical errors. A glance, however, at the result of these measures, which threatened the transgressor with death and the confiscation of all his possessions, reminds us of the truth of the proverb, that too much sharpening notches the knife. The clergy, disturbed in their comfortable existence by the strange occurrences in the neighbouring land, approved of such measures, and credited them with the necessary force. So also the man who stood at the head of the Polish Church. We must confess that the Archbishop during a long and brilliant career in Church and State had become too much of an ecclesiastical politician for being able to acquire in the evening of his life an appreciation of the ideas of the Reformation. That which reached him with regard to it on his exalted seat appeared to him, AT HOME AGAIA 7 . 89 the ecclesiastical prince, as a revolutionary renuncia- tion of the obedience due to the Church, and there- with, according to his firm conviction, to the Head of the Church, Jesus Christ Himself. For such mis- deed no punishment could appear to him too severe. Presently after the issue of the royal edict, in which we assuredly hear the voice of the mighty Primate resounding, he summoned the clergy to a synod in Leczyc (/th October, 1523), at which the notorious Bull of Leo X., " Exsurge Domine," against Luther, and the royal manifesto, were taken as the standard in accordance with which the council "rejects and con- demns (excommunicamus et anathematizamus] every heresy which lifts up its head against the holy, orthodox, and catholic faith, and against the Roman Church, in particular the heresy which has proceeded from Luther and Hus." Yes, if such lordly decisions and anathematisings were able to quench the Spirit which proceeds from God. Our JoJiannes was no longer present when this synod met. Not that he would have intentionally withdrawn himself from such heresy-hunting doings. We have no reason whatever for supposing that in those days he had already severed himself from the views of his uncle, or looked with other eyes than those of the main representatives of his Church upon the movement which was accomplishing itself in foreign lands. That goad had not yet been pressed into his heart against which a Saul of Tarsus found himself too weak to struggle. He was in full career ascending the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment. Hardly had he been made Dean of Gnesen, and therewith, even in his twenty-fourth year, attained to the highest post of the chapter, before the uncle was JOHN A LA SCO. meditating new and higher dignities for the nephew and, as he hoped, successor. On the 22nd of September, 1522, the Bishop of Plock, Erasmtis Ciolek, one of the bitterest opponents of the Arch- bishop, on account of whom he had a few months before appealed in a worthily composed letter of vindication to the King, had died. Almost a year passed away without this important post being filled up ; differences had arisen between the Pope and the King of Poland with regard to the appointment. The Archbishop sought during the General Conven- tion at Cracow in the summer days of 1523 to induce the King to select the nephew as coadjutor of the bishopric of Plock. That seemed to the King to be too much for one, of however great promise, who was still so young. While refusing to his primate this request, he agreed to use his influence with the Pope by a letter, to the end that at the next nomination the provostship of Leczyc might be bestowed upon the nephew.* All these distinctions were not able to bind the young man to the land ; no ambition now impelled him to distinguish himself on the spot, and rapidly to climb the further steps, at a time when everything in his native land seemed to be disposed in his favour. He was strongly attracted again to foreign lands. The reason for this feeling is not clear. Certainly the life passed abroad some years before had inspired him with a longing for the refreshing intercourse of men who, themselves standing at the highest point of the humanistic movement, had kindled in him the love for those studies, the desire * Compare thereon the spiteful account of Krzycki (Tomt- ciana, vi. 292). AT HOME AGAIN. 91 for a closer community of life with themselves. But there was also much in his own land which was beyond doubt likely to repel him, and to banish him from a society in which he was able to trace only too clearly the odious machinations of vulgar intrigue.* If the opportunity was afforded to our Johannes, who in those years was living for the most part in Cracow and how should the opportunity be wanting to him ? for obtaining an insight into the meanness of disposition in many a prominent eccle- siastic, whose doings in truth powerfully drew the Church towards a reformation, we cannot be surprised that he should wish to be removed from such surroundings, and longed for a while again, far from all hateful commotion, to breathe the pure atmo- sphere of humanistic studies and enjoy the society of men whom he could look upon with esteem. * Amongst the most unscrupulous opponents of the Arch- bishop at this period is to be mentioned Peter Tomiczi, Bishop of Cracow and Vice-Chancellor of the kingdom, who had formerly been on terms of friendship with the Primate. Tomiczi was ably seconded in his designs by the ambitious Andreas Krzycki, then Provost of Posen, and soon after Bishop of Przemisl, to whom we shall have occasion to refer more than once. V. THE OTHER STUDENT TRAVELS ABROAD. r I "'HEY were warm days, in every sense, at the -i- time of the diet which was held in Cracow during June and July, 1523. The time of assem- bling had been somewhat delayed on account of the pest which, at the beginning of the year, had shown itself in Cracow. The question of the filling up of the bishopric of Plock, which was among those dis- cussed on the sultry summer days at Cracow, could not yet be brought to a settlement ; the Primate encountered much vexatious opposition. In serried ranks the powerful adverse party was ranged against him ; even from the King indeed he could not, as was his wont, obtain the wished-for concessions. On this occasion, too, as in so many following con- ventions, the Lutheran heresy had appeared in the negotiations, like an awe-inspiring spectral form. The heresy, spreading ever more and more widely, began to press like a heavy nightmare upon the spirit of many, the longer the more heavily, because no good conscience supplied the needed counteractive, and ignorance as to the real ground of the movement led to fear of its destructive operation upon a domain which was unreal. Spiritual and secular councils discussed, under the presidency of the Arch- THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 93 bishop, the measures to be taken against this spread- ing pestilence, against which they were disposed to proceed with the same inexorable decision with which in the present day we take action against, for instance, the plague. With almost juvenile ardour did the venerable ecclesiastical prince join in the debates on this obstinate movement, conducted as these were with Polish animation, although the movement, in spite of the peremptory decisions of the previous year, still refused to be consigned to repose.* Now the reaction from the overstrained labour had set in. The exhausted, and withal somewhat irritated, old Bishop had urgent need of recreation. Hardly had the termination of the sittings arrived, when he hastened from the close and stifling atmosphere of the town, to spend the oppressive autumn days in the shady park of his manor [at the now famous] Squiernievice. Here, in the quiet of the country, and in pleasant seclusion, was also once more taken in hand that testament the contents of which in not a few places possess the attractive value of a diary. Under the date of the i /th of August "j" we find the entry made, that his nephew the Dean cherishes the intention of repairing anew to Italy for the purposes of study. The nephew seems not to have been in the vicinity of the uncle, so that he was unable more fully to unfold his intention to him. Let us then attempt to do so for ourselves. The favourite brother of our Johannes, Jerome, with whom he had shared a common education, had studied together in Rome and at Bologna, had, as * Tomtctana, vi. 291. t Zeissberg, p. 692. 94 JOHN A LA SCO. we have said, devoted himself to the career of a statesman. A high natural endowment, which within a few years already proved him one of the ablest and most polished statesmen of the sixteenth century ; the influential position of his own family, further augmented by his marriage with the noble Anna Koscielecka, of the wealthy and distinguished house of the Rituani, had early opened the way for this nephew of the Polish primate to a brilliant and distinguished career. As early as 1520 he was appointed royal carver.* The very next year we meet with him as already Polish ambassador at the court of Charles V. in Brussels, in the following year in like capacity at Cologne.")" Gladly did the King avail himself of the accomplished young patrician, so well versed in foreign languages, and in all respects so morally excellent, for his missions to different courts, in growing measure for the most difficult ones, such as were furnished by the very perplexed condition of European affairs in that day, wherein the voice of Poland was of such decisive weight. Such difficult commission of his king brought the skilled diplomatist to Paris and Rome in the spring of 1523, one year after he had been made captain of Inowlaclaweck.J Laski was fully conscious of the difficulty of the commission entrusted to him ; the youthful statesman in both places modestly urges that he is exercised, it is true, in the use of arms, but not dexterous in the wielding of the pen.J In Rome it was a question of maintaining the ancient rights of the Polish crown as regards the * On the significance of this post compare Cromer, p. 508. t Zeissberg, p. 606 ; and Cromer, p. 517. \ 7omta'ana, vi. 212. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 95 filling up of the bishoprics before a Hadrian, who only in the previous year had succeeded Leo A'., and sought earnestly and uprightly to preserve intact, at a very difficult time, the rights of the Church, assailed on every side. At the court of Francis I. the fall of Rhodes was to be turned to account for paving the way to a peaceful co-operation of Poland and France ; and in the event of success advantage was to be taken of this approximation for privately sounding the possibility of drawing more closely the prospective bond of alliance, by means of a marriage union between the two royal families.* Jerome appears to have returned from his embassy during the summer of the year, and to have been present at the General Convention. In the latter autumn it became necessary to follow up still farther the thread of negotiations."]" This time Rome was not again touched ; the charge, however, was given to the royal messenger to repair also to the court of the Emperor. This course was taken, it may be, in order to divert, or even remove, any rising suspicion in con- nection with the lively intercourse between Poland and France. Charles V. was at that time in Spain ; thus the ambassador of the King of Poland could, without exciting much attention, either on his going or return take the great high-road through Paris to the Pyrenees. Travelling in the suite of a royal ambassador had in those days in more than one respect a seductive charm ; even the protection * Tomiciana, pp. 207, 214. t I infer the twofold journey to France within a year from the fact that in a notice pertaining to the instruction of the ambassador, Isabella, Duchess of Milan, is spoken of as dead ; her death took place only at the close of 1523. 96 JOHN A LA SCO. thereby afforded in strange lands, on the insecure highways, in which so many " roaming people " wandered about aimless and without means, was not to be lightly esteemed. There was consequently no need of any long persuasion on the part of the am- bassador to induce his two brothers to make the journey in his company. i. FIRST RESIDENCE IN BASLE. When our three Polish friends left Cracow, and by what route they set out upon their long journey, is not clear to us. We unexpectedly meet with them at a remote spot on their way.* At the end of December, 1523, or beginning of January, 1524, we find the brothers, still in the prosecution of their journey to the Emperor, staying in Basle, and there in familiar converse with Erasmus. The great Humanist, who was in those days in a particularly angry mood, because he had been publicly called a second Balaam, connects the origin of this very offensive appellation with the visit of these Poles. With Jerome Erasmus had already been acquainted in Brussels, and now they saw each other frequently. One day, as they are chatting in the library of the great scholar, the conversation turns upon the simple preacher who has now for some years kept the world in a state of excitement. The Pole is carried away, with all the ardour of his nature, against Lutlter ; the impressions of the General Convention at Cracow are still fresh in his mind ; he has perhaps observed that his king is surely not quite so much in earnest to proceed with the same resolution in * In Booking, Ulrichi Hutteni Opera, ii., p. 399. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 97 the extirpation of the Lutheran heresy in his lands, as the Hotspurs of the diet. It seems to the diplomatist of importance to be able to appeal before his king to the equally unfavourable judgment of the man to whose weighty voice pope and emperor and king were wont to give heed. But on this point the timid voice of the scholar wavered greatly. Upon the table there were lying a couple of letters from the Reformer, with remarks upon Erasmus, expressed in a clear and decided tone, which had been published in Strassburg without the knowledge or consent of the writer. A private letter of the Wittenberg Reformer was, it is said, lying there too ;* and the host observes that his Polish friend would like to take the letter with him for use at home, in order to goad his king on to a more decided procedure. Erasmus promises him a copy of the letter, as likewise of the two which have appeared in print, and begs the ambassador to make known their contents to the Emperor also. This incident suffices to give us an impression of the atmosphere in which our Johannes was still living at that time, and which was so entirely opposed to the fresh and invigorating breeze of the Reforma- tion. Erasmus experienced a lively pleasure in the three Polish young men, who, though belonging to the highest nobility, bowed with friendly homage before the intellectual nobility of the Humanist. The brothers appear to have stayed only a short time in Basle on their route, but yet long enough to have formed a few acquaintances in the highly animating humanistic circle, who were powerful * Erasmus himself says so. JOHN A LA SCO. enough to detain our Johannes, after an absence of some months, for a longer period in the university city. We shall have an opportunity on his second visit of becoming ourselves at home in these circles. Only to one person would we refer, with whom Laski now came into contact, but whom he no longer found present at his return : he had then, at Basle, too, been compelled to take up again the wanderer's staff of banishment, already so often in request with him. It was Guillaume Farel, the fiery hero from France, who had bidden farewell to his own fair native land and gone into exile in order to be able to live in accordance with his faith. He is a pheno- menon in a high degree attractive, this man, who, a fugitive from France, has for months been living in Switzerland, where the waves of the Reformation already run high, and in the first weeks of the year 1524 has found a shelter in the free city of Basle ; a countryman of Calvin, and his forerunner and path-breaker in Switzerland. The energetic son of the Dauphiny could not long impose silence upon himself, even in the city in which he enjoyed the rights of hospitality. As early as the twenty-third of February he persisted in holding, despite the protest of the University, a public disputation upon thirteen theses, in which the spirit of the Reforma- tion flowed with mighty onward sweep. On this occasion Oecolampadins acted as interpreter/' 5 ' The victorious issue of the disputation was an important step in advance for Basle towards a final decision in favour of the Reformation. For the impetuous and * Herminjard, Corresfiondanced.es Reformateurs (Geneve, i866.J7z'.), i., p. 193. Compare Adam, Decades duce (Franco- furti ad Mcenum, 1653), P- ] 3- THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 99 fearless Frenchman, however, the delay was too great before the decisive die would be cast in the peaceful development of affairs. At the end of a few months he had, by his unhesitating frankness, by his passionate insistance upon an instant decision, forfeited his right of hospitality in the city. It was thus, at any rate, too early as yet to call Erasmus a modern Balaam. About Whitsuntide the right of hospitality was withdrawn from the troublesome man ; the homeless fugitive repaired thence to Strassburg. Our Johannes had, during this first residence in Basle, been brought into personal contact with the lively, earnest-minded Frenchman, and even formed an intimacy with him. This might awaken some surprise, when we have regard to the bearing, then so fundamentally different, of the two young men towards the Church. In explanation may be urged the inner affinity of the Slavonic and the Romance nature, then already to be recognised in many traits. We must likewise take into our account the zeal of the Pole for keeping his eye open for every phenomenon of the spiritual life ; and who, considering the imperfect accounts which have come down to us from that time, shall prove that one or another of the theses, even though they at first startled the nephew of the Polish ecclesiastical prince, living as he did in the midst of such totally different associations, did not pierce his heart like a lightning-flash, there to light up in lurid glare a world hitherto veiled in dense night ? However this may be, the impression left was so deep, that even a quarter of a century afterwards, at a time when the Basle days often revived again fresh in his ioo JOHN A LA SCO. memory, Laski thought also of his conversations and friendship with the stout-hearted Frenchman, and in a letter to Calvin sends his greeting to the indefatigable and fearless preacher of the Gospel.* To the bitter saying of Farel with regard to Erasmus, when he brands him as a modern Balaam, the Polish brothers have, all unwittingly, given rise. On the occasion of their departure from Basle, Jerome, with Polish liberality, made to the revered Humanist, who very much liked to receive costly gifts, the present of a silver vase. The rumour was directly circulated in Basle, that Erasmus had boasted of being in possession of a means of quench- ing the Lutheran conflagration at a stroke. This means, it was whispered, he had conferred upon the Polish imperial ambassador, and the silver plate was the price of the shameful merchandise. Erasmus smarted greatly under this charge. In a lengthy epistle to the Constance jurisconsult Botzemius, to whom he pours forth his troubled heart, he hints only obscurely at the man whom he takes to be the author of the reproach ; he must afterwards have obtained more certain information that the thing had been said in somewhat brusque candour by William Farel ; and then he rested not until he had got the opponent driven out of Basle.f But that took place long after the Laskis had left the city. We are without any information as to the time of their departure ; nay, we are to so great an extent groping in the dark as regards the succes- sion of time that it is only by a conclusion on the * Calvini Opera (in the Corpus Reformatorum) (Brunsvigae, 1863 seq.}, xiv. 42. t Compare Haag, La France Protestante (Paris, 1850), v. 61. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 101 grounds of probability that we are led to place at this stage, shortly after his brief residence in Basle, the journey of our JoJianncs to Paris, where, at any rate, he most assuredly was. More fortunate explorers will perhaps hereafter light upon a more certain date ; until then conjecture may be allowed its modest place. 2. IN PARIS. If our conjecture be correct, it was about the spring of 1524 that our three Poles entered the metropolis of France, not as distinguished strangers who must first open to themselves a way into the higher society. Jerome had already repeatedly visited the court of the King, and, moreover, the last time in particular on a mission which of neces- sity brought the plenipotentiary into familiar rela- tions with the King himself. Francis /., for whom much depended on an intimate alliance with Poland, was on a very friendly footing with the gifted ambassador, the more so because he was drawn to the chivalrous person of the ambassador himself. The youngest brother had either already, on a previous occasion as formerly mentioned, won the favour of the King, or he acquired it now, and that in such high degree that he entered the service of the King of France, and in his immediate surround- ings often afterwards gave proofs of his most faithful attachment to Francis /., even in the darkest days of his adversity. It is thus self-evident that our Johannes could go in and out at the French court at his pleasure. It was for an aspiring theologian an attractive I02 JOHN A LA SCO. time at which Laski abode in Paris. The powerful movement, which had proceeded from Germany a few years before, had not made a halt at the Rhine ; its wide circles quickly touched the other bank also, and already one might trace the effect in the heart of France, nay in the very court of the King. Those who, as the spiritual sons and heirs of the movement, now dwell in that land, suppose that the first traces of the newly awakened Reformation life must be sought in France itself. Our Polish dean must have been singularly affected at seeing the same ineffec- tual measures now adopted by the Sorbonne against the heretical doctrine to which he had himself given his assent but the year before. Precisely the inter- diction of the writings of the Reformation was then, as to-day, a right thankworthy lever for their diffu- sion. But then on the Seine men were sooner disposed than on the Vistula to follow up passionate words with stern deeds ; they shrank not from raising an avenging hand against those who incurred the not unfounded suspicion of having given a questionable reception to the new and dangerous doctrine. The men well-disposed towards the Gospel gathered around the venerable form of the Bishop of Meaux, Briqonnet, the spiritual adviser of the sister of the King, Marguerite of Valois. Specially during the first years of his episcopal administration is there to be perceived in the action of the pious shepherd of souls a compassion for the flock en- trusted to him, a profound grieving over the open and gaping wounds of his Church. It seems like a breeze of spring in the Gallican Church when we see how this pastor proclaims to his flock the Word THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 103 of God in a preaching of almost Protestant tone ; how his clergy, animated by a like zeal of love, un- ceasingly pass to and fro between Meaux and Paris, to attend in faithful ministration upon their spiritual charge ; how from this evangelically minded circle writings go forth over all the land, which, though expressed in cautious and scrupulous language, and wanting the jubilant tone of freedom breathing in the burning words of the German Reformer, never- theless re-echoed far and wide in the lark-song of early morning, which even in its earnest cadences breathed a longing for the dawn of the new day. In the circle of these men we meet with one of the most attractive forms to be found among the precursors of the Reformation. It is the then highly venerable Jacques Lefevre d'Etaplcs, who, proceed- ing from the studies of the ancient literature, was among the first courageously to apply himself to the investigation of Holy Scripture, at first, it is true, only with the interest in those days passionately devoted to every literary fragment of antiquity. But just this prosaic mode of contemplation, which aimed only at the right understanding of the words, was the means of striking off the fetters in which it had been sought for ages past to place the Word of God, to the intent that it should be made to give its assent only to all possible dogmas and definitions of the Church. In the course, however, of a further unceasing penetration into the meaning, the sacred contents of the book exerted their inevitable effect upon the devout man. So soon as he had felt this saving effect in his own experience he rested not until he had submitted the great throng of his students at the Paris University to the same in- I04 JOHN A LA SCO. fluence. His unfolding of single books of the New Testament is a veritable pioneer labour.* During these very days (1522 1523) his expositions on the four Gospels had appeared in the press, and in rapid succession the Catholic Epistles, creating the greatest sensation, and for the Sorbonne no small degree of offence. These books now fell into the hands of our Polish friend. The name of the author had been familiar to him from his boyhood. The school editions and elucidations of Faber Stapuknsis on the Latin and Greek classics had almost all been reprinted in Cracow, and the numerous editions give us an idea of the frequent use of them in Laskfs native land. In those Paris days Laski seems to have been brought likewise into close personal re- lations with the serious and devout investigator of Scripture. In the only passage of his works, so far as my memory serves me, in which he makes mention of the French expositor, he lauds certain qualities in the man which may well have become known to him from personal intercourse.! Faber was up to that time still firmly persuaded that he could yet claim room and toleration in his mother Church for his opinions, which, it is true, were already most fiercely assailed by the opponents. The painful moment of decision had not yet come for the old man. Timidly did he shrink from the dreaded hour. But while upon his deathbed, in 1536, the veteran of eighty-six years was tortured with the thought that he had been weak in the hour of peril, and had * Compare Graf, " Jacobus Faber Stapulensis," Ztsch. f. Hist. Theol. (1852), p. 24 seq. t Kuyper, Joannis a Lasco opera tarn edita quam inedita, 2 vols. (Anstel., 1866), i., p. 53. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 105 lacked the witnessing courage of a confessor, and that he had thus forfeited the crown of life which his heroic disciples and friends, the noble Panvant and the intrepid confessor Berquin, had obtained by their faithfulness unto death at the stake. Out of the midst of these men, profoundly inspired as they were with the evangelic spirit, and of kindred sentiments and endeavours with them, towers in graceful beauty the form of the renowned Marguerite de Valois. She belongs to the most chosen number of the daughters of her native land, and in like degree to the most favourite daughters of the Renaissance, at the point at which it inclined to the side of the Reformation. The current of thought in those great days beats upon her well-nigh masculine soul, there to meet with a warm and deep and delicate receptiveness. With full understanding and enjoyment, the highly gifted and noble princess reads the Latin, Italian, and Spanish authors ; nor is she unacquainted with Greek and Hebrew. The same passionate acquisitiveness for learning, which un- ceasingly animates the Humanists of those days, has descended likewise upon her. But with a certain feminine refinement of feeling, she avoids such dis- quieting research ; her devout mind leads her in the advancing path of her severe studies into the depths of the word of God. She is brought into contact with the " friends of God " in Meaux. Bri^onnet is to her more than a father-confessor ; in the fair, evangelical sense of the word, her spiritual shepherd. Before him she pours out her heart, athirst for grace, and that in affecting letters, preserved to the present day, precious testimonies of her pious soul, as also of the age in which she lived. She is to be regarded io6 JOHN A LA SCO. as the guardian angel of the reformational move- ment in France : to help it, however, to a full deliverance surpassed her powers ; for such a lofty, severe task she was still too much ma mignonne, as the King was wont most frequently to designate his dearly loved sister. Every moment men were looking to see her take the decisive step of openly confessing herself on the side of the Reformation. She had appeared so markedly in the foreground, had given so momentous an impetus thereto, and that in so decided a manner, that others reverentially awaited the signal to be given by her, and on that account even irresolutely lingered. But she, too, lingers ; at the last moment she shrinks back, not, it is true, from fear of the suffering she might have to encounter ; of this she bore with resignation an overflowing measure. But she is just the mignonne of her brother, and the King almost her idol. To awaken his displeasure, perhaps to have to separate from him on account of such a step, the thought of such a possibility rises not for a moment before her passionately loving soul. She would be able to sing the last strophes of our German Reformation Hymn, save in the case that, in place of the possessions there demanded, the parting with her brother had been the sacrifice required of her. Sorrowfully, as the rich young man in the Gospel, would she then have gone away from the Lord, who demands so heavy a sacrifice at her hands. If one might be allowed to give another turn to the course of history by what prove to be, in presence of its brazen step, but very fond wishes, our wish would here certainly be that this towering form at the threshold of the French Reformation had only received, in place of the THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 107 counsel of Briqonnet, consoling himself in a certain mysticism, that of her most distinguished contem- porary and countryman, the great Calvin, and had permitted the sacred truth by him to be carried home to the conscience, that the confession of Christ is worthy of the sacrifice of even the most faithful brother's love ! But history has followed a different path for that beauteous land. France has violently repelled the Reformation from its richly favoured plains, and in consequence thereof has had to under- go the Revolution, whose bloody and baleful convul- sions to this hour forbid the much-enduring land to attain to repose. This train of thought has led us far from our starting point. We hasten to return to that far-off year of the visit of La&ki to the court of the King. Francis I. cherished great esteem for his highly gifted sister, and heeded her wise counsel. It was a frequent occurrence that after holding an interview with the foreign ambassadors, he would refer them likewise to his sister, would consult with her as to a final decision, and would follow her guidance therein.* On account in particular of his secret commission would the ambassador of King Sigismund be in- troduced by Francis I. to his sister ; through him our Johannes also obtained access to the court. That he was brought into immediate personal converse with the high-minded Marguerite de Valois in those days is attested by the epistle of Erasmus to the princess, in which he makes mention of the * Merle d'Aubigne, Histoire de la Reformation du XVI* Siecle (Paris, 1860), Hi., p. 383. io8 JOHN A LA SCO. letters she had addressed to A Lasco during his residence in Basle.* Many traces of elective affinity are to be discerned in the spiritual tendency of the two persons, Laski then still firmly rooted in his attachment to the Romish Church, Marguerite continuing in it until the end of life, both alike animated by the conviction that the deep wounds recognised by them could still be healed by the Church herself. She, in point of years the senior, is also intellectually in advance of the man who is on the way to the Reformation ; eventually, however, the French queen is outstripped by the Pole, who alone of the two attained to the fair prize, because he was prepared for making a sacrifice from which the gifted woman shrank. How long our Laski still remained in Paris after his brother had departed for the execution of the royal commission entrusted to him, we have been unable to discover, and just as little whether he repaired thence to Switzerland direct, or whether his course of studies led him to other places also. We meet with him only in Basle at the end of 1524, and breathe freely again, as it were, on having found him there, because from this time we have more solid ground under our feet ; and certainly a clearer light falls upon this second visit than the twilight in which hitherto for the most part we have had to trace our steps. 3. THE SECOND RESIDENCE IN BASLE. The fortunate Basle, even in the sixteenth century, * Erasmus, Efiistolarum Libri XXXI. (Londini, 1642), p. 970. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 109 and specially in those days, in its fairest, most abundantly favoured time of bloom ! Situate on the boundary line of two lands, or rather standing with firm foot in both lands on either side of the Rhine, the city has known, at that time of decision in which she cast in her lot with Switzerland, how to preserve to herself the rights of citizenship in the intellectual fatherland of the two neighbouring States. The citizens remained in their essential character men of the German mind, and adopted in addition the Switzer's proud sense of freedom ; this twofold gift has at all times preserved a good name. sEneas Sylvius in his day gives a flattering description of the city and its inhabitants, at the time when he abode within its bright and cheerful walls during the sitting of the Council of Basle (1431). The sound vigorous sense, which is lauded by him, did not fail the inhabitants during the century which had elapsed ; there had grown up, however, a greater earnestness, a scientific eagerness, an active interest in the questions which now stirred the minds of men. Basle had become a main fortress of Humanism on this side the Alps, a sanctuary and rendezvous of the learned, who here could quietly surrender themselves to their passion for studies. Of the touching zeal, the almost consuming, devouring ardour of the affection which inspired the Humanists for the revived sciences, Basle affords us more than one fascinating instance. What a rare apparition, for example, that Thomas Platter, whose traits have been caught by the master-hand of a Freytag in the picture of a roving scholar of the sixteenth century ! * We * Freytag, Bilder aus der Deutschcn Vergangenheit no JOHN A LA SCO. cannot refrain from here mentioning an incident not turned to account by others. The poor shepherd boy, and then roving scholar, who, without fixed abode, had travelled so far into Germany, has now landed at the rope- maker's workshop in Basle, after long and toilsome wanderings. To the cord which he has to twist upon the rope-walk he affixes a wooden fork, holding a single sheet of a copy of Plautus which has been given him. Thus walking backwards, he twists the rope and plunges in spirit into the midst of the breathing forms of the Roman poet. In this way he plied the Latin, in this way the Greek, yea even the Hebrew, and while yet a journeyman rope-maker also taught in the school of Dr. Oporinns. And now he relates in his diary, " In the same year," it was about the time at which Laski was living in Basle, " there came a Frenchman from the Queen of Navarre, sent out to learn Hebrew, who came also into the school, where, as I went in my common clothes, I sat me down behind the stove, which was a fine seat, and let the students sit at the table. So says the Frenchman, ' Quando venit noster professor ? " [" When does our professor come ? "] " Oporinus points to me. Then he looks upon me and begins to wonder, thinks in doubt, ' Such a man ought to be clad in other garments than such common ones.' When all was over, he took me by the hand, leads me out over the little bridge, and asks me how it came about that I was so poorly clad. Said I, ' Mea res ad restim rediit ' " [" My affairs have come to the rope " (a Terentian joke)]. " Then said he, ' If I would, he was (Leipsic, 1867), ii. 2, p. 13 seq. Compare Thomas u. Felix Platter, Zwei Lebensbilder, by Heumann (Gutersloh, 1882). THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD, in minded to write to the Queen about me ; she would raise me to a god if I would only follow him ; but I would not follow him . . . "* Rather then in Basle as a journeyman rope-maker, than be entertained in Paris as a king. It is the proud answer of the free Humanist, who has found in this place what he wants. Not a little did it contribute to the fame of this city that it had become the workplace of important master-printers, above all the renowned Froben, and then also people like Amerbach, Oporinus, and so many others. The printing art was not yet old, and those engaged in its service passed through the ever-memorable period of first love for the new wonder-inspiring art. Those who practised the marvellous discovery looked upon themselves as artists, not as handicrafts- men ; they were enthusiastic heralds in the service of the Immaniora, not a few among them the greatest favourers of science, their workshop a fount of learning. The profit from their calling was for these men a secondary question ; their enthusiasm was derived from the satisfying feeling of being an essential link in the chain at which the greatest minds were standing day and night, in order to raise the new-found treasure. They had the sense of being royal mint-masters, who gave currency to the gold obtained, as the common possession of the learned ; upon all their doings in those days rests the fine enamel of an intellectual act, which carries its reward in itself. The master-printer Froben was the powerful magnet which in those years drew to Basle an * Boos, Thomas und Felix Platter (Leipsic, 1878), p. 55. U2 JOHN A LA SCO. Erasmus, the friend and invited guest of kings and the highest spiritual and secular dignitaries, which was strong enough also to detain him in the quiet burgher city even when Margaret of Austria, spite of the imperial mandate, made the payment of the pension granted him dependent upon the return of this king of science to the court of Brabant* Erasmus, at the time when he migrated to Basle, was looked upon as the king in the domain of knowledge and of the study of ancient literature. In this delicate form, with the sharply projecting, pointed nose, with the fine firmly closed lips, about which plays a slight suppressed smile, as the pencil of Holbein has depicted the man to us as the archetype of an intellectual scholar, was collected, as it were in a focus, all that gave shape and life to the humanistic movement. That which once in after-times Zinzendorf confessed of himself in a very different province he had " only one passion, and that was Christ," the word of a passion consuming all other emotions of the soul, is true also of Erasmus, only with regard to that other object, the newly awakened science. Of an acute mind, a refined intellect, freed from the trammels of earlier times, Erasmus launched forth into the pro- vince now first opening itself to human research ; with greater ardour has no youth ever clasped to his heart his bride, than that with which he impressed the kiss of his love and enthusiasm upon the newly awakened, reviving world of the ancients. It is a gigantic industry, which the man with the * Feugere, Erasme. Etude sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages (Paris, 1874), p. 113. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 113 sickly physical frame unfolded his life long. Into all the most remote corners his searching eye;] is found to penetrate ; nothing remains strange to him ; everywhere he is at once at home in the newly discovered domain. The genius of the ancients is not ungrateful in return for such faithful devotion ; it opens up to the unwearied wooer its beauty, so that it is as though the ancients themselves were speaking through him, so pure, so clear, so well proportioned and sparkling flows forth his Latin discourse. Even as a Humanist Erasmus bears the stamp of the German character. The latter is more earnest, profound, more immediately penetrating to the sources of life, than the other nature, beyond the mountains, in the sunny, joyous south. For a Boccacio, or even an Aretino, we have no congenial spot. The direct effect of the revival of the sciences may be compared, in all lands through which it held its procession, to the exultant jubila- tion of a crowd of boys, who, long pent up in the close schoolroom, with its dust and vapour, are now suddenly set free, and rush out amidst the breezes of spring, to drink in deep draughts the delicious air of May. Just as great was the difference between the breath of fresh air which was wafted to the Humanists from the study of the newly revived Greeks and Romans as compared with the oppressive atmosphere which had gradually formed about the investigations of scholasticism. We must not pronounce too severe a judgment on the outbreak of the first, perhaps wild jubilation at the reopened place of exercise ; and must not apply too stern a rule to the period of the first boisterous 8 I14 JOHN A LA SCO. excitement. But life is not to be passed on this playground, and its task is not the enjoyment of pleasure. It was in Germany that the studies of Humanism underwent a timely diversion into more serious channels, and amongst those who took the lead in this direction we find Erasmus. In the course of his investigations, which, with bold spring, left far behind them the beaten tracks of scholasticism, he plunged into the writings of the Church Fathers ; astonishing is the number of the editions of the old witnesses for the faith which he brought out. Froben had hardly printing-presses enough to keep pace with his bee- like industry. The Humanist did not restrict his unresting step to the Fathers alone ; he penetrated even to the fountain-head. His edition of the New Testament appeared in 1516. It was a hurried labour ; Erasmus himself admitted this. But that the edition did appear was in those days a great fact. It was the victorious return to the word of God, the freeing of the path from all the unspeakable brush- wood of human dogma which had blocked up the access to the fountain itself. The New Testament was looked upon now as afresh brought to light, like a newly discovered writing of Cicero or Plato ; and was also so read by many. This was, in the first place, a gain for the understanding of it ; all the un- happy allegorisings of scholasticism vanished before the sober grammatical treatment of the Scripture text, as the misty forms vanish before the piercing * Berger, La Bible au XVI e Siecle (Paris, 1879), p. 55, makes mention of the passage in the letter of Erasmus to Pirkheimer: " Novum testamentum praecipitatum fuit verius quam editum." THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 115 ray of the sun. This liberating effect of the studies of Humanism in their furthering influence upon the Reformation may be compared to the significance of the campaigns of Alexander upon the first diffusion of Christianity. Ximenez had begun the preparatory labours for his polyglot of the New Testament much earlier, and everybody was intently looking for its appearing. Erasmus had been led to undertake the hurried labour by the wish to be beforehand with the Spaniard. The German Humanist, however, did not content himself with an edition of the text ; with devout mind he kept his eye fixed upon the higher task of opening up to his contemporaries the under- standing of Holy Scripture. Precious directions thereto, of value to the present hour, are to be gathered from the writings of Erasmus bearing on this subject, communicated by a soul deeply affected by the sacred contents of the writings, which surrenders itself to the impression of the Word of God, though still in a certain naive manner without calculating the full bearing of this impression. A breath of the Reformation sweeps through these passages ; no one can deny it. In them moves a spirit which is out of harmony with the modest or even scrupulous self-restriction, which Erasmus, in a figure, designates as the life-task assigned to him. On one occasion he compares his position to that of the pillars of Mercury in ancient Rome, which, set up at the cross-roads, point out the way to the traveller, without entering upon it themselves. The Humanist did enter upon it, but, alas ! shrank timidly back when he observed that which he might have to encounter upon this path. Those who at that time set out fearlessly in this i:6 JOHN A LA SCO. path have often bitterly condemned the conduct of those who remained behind. More lenient, but at the same time more just, is our judgment after an interval of more than three hundred years. We have to judge the great Humanist not only by the standard of those who pressed forward from Humanism to the Reformation ; we have to measure him also by that wherein the endeavours of the German Humanist are so essentially and so advan- tageously distinguished from the endeavours of those beyond the Alps. Even before the decided rupture had been made between the German Reformer and the German Humanist, Luther expressed the opinion already with the presentiment of the approaching separation, but as yet under the spell of esteem for the powerful man that Erasmus, like another Moses, had brought up his people out of Egypt, but had not led them into the land of promise. Erasmus has never been anxious about the salvation of his soul, as the Augustin monk at Erfurt. He offers in his whole appearance the brilliant and incontestable proof of that which purely humanistic efforts are capable of yielding : how under their quickening breath a fair world arises, for a while irradiated by the full and pure charm of art, but also how its light is ever unable to disperse the mists of sin, to reconcile us to God, to effect our sanctification. God, however, has not appointed us the task of enjoying a fair life, but of becoming holy as He is holy. Humanism is able perhaps for a moment to silence the earnest voice of the conscience amidst its liquid melodies ; but never is it qualified to afford a consolatory answer, a blessed satisfaction, to this voice, which cries after God as the hart cries after THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 117 the water-brooks. This its powerlessness is deeply impressed upon its creations, even in the case of Erasmus, who, full of painful timidity, cautiously dives, as it were, out of the way of the truth of the Reformation. When the clear waters then roll over him, and somewhat distort his features, it seems to us often as though we see in the man already something of that which is borne on the forehead of the Bayles, the Encyclopaedists, and a faint hint also of that which is borne by a Voltaire : that sarcastic vein which rejoices to awaken doubt, and yet cautiously remains in hiding, not to disclose its ultimate design ; that mode which Sainte-Beuve once characterised as simultaneous attack and defence, which goes its way under the mask of learning.* Erasmus, at the time when Laski came to Basle, was standing at the decisive parting of the ways for or against the Reformation, which had already become strong enough in Germany and Switzerland to wring from the presiding spirit among the Humanists the painful decision. We know that he cast his die otherwise than Ulric von Hutten, from whom he became so remarkably estranged in those years. The Humanist, who by the public renunciation of the Reformation, as like- wise by the cessation of a sound development of life, maintains his course, does not find the path open to him for his return to the sheltering bosom of the Romish Church. Both currents cast upon * Feugere (p. 236) : " Cette methode " selon Ste.-Beuve " d'attaque et de sape, qui va son train sous air d'6rudition, et que Jansenius definissait si bien en disant, qu'elle consistait a produire les difficultes centre la foi sous forme de questions, et a inserer ce qui etait souleve la-dessus." n8 JOHN A LA SCO. him the burning sand of the shore, on which he pines in solitude ; it is difficult to decide whether the darts hurled from Wittenberg, or those from the Sorbonne in Paris and from the University in Louvain, were the more galling for the lonely and wounded man. We have, in sketching the central person, who occupies, at that mighty turning point, so prominent a post that his fate acquires a typical significance, already to some extent anticipated the time at which our Laski stood on terms of intimacy with him. The sketch has perhaps been made too broadly and on too large a scale for our framework ; we were carried away by the attraction of the theme, because the influence of that extraordinary man is to be traced upon the course of our hero's life during a whole decade. The eventual decision in his position towards the Reformation was considerably delayed by the powerful personality of the revered master. Erasmus appeared for a long time to the timid Churchman to afford eloquent proof that one may surrender himself, wholly and enthusiastically, to the fresh warm current of the studies of Humanism, without becoming unfaithful to the mother Church. We have already seen that Laski did not form the acquaintance of the illustrious man merely on his second residence in Basle ; the elder brother had already introduced him to the acknowledged head of the sciences ; the commendatory recognition of the young Pole in the previous year conferred upon him the right now to beg a second time for admission to the society of the master. The favour- able impression was augmented from time to time, THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 119 and that reciprocally. To the old magnate, who at this particular time was so severely assailed on all sides we have only to remind our readers that the blows received in the feud with Hutten still left their scars, and now he had again to buckle on the armour to meet the German Reformer and his challenges, to the old sorely harassed magnate it might well do good to receive the testimony of such warm and devoted loyalty on the part of this refined and amiable Pole, who at home belonged to the highest circles, and here stood in bashful rever- ence before the great scholar. The man at one time lauded as a king by all the world was only too accessible to delicate marks of homage and tokens of veneration. The wave of general favour was seriously receding ; it looks as though the man, long unaccustomed to receive these tokens, clung to those still given, and was at pains to salute from afar the tribute which his immediate surroundings threatened to refuse him. Erasmus was wont to receive boarders into his society of young men. He had sufficient space at his disposal in his quarters, at the house of his printer Froben, to vacate a room for a young scholar. Since he did this in order to augment his income, only young men of wealth could share the privilege of becoming part of the household of the famous scholar. Our liberal Pole, already in his youthful years in the possession of no incon- siderable benefices, and, after the manner of his nation, entirely careless as regards money matters, probably paid dearly enough for the favour which he enjoyed during the last half of his stay in Basle. Three and a half gulden per month was the price of I20 JOHN A LA SCO. the room,* and he seems to have defrayed the whole expenses of the kitchen out of his income ; so that Erasmus was a guest in his. own house, and long painfully missed the generous guest after the latter had been called to leave Basle. In a magnani- mous spirit, Laski further purchased of his book- collecting host his entire library, with the friendly concession of leaving the scholar to the end of his life in the enjoyment of the slowly accumulated treasures. Laski was not then in a position to pay down the full purchase money ; there remained a sum of two hundred gulden still lying on it, and Erasmus observed in his willf that the books were to be delivered up at his death only on condition that the outstanding amount should have been paid to his heirs. The payment seems not to have been made ; at the time of Erasmus' death Laski was almost fortuneless, and was on the point of quitting the Romish Church. It was not these external advantages which attached Erasmus to his new household companion. The old man felt the power of a captivating influence exerted by the youthful form. Erasmus in his letters is not sparing of words, specially where there is a prospect of that which he has written coming under the eye of the person commended. But when we review the different passages in his letters concerning the young friends, they certainly leave the impression that the words are not merely the light coin of social intercourse. It seems as * Compare the very rare little volume of the private letters of Erasmus to Amerbach (Bas., MDCCLXXix.), which fell into my hands in the town library at Basle. t In the private letters of Amerbach, just referred to, there is a printed copy of the will (p. 122). THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 121 though the morally earnest personality of Laski had itself gained an ascendency over the old man, and had exerted an abiding influence. That which is lauded by Erasmus presents the same lineaments, only now further detailed, as were already pointed out to us by the tutor at Bologna, the same linea- ments as we ourselves again recognise, more set in the matured life of the man, but which are now of special value as derived from one who lived in intimate association with him during successive months. It manifests an almost youthful warmth, a touching and affectionate longing, when the man of sixty and more years judges in words like these of his daily companion : " While a man of no ordinary learning, Laski is in his life spotlessly pure, as fresh-fallen snow ; kindly, amiable, so that every- body begins to live again in his society and all have a sense of bereavement at his departure ; a golden disposition, a true pearl, and so unassuming and free from arrogance, although he is called some day to fill one of the highest offices in his native land." The young Pole, with his ancient Roman blamelessness of character (jprisca integritas), serves Erasmus as a proof, as he expresses himself in a dedication to the Vayvode of Cracow " that Astraea, in taking her flight from the earth, had left the last traces of her sojourn among the people of Poland." Often does the renowned man admit, even after a lapse of years, that he became the better for his living with Laski; that he, the old man, has learnt from that young man that which, in other cases, youth has to learn from age, sobriety, temper- ance, reverence, moderation of the tongue, modesty, chastity, purity of character. 122 JOHN A LA SCO. Laski clung with great deference to the master whose disciple he boasted to be in those days. He was willingly led on by him in his humanistic studies, then pursued with so great ardour ; but the deeper and more abundant knowledge acquired by him in this domain was not in after-years the most grateful memory. Yet higher is his boast of the man, that he first guided his soul to spiritual things ; that he had under that guidance first begun to feel himself at home in the province of true religion.* Strange, and yet in those days not surprising con- fession, as coming from the Romish Church. The young man, already high on the ladder of ecclesias- tical dignities in early years, who in former days had long devoted himself to theological studies in Bologna, now first learns in Basle, and at the feet of the German Humanist, the primary and wholly decisive rudiments of his vocation ! And it is Erasmus again who gives the impulse to a move- ment which with necessity impels into paths which the master himself did not venture to enter on. So leniently and beautifully does Laski in after-years judge of this weakness and half-heartedness of the Humanist, with which he had already become suffi- ciently acquainted during his residence in Basle. " Every one has his measure of gifts, and no single one is strong in all domains ; for us also there is still much to-day which we do not know. It is our part to congratulate ourselves on that which God, in accordance with the decree of His will, has been pleased to vouchsafe to us according to the measure * Kuyper, ii. 569 : " Erasmus mihi autor fuit, ut animum ad sacra adjicerem, imo vero ille primus me in vera religione instituere coepit." THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 123 of our faith. On that account also we must rejoice in the gifts of Erasmus, which were of a truth great and significant enough, and ought to acknowledge God in them. But if we believe we have advanced farther, let us consider that this too was only granted to us of God."* Yes, that is the temperate language, on account of which the youth already served as an example to the old man. Erasmus 1 writings and his oral teaching in per- sonal converse were well adapted for introducing a devout mind to the glory of the spiritual vocation, by leading far away from artificially constructed, leaking cisterns of scholastic lore, beyond the Fathers of the Church, to the living fountain of the Word of God itself. How should a writing like the Manual of Instruction for attaining to a True Theology, published as early as 1515, fail of exerting its influence upon Laski ?f And what precious, what stimulating, and refreshing passages, in Erasmus* paraphrases and explanations of single parts of Holy Writ ! Yet even in these courses of exegetical investigation it is not difficult to discern the timid step of the man who advances only to the threshold of the sanctuary, then halts, and contents himself with merely external things. Those were the heroes of the Reformation who courageously brooked not to remain standing outside, and then in the sanctuary have seen Jesus only. With one of these heroes Laski was brought into personal contact during his Basle days, true, only in a passing moment, but yet quite sufficiently for him to receive that goad of God pressed into his soul * Kuyper, ii. 584. t Compare the elaborate description in Feugere, p. 205 f. i2 4 JOHN A LA SCO. against which no man, even though he were a Saul of Tarsus, can successfully strive. In his apologetic writing against Westphal he makes mention, in two passages,* of the influence which Zwingli has exerted upon him. In passing through on his way to France he had met with Zwingli in Zurich, f and was first induced by him to enter upon the study of the Holy Scriptures ; to him he owed his most powerful stimulus. He nevertheless defends himself resolutely against the assertion of Westphal that he is a Zwinglian, since he was baptised into the name of no man, and neither Luther nor Zwingli was crucified for him, nor does he accept the doctrine of Zwingli in all its particulars. Every attempt to obtain more precise information con- cerning this meeting with Zwingli in Zurich has proved a failure. Neither do the letters of the Re- former contain any allusion to it, nor could any hint with regard thereto be found in the abundant epis- tolary correspondence of those who at that time held communication with Zwingli. The hospitable dwelling of the noble Zuricher was open to all ; not lightly did any person of distinction let slip the opportunity of enjoying an interview with the daring man. But of our Laski report says nothing ; so that we must rest content with his own explicit statement. In imperishable remembrance remain for Laski these Basle days, which he spent in spiritual inter- * Kuyper, i. 282, 338. f Has not Laski in this case, after an interval of thirty- four years, fallen into an error of memory ? It can hardly have been on his way to France, whither he travelled in the company of his brother, but must rather have been during his residence in Basle. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 125 course with the leading men. Through the agency of his host, it was only to be expected that he should be brought into contact with the household which had been for Erasmus the reason of his staying in Basle. Among those who frequented the society of Froben he attached himself in particular to Boni- facius Amerback, who in 1524 had become pro- fessor of civil law in Basle, When we contemplate the fine picture of the young jurisconsult, painted by the hand of his friend Holbein, it is as though we were looking upon our Johannes in the days of his youth. And in truth, if we had to name among the acquaintances of our friend in Basle a personality having elective affinity for that of our Laski, we should have at once to point to this professor, of about the same age with Laski, as the one who presents the most similar mental traits. The passages in the letters of the renowned painter concerning this his dearest friend read as though they were referring to Laski himself.* In them the purity of his character, his integrity, his conscien- tiousness, fidelity to duty, severity of morals, are boasted of. Then again Holbein dwells on the charming gifts of social converse, his vivacity, the exuberant wit in conversation, a fine poetic and musical vein. People loved to listen to the Pro- fessor as he played upon the lute one of the ditties composed by himself, perhaps to the then favourite air " Adieu, mes amors." In such leisure hours of social fellowship, no doubt our Laski too, acquainted as he was with music from his university days, was wont to take his guitar in hand, to render to his * Woltmann, Holbein und' seine Zeit (Leipsic, 1866), i., p. 262. 126 JOHN A LA SCO. friends the songs of his Polish home. A happy fortune has preserved to us a number of letters of Laski to his friend A merbach. * Some of them con- sist only of a few lines upon a strip of paper ; but even the passing, everyday character of the contents affords us a charming glimpse into the easy famili- arity of the friendly intercourse. The light-hearted Pole borrows of his well-to-do friend smaller or larger sums of money when the store in hand has been exhausted, and the messenger has not yet returned whom he has sent to Augsburg to draw money upon his banker there, the well-known Fugger. Long after the departure from Basle a lively interchange of letters is kept up on the part of the two friends. It was an exceedingly stimulating intellectual intercourse which prevailed in Basle in those days, and into the full current of which the guest and com- panion of Erasmus entered. The humanistic and reformational movement here still advanced peacefully side by side, though, it is true, in the last steps of such amicable walk. The heads, who on the morrow were compelled to present a hostile front, conversed with each other to-day, sometimes with a natvett which appears astonishing to us at the present time. In social converse, you might hear from the lips of Erasmus utterances, for instance, on the subject of the Lord's Supper, which assign to him a position further to the left than that taken even by Zwingli. The oppositions and distinctions were not yet defined, had not as yet been clearly brought out and reduced to shape. Thus one saw grouped around * They are to be found, still unpublished and hitherto un- used, in the archives of the Antisterium in Basle. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 127 the old master, in lively conversation with him, here men like Oecolampadius and Pellican, there men like Glarean and Beatus Rhenanus ; and our Laski received and enjoyed the blessing of this twofold intercourse. A glance only at two or three of these men, whose influence did not pass away without leaving a trace upon the vigorous and receptive inner life of our friend.* With Oecolampadius indeed Laski had been brought into contact during his first brief sojourn in Basle, probably by the agency of Farcl, who had been the table-companion of the after-Reformer of Basle.f Laski retained an honouring memory of this eminent man. At the close of two decades, his judgment with regard to him is still such that he thinks of him with the highest respect, on account of his rare simplicity and piety, combined with so great learning.^ The works of the master adorn his collection of books ; he wishes to possess all that Oecolampadius has written. A detailed comparison would show how faithful and zealous a reader of his works, specially of his exposition of the Holy Scrip- tures, Laski has been. In the far-off home they may well have become friendly, solitary guides to the Romish priest, to lead him more and more deeply into the understanding of the Scriptures, and with this, as a logical and necessary consequence, gradually * The first edition of Wyclif s Trialogus was issued in this year 1525, according to Hardwick from the Basle press. If this be so, A Lasco could hardly fail to have heard its contents discussed. TR. t Herminjard (i. 299) fixes by conjecture upon Peter Tous- sain as the recorder of the table-talk mentioned by this author. May it not, however, have been our Laski, the vir integritatis rarissimcs P \ Kuyper, ii. 576. J2 8 JOHN A LA SCO. but surely to free him from the spell of the Romish tradition and error. When often in later years the Basle days stood in attractive beauty before the spirit's eye of Laski, it was the form of Conrad Pellican in particular which in memory heartily saluted him. As yet, in the garb of a superior of the Minorite order, and with faithful touching attachment to the quiet contempla- tive cloister life, the honest simple scholar nevertheless already heard in those days such ringing herald calls for the Reformation sounding forth over the land. A fair, heartily genial, and withal decided and upright form in the circle of those towering men of Basle, is that of Pellican, who, animated by the most affecting zeal for the studies of humanity, ever enters more warmly, more consciously upon the path of the Reformation.* Laski felt himself in a high degree attracted by the man, to whom similarly attuned chords of the soul attached him. After an interrup- tion of twenty years, he renews the old relations in a letter to the tutor and companion in studies, through which there runs so heartfelt a note of * What a delicious counterpart to that eagerness for learn- ing and teaching on the part of Platter (of whom mention has been made above) is afforded by the charming account of the manner in which Pellican came into the possession of the first Hebrew manuscript ! Compare Riggenbach, Das Chronikon des Konrad Pellikan (Basle, 1877), p. 16 : " Post aliquot dies superveniens Paulus Scriptoris, magnum codicem gestaverat in humeris, talis et tantus vir, a Moguntia ad Pfortzen, in studiis et desideriis meis gratificaretur, quae probabat valde, quum ipse quoque jam antea graeca didicerat, a Reuchlino eatenus instructus, ut epistolium graece eidem scriptum a Paulo viderim et legerim. Nihil in eum diem mihi acciderat gratius, quam ubi eum codicem grandem hebraicum viderem mihi allatum : erat autem volumen in pergameno scriptum, elegantissimo charactere, magnifice, et cum masoreth, tantae amplitudinis, quantum praestare posset cutis Integra vitulina." THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 129 longing, one might almost say of home-sickness, that one cannot help inferring the existence of a most intimate fellowship.* Pellican had been the instructor of the Polish dean in the Hebrew language. The Reformer in Friesland bitterly bewails that these studies were then so early broken off by his sudden departure to his native land, since then he had lost the knowledge of this language. Not the Hebrew language alone did Laski acquire at the feet of this man. Oecolampadius had already begun some years before to expound Isaiah and the Epistle to the Romans in a scientific form to his students, while he expounded the epistles of John in a series of devo- tional meditations to the townsmen, and that amidst a great influx of the people to his lectures. The animating example of the homily was followed by our superior of the Minorites, and with him by one and another devout cloister brother. Just at this time Pellican was expounding Genesis.t We certainly do not err in conjecturing that Laski was among the audience ; and then he was able to discover the heart's wish of the teacher, " that only the kingdom of Christ may come, the Gospel might be preached, and received with believing ears." The Bishop of Basle, Christopher von UttenJieim, to whom the nephew of the Archbishop of Gnesen was no stranger, was not at that time unkindly disposed towards such endeavours ; their, as we should say, necessary bearing had not yet become sufficiently apparent, and Oecolampadius could still dedicate to the devout and withal learned Bishop his contemplations on the * Kuyper, ii. 583. f See his charming letter to Pirkheimer in Heumann, p. 209. ,30 JOHN A LA SCO. epistles of John, which appeared in print in the year 1524. While these two men had entered with decided step upon the path of the Reformation, two other attractive forms meet us in the animating surround- ings of Laski at Basle, men who were not drawn away from the narrowly circumscribed domain of Humanism in the high floodtide of intellectual movement on this side of the Alps. On the equipoise indeed stands the one, Beatus Rhenanus. Once the highly gifted scholar of Lefevre in Paris, then in Basle the intimate friend of Erasmus, he did not break with this old master of the studies of humanity when the latter fell out with the Reformers and retired to Freiburg as a sort of pouting corner. That did not hinder our brave Alsatian from diffusing from time to time the writings of Luther in Switzerland and greeting Zwingli in an interesting letter on the latter's entering upon the pastoral office in Zurich.* His main strength, however, lay in the domain of Humanism. Erasmus estimated at no low rate the merit of the highly cultured scholar. To him he dedicated the beautiful exposition of the first Psalm, with the epigrammatic words, " Mitto Beatum Beato," " I send the blessed man [of the Psalm] to Beatus " (the blessed one). This man could not remain a stranger to the constant companion of Erasmus. Laski also participated in the far-reaching studies of the scholar ; and such fruit-bearing participation demanded an exact and loving appre- ciation of the Roman historians. For RJienanus published not unimportant critical labours on Tacitus, * Zwingli, Works of, edited by Schiller and Schultheis (Zurich, 1828), vii., p. 57. 7HE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 131 Livy, Pliny the elder, and Velleius Paterculus, during the time of the sojourn of Laski in Basle. Even after his return to his native land Laski continues in lively correspondence with the Humanists. The distinguished Pole was looked upon by these men as a Maecenas. Rhenmins on one occasion, in a letter to Laski, expressly emphasises the fact that he has dedicated a little work to his far-off friend, not as had become in an increasing degree the manner, or rather the sadly repulsive unmannerliness, among the Humanists of that day in order to receive a present from prosperous and affluent patrons but in grateful remembrance of former benefits he had received from him in Basle, of the warm affection Laski had at all times manifested for him.* The other prominent form in the circle of our Laski's acquaintances, Henry Glarcan, separated himself in an equally decided manner as Erasmus, in the progress of development, from the Reforma- tion. A finely cultured Humanist was Glarean, at first equally intimate with Zwingli as with Erasmus. This state of things, however, had already become essentially changed at the time when Laski went to live with Erasmus. For him the Reformational movement was a painful interruption in his agreeable course of study. He got angrily out of the path of the Reformation, and of course also of the leaders * Gabbema, Epistolarum Centuries Tres (Harlingae, 1663), p. 10. Among the works edited by Rhenanus and issued from the press of Froben not long before the time of Laski's stay in Basle was a volume of the collected writings of Tertullian (1521), to which he furnished a valuable argument at the head of the several books. The rapturous joy of the scholar on his acquisition of the MS. is described by him with much animation in the preface lying before me. TR. i 3 2 JOHN A LA SCO. of the host, broke off in an ill humour the old associations of friendship, and as time went on turned more and more aside to walk, hand in hand with Erasmus, in lonely embittered ways. The influence of such a personality could not fail to leave its traces upon the mind of our Laski. Upon a promising start towards the Reformation, to which our Pole had already received no small incitement, such association must act only as a drag ; the great men of the Reformation approached him only in the reflection which their form assumed upon the field of vision of these one-sided, narrow-minded Humanists ; and almost from month to month this reflection became, in the irritated mood of these fiercely assailed people, a more distorted one. The smitten and, moreover, severely wounded ones in the exasperated, unsparing conflict made the refined and sensitive Pole but too conscious of the often grievous sting of a harsh mode of expression. We cannot then wonder if the desire was wanting to him for penetrating, despite such an unpromising exterior, to the heart and core of the controversy. He felt himself, with his injured friends, repelled by the method of the conflict, and then quickly trans- ferred to the assailants the aversion he had thus conceived. The prospect, still regarded as a hopeful one by these Humanist friends, instead of coming to an open violent rupture with the Church, labouring at the peaceful cleansing of it from the evils admitted by them to exist therein, must be more in accord with his whole character, strengthened as this was by his position in the national Church of his native land. With Glarean our Laski seems to have lived on most intimate terms. After years of separation THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 133 the busy and exceedingly diligent Humanist keeps the distant high -placed ecclesiastic fully informed of the course of his studies. We find among his correspondence with Laski communications on the arithmetic of the ancients ; the most difficult questions of ancient music are treated ; then again information is given of his collection of notes on Livy, studies which even in our own day have received consideration from a man like Niebulir, and which Glarean would certainly not have conmunicated to his friend unless he had been previously assured of the hearty participation of the latter.* But we too at last have to bid farewell to Basle, and to leave the attractive circle of men in whose midst A Lasco was so fully at home, and over whom our description has already lingered too long. More suddenly than he expected, and certainly than he hoped, he had to break the bonds which now attached him and quit that city in which he had known a happiness such as in no other, not even in his native land. 5. THE RETURN HOME BY WAY OF ITALY. It was in September, 1525, that Jerome^ the much- travelled royal ambassador, again charged with a diplomatic mission, made a call upon Erasmus in Basle. He brought at the same time to his brother a decided instruction from home to leave Basle without delay and to enter upon his homeward journey in slow stages by way of Italy. The state of affairs in Poland had come to such a pass as to * Compare Gabbema, p. 1 1 seq. ; Herzog, Rcal-Ency- clopddie (Stuttgart, 185^ seq.), v.. p. i6~. i 3 4 JOHN A LA SCO. render desirable the return of the youthful and gifted provost. More severe measures had been taken during the absence of Laski against the poison of the Reformation, now ever more widely spreading ; it was deemed imperatively necessary to concentrate the forces which it was hoped to turn to account in the event of the outbreak of a conflict. Men reckoned likewise upon the nephew of the Primate and friend of Erasmus as a meet champion of the threatened Church. His two brothers had already acknowledged their colours ; they were the decidedly ecclesiastical colours, the anti-Reformational colours of the house of Laski ; the same thing, it was almost taken for granted, would be the case with the rising ecclesiastical prince. The royal ambassador handed to Erasmus the passionate and venomous attack upon Luther and his adherents from the pen of that Bishop Krzycki already unfavourably known to us.* To employ the friend of Erasmus on such an errand, in order in this way to enter into personal communication with the revered head of the Humanists for this, in the estimation of the mean-spirited defamer, the nephew of his hated archbishop was after all good enough. At the National Diet of 1523 the Bishop, as a talented and facile writer, was urged to the under- taking of this treatise alike by the King and by his colleagues, though certainly the unbridled character of its contents made up no part of their instruction. He now acknowledges, in an accompanying letter to * Unfortunately the document has not fallen into my hands, even in the ample libraries of St. Petersburg ; its contents have come into my possession only from excerpts and notices in other works. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 135 Erasmus, that the form of the work was influenced by the wish which guided him in its composition, that, namely, of weakening the force of the suspicion that he himself rendered a secret fealty to the views of Luther* As it happens with common minds which love not the truth, he accomplished this end by freely reviling his opponent. It does not appear that Lutlier ever saw the production ; at least, I have not found in his writings any passage referring to it. If he had seen the calumnious book, it would perhaps have been dismissed with the words, " Devil, thou liest ! Buffoon, how thou liest ! O Hans Wolfen- biittel, what a shameless liar art thou, ventest much and sayest nothing, ragest and provest nothing !"f Erasmus did not enter upon a review of the docu- ment ; it was thus perhaps too strong for him.J He returned the gift by the present of a work from the pen of Tonstall, Bishop of London, a man who opposed the Reformation with the same passionate hatred. Hardly did the Polish friend and guest find time to make himself acquainted with the purport of this invective missive from his native land. He was on the point of taking his departure. It had been planned that he should pass by way of the Alps into Upper Italy, should make a stay for a while in Padua and Venice, and there await further directions as to the time and route of his return. Erasmus furnishes his friend, as though he had been a dear son, with letters of introduction to the leading Humanists in those cities where Laski proposed to make a stay. And with what warmth of language * Compare Tomiciana, vii. 344. f Luther, xxvi. 6. \ Erasmus, p. 783. 136 JOHN A LA SCO, did he commend him to such men as Egnatius, Lupsetus, Casimbrotus, himself the prince of Humanists ! * On the 5th October, 1525, Laski set out from Basle.f He was accompanied on his journey by Karl Utenkove, a gifted young man from Ghent, who lived with Erasmus as a sort of amanuensis, was frequently employed by him, specially on the occasion of despatching important letters, and now again was commissioned to convey a message to Rome. As regards his Latin, the master has, it is true, to complain that the man of Ghent did not employ the classical language with the same ease and skill as the young friend from Poland ; but he was pleased with the faithful devotion of the Fleming, and association with him afforded a solace to the now elderly man.J We are specially interested in this travelling companion from the fact that probably on this journey to Rome the bonds of attachment were formed with the family which after decades of years so closely and faithfully bound John, the half- brother of this Charles, to our Laski. Charles, too, was a welcome companion to him on the way ; A Lasco informs his Amerbach concerning him, that he could not have wished a more faithful guide or a more agreeable comrade. The first letter preserved to us from the time of these travels was written at Venice, 26th November, * Erasmus, p. 770,. t Erasmus describes the parting in the strong words, " Multos homines et inter hos Erasmum occidit, tantum sui desiderium reliquit abiens, cum quibuscunque habuit con- suetudinem " (784). \ Herminjard, ii. 183. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 137 1525, full of longing after the friends at Basle.* Whether the travellers tarried so long on the route, or a stay of some weeks in Padua had already pre- ceded, cannot be learnt. For the present our friend remained a considerable time in the city of the doges ; he had sent a messenger to Cracow, the return of whom he had to await. He was, however, at this time strongly drawn towards Spain. In Madrid, in a narrow chamber of one of the towers of the fortifications (with a gloomy outlook upon the desolate bank of the Manzanares),f Francis I. was languishing in ignominious captivity. His proud entry into Bologna as victor at Marignano had been witnessed by the brothers Laski, then all unconscious that one of them would be the King's faithful com- panion in captivity. From the time that Jerome took with him his two brothers upon the embassy (1523), Stanislas had remained at the court of the French king. Francis I. had taken much pleasure in the refined young Pole, so greatly skilled in the languages, who, moreover, distinguished himself in all knightly arts, and had assigned him a position in his own immediate surroundings. Henceforth Sta- nislas did not quit the King's side. He accompanied him on his expedition to Italy, spent with him the * "Plane video, Amerbachie clarissime, verum esse comitem voluptatis moerorem, qui cum incredibilem semper ex tua consuetudine sim solitus capere et voluptatem et fructum, nunc tanto ejus desiderio tenear, ut non litteris modo sed nee verbis quidem explicere satis possum. . . . Jamque vale amicorum amicissime et me ut coepisti ama et Erasmo meo subinde commendes, Glareano nunc profecto scribere non narravit. Eum tuum et Beatum ac etiam Pellicanum meum ex me cupio diligenter salutari." t Michelet, Histoire de France au XVI. Siecle (Paris, 1851), viii., p. 251. i 3 8 JOHN A LA SCO. winter of 1524 in Lombardy,* and then also suffered with him the disgrace of Pavia. Laski was among the number of the captives ; as a Pole, how- ever, he received his liberty, but remained of free choice in the train of the royal prisoner. At first he hastened to Paris to communicate the sad tidings ; thence he journeyed to Madrid, whither the King had been taken. In the murky winter days the King was shut up without a prospect in the solitary tower. Johannes would fain pay a visit to his noble-hearted brother. It is probable, how- ever, that he received in those days the intelligence of the latter's departure. Margaret of Valois had repaired with all speed to join her suffering, so dearly beloved brother. The journey was certainly a hazardous enterprise, but one which the self- sacrificing sisterly love of the royal mignonne did not for a moment shrink from undertaking. Her coming restored the drooping brother to life. When, a few weeks later, she returned to France, she took with her the faithful Pole as a travelling companion, f For the Polish ambassador in Toledo, the renowned John Dantisctts, the departure of his influential countryman had proved very inconvenient ; he had hoped to be able through his interven- tion to transmit certain letters to the Emperor when the latter held his first interview with his royal captive, at which no ambassador was suffered to be present. Week after week passed away for our Laski in * Michelet (viii. 228) cites the passage of Guicciardini, " Le roi s'amusait, donnant tout au plaisir, rien aux affaires. Unhiver d'ltalie, passe ainsi, lui semblait assez doux." + Tomiciana, viii. 310. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 139 Venice without the return of the messenger de- spatched by him ; as late as January in the following year he had not reached Cracow. Laski bewailed his fate as one murdered on the road, an event of only too frequent occurrence in those troubled days, in which disorder prevailed on all the high- ways. A winter spent in Venice was even at that time a delight for which one would willingly pay by the uncertainty as to that which was to be begun in the immediate future. Most of the Poles of good position were wont to alight at the Fondaco de Tedeschi, a still imposing edifice to the east of the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal. The wealthy and tasteful German merchants had not spared the adornment of their property in a manner worthy of the then queen of the seas ; and Venice entertained in those days, to an extent hardly reached before or since, a multitude of artists, in order to give the most perfect expression as regards form to such an endeavour in every province. Titian and Giorgione vied with each other in exhibiting the best products of their art upon the German Chamber of Commerce. On the side nearest the canal the pictures were still fresh upon the building which Giorgione had painted as an art-decoration ; and Titian, whose genius was now entering upon its lofty flight, had continued them. What must then a sail in the gondola have been along the Canale Grande, where all these glories, then just called into existence, saluted one in a vigorous present, not as now, looked down, as from a lost world, strangely and sadly upon such entirely different surroundings ? Whether Laski was brought into more intimate connection with Titian (as he had formed the acquaintance of Holbein at 1 40 JOHN A LA SCO. Basle in the house of his friend Amerbach\ all in- formation is wanting to us ; we are rather inclined to doubt it. Just at this time Titian was contract- ing a friendship with the worthless Aretino, and so long as this continued the pure-minded Laski could find there no point of attachment. We have mainly indeed to seek our friend in the circle of the leading Humanists, to whom he had been introduced by Erasmus with such warm commenda- tion. Erasmus, in after-letters, gives thanks alike to Casimbrotus and to the renowned Egnatius for the hearty reception accorded by each of these men to his Polish friend.* The intimate associate of Froben and of Amerbach would certainly when in Venice have the entrance to the house of the no less eminent master-printer Aldus. The best houses were open to the young Pole. It is true the Doge, to whom the uncle of Laski had more than a decade before delivered the royal message, was no longer living. His successor, too, the almost nonagenarian Grimani, whose firm characteristic expression of countenance stands forth livingly before our eyes in the immortal drawings of Titian, was already dead ; and Andrew Gritti now wore the proud tiara. He had in earlier years pined as a prisoner in Constanti- nople, was companion of the changing fortune of Francis I. in Italy, and yet astute and adroit enough to keep his Venetian army out of the battle of Pavia. Gloomy days had supervened for the maritime supre- macy of Venice : away in the East the Sultan, with evil boding, was raising his victorious head, a source of anxiety to two powers alike Poland, whose fron- * Compare Erasmus, pp. 1105, 1107. THE OTHER STUDENT TRA VELS ABROAD. 141 tiers were contiguous to those of Turkey, and Venice, the queen of the Mediterranean. In the sense of common danger to both peoples, the presence of the nephew of the Polish primate will not have passed unobserved, albeit no notification of a meeting between Laski and the Doge has been preserved to us. Already February was approaching, and still the messenger from Cracow had not arrived, nor had any intelligence from thence come to hand with new instructions as to the course of action. Before Easter (ist April) Laski with certainty expected a decision ; perhaps the issue might be, as he mentions to his friend in Basle, that ere his return he would once more pay a visit to Switzerland and France. The delay was painful to him. He had borrowed of Amerbach money for the journey, and, through the failure of the messenger to appear, was unable to liquidate the debt within the given period. At length, in March, the long-wished-for tidings from home came to hand, and the return journey was at once entered upon. As early as the 8th of April he is able to report his arrival in Posen. Here he has soon discovered in the busy trading city merchants who are going to Basle, and are ready to take with them a part of the sum to which he was indebted. They carry also valuable presents to the friend in Basle : two sable-skins and two bundles of ermine- skins. Only two days does Laski make his abode in Posen, and then hastens on to Cracow> where, after an absence of two years and a half, he arrives in the middle of April. VI. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC IN HIS NATIVE LAND. i. TRYING EXPERIENCES AT HOME. MORE difficult than ten years before was it now to our Laski to adapt himself to the old relations in his native land. Even in those days, in which Poland was preparing to ascend to the culminating point in its history, it was not easy for a child of that land who had breathed for a few years the different atmosphere in the haunts of the Humanists at once to feel himself in his right place and at his ease again at home. At first the eyes were turned backward, in spirit at least, to prolong his life with his friends. An active interchange of letters was kept up ; only isolated fragments has a happy destiny preserved to us, more of letters to Laski, than it has of those from his hand. A fortunate discovery of some of the latter, which agreeably supplement the few specimens in the Complete Edition* leads to the hope that, here or there in ancient collections of manuscripts, there may yet lie hidden letters which shall afford to a Kuyper (ii. 547, 548) has only two letters of Laski for a period of fourteen years, strictly speaking, for the first forty years of his life. Fourteen others were placed at our disposal. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 143 later and more favoured explorer welcome reward for researches often so toilsome and fruitless. From the letters of his friends, too, we are able to discover what the contents of Laskis letters may have been. The old companions in study enable him to share in the progress of their scientific labours ; even those courses of their investigations apparently most remote, they do not deem too much out of the way for them to invite Laski to accompany them therein, by means of detailed communications. Here an erewhile companion in study dedicates to him a work on geography ; there he is by another kept fully informed concerning his edition of an ancient classic; then again he receives desired information as to the art of music among the ancients ; in short, we see how the energetic impulse after knowledge on the part of his master Erasmus has passed over to our Laski, who enthusiastically names himself the scholar of Erasmus. Briefer and more scanty are the com- munications concerning the great world-moving questions of the day. Hardly more than so far as the high-swelling waves penetrate into the work- room of the scholar does the nephew of the Primate of Poland receive intelligence thereof, mostly allu- sions conveyed in a peevish humour, because coming from those who feel themselves hard-pressed and straitened by the resistless current of events, and wish only for a quiet corner of the earth where they may weave their web around them, and be able to sulk over the course of events, which so essentially contradicts their cherished expectations. Mere epistolary correspondence did not afford sufficient amends to our friend, in his sense of isolation, for the copious enjoyment of personal 144 JOHN A LA SCO. intercourse. As he receives tidings of a dangerous illness of Erasmus, he would fain leave everything as it stands, and hasten to the bedside of the revered master, to enjoy with him the last hours of social communion. But the duties of his vocation hold him fast with indissoluble bonds. Thus he seeks to attract the friends to Poland. Within a very little he had succeeded in prevailing on his dearest companion Amerbach to make such a change of abode. There is still preserved a letter from Amerbach to Zasius, belonging to the year 1526,* in which the Basle jurisconsult relates that he had a few days before (the letter was written on [2 1st August] the Tuesday before St. Bartholomew's Day) received from JoJm a Lasco a call to Poland upon the most brilliant terms ; eventually, however, he decides on remaining in Basle, from the consideration that he cannot leave his friends, and from that lively home-feeling which makes us, as he beauti- fully expresses himself, think the smoke of our native country more bright than the fire of a strange land (" dein quod ita nobis natura insitum est, ut fumum patrium igni alieno luculentiorem credamus "). In those days there was prevailing in general throughout Poland the wish to afford a refuge for illustrious men, specially such scholars as, being discontented with the noisy progress of events, desired for themselves a sequestered retreat. Krzycki in glowing language invited Erasmus to flee from the agitation without to the quiet Poland, where untroubled he could live for his studies, and undisturbed could enjoy the high esteem and * Stinzing, Ulrich Zasius (Basle, 1857), P- 373 THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 145 homage of the Polish nobility, liberally rendered to this king of science. But Erasmus rightly judged even Poland to be no longer such a lauded place of shelter.* For an enjoyable life of quiet, in epistolary correspondence with his friends without, our Laski had not been recalled to his native land. The nephew of the Archbishop of Gnesen already occupied too high a post for the fatherland in the distresses which threatened it not also to have counted upon him. In the opinion of Erasmus, the Church needed just such men as he had discovered, in such brilliant prominence, in this his youthful friend. He writes to the Bishop of Plozk that no one can be of more salutary influence for the Church of the present day than men who, to their deep regret, have been called away from their charming studies of philosophy in order by their counsel to aid the fatherland.t This advice, however, so far as it aimed at Laski, was distrusted ; and our friend had first to clear himself of the suspicion which had cast a dark shadow upon him. While the Dean of Gnesen was dwelling so long abroad, especially in Basle whence full many an evil report had reached Cracow, that there also the terrible heresy was already gaining ever firmer ground the intelligence reached his native land, that this priest of the Romish Church had already in Zurich visited Zwingli (whose name, it is true, was not so well known, and therefore not in such * Erasmus, p. 1127. f Ibid., p. 1127: " Orbi christiano nulli sunt magis utiles quam qui reluctantes a philosophise dulcissimis studiis ad patriae consulendum revocantur." IO 146 JOHN A LA SCO. ill-repute, as that of Luther], and rumour was at once busy, particularly in the circles hostile and adversely disposed towards the Archbishop, in brand- ing the nephew of the Primate as a heretic, and declaring of him that he had, like so many a priest, already taken a wife. If he had only followed the hundredfold-repeated example in the Church of his native land, and associated with a woman for lust, the accusation would not have been so aggravated ; but to wish lifelong to share sorrow and joy with a legitimate wife in faithful covenant, well-pleasing to God, that was in the estimation of the Pharisees of those days a shameful misdeed. To see his own favourite nephew, in whom his hope had for years recognised his eventual successor, in the ranks of the apostates who had severed themselves from the mother Church, would have been for the aged Archbishop the bitterest ingredient in his cup of sorrow. From him indeed proceeded the. urgent direction to quit the notorious city of Basle without delay ; from Italy the Polish primate had not yet received tidings that there too Reformational movements had manifested themselves. On that account the journey was to be made not by way of Augsburg, Leipsic, and even Wittenberg, but rather by the indirect route by way of the Alps and Italy, and that slowly, with a prolonged stay in Venice, in order to get any questionable tendencies expelled by the vicinity of Rome. Our Laski, when at length he had returned home, could frankly and without reserve appear in his uncle's presence. He had not married a wife abroad, as his detractors would fain have had it believed with regard to him ; and otherwise than in THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 147 conjugal union, he, the man of pure and rigid morals, had no desire for any intimacy with woman. But with regard to the other accusation also, he felt himself guiltless. Merle (fAubigne supposes that in the oath of purgation we must assume a fall, on the part of the young man, from the height to which he had attained in the intercourse with the friends at Basle.* To so harsh a verdict we cannot by any means subscribe. Our Laski, at the time of his return to his own country, differed in no degree as yet in his view of the Reformation from that of his master, Erasmus. With him, he was fully convinced of the necessity for a reformation of the Church in its head and its members ; on his departure from home he had carried with him this conviction, and in the many travels by which he was brought into contact with persons of the highest ecclesiastical rank, he had been favoured with ample opportunity for witnessing the deep and painful wounds from which the Church was suffering. With Erasmus, too, he was convinced that the greatest injuries had been inflicted upon it by the servants of the Church itself, and that the most passionate complaint with regard to them and their unspiritual life was only too fully justified. But, in common with his teacher, he still cherished the hope that this necessary reforma- tion of the Church could be accomplished without that breach which, to his deepest regret, he saw widening from day to day. With the whole intensity * Merle d'Aubigne, Reformation en Europe, vii. 572 : " Toutefois ce serment prete par De Lasco fut ainsi que sa mondanite une veritable chute ! " It would have been equally difficult for the revered historian of the Reformation to have given the proof for his second assertion that of A Lasco's worldly-mindedness. 148 JOHN A LA SCO. and fidelity of his heart, Laski clung to his mother Church, outside of which he could not conceive of any salvation. For him, the Pole, who had grown up to manhood in the ecclesiastical and political views of his uncle and the court, as of the whole clergy of his native land, all rupture with the Church was a rupture with the fatherland ; neither of these would his heart, glowing with affection for Church and fatherland, at that time have been able to endure. That Christ may demand of His disciple even a sacrifice like this was a thought for the inspiring of which the evangelic spirit which animated the Reformers had not up to this time come personally near to him. At first he lived in foreign lands as a Pole, for whom the question which impelled the solitary man in his relations at home ever farther and farther upon the way that leads to separation was as yet only something remote. The contact with Zwingli may have been only a very fleeting one, lasting enough indeed to press the goad into his soul which impels him henceforth into the depths of the Gospel, decisive enough to lead him after decades of years still with grateful heart to describe Zwingli as the man of God who, with powerful hand, had given him the first impulse to that movement which can only find its issue in the Evangelical Church, but yet not so long and constraining as to call forth from his conscience at once the fateful sacrifice of decision. That important passage, in which Laski after thirty years speaks of his meeting with Zwingli, has been turned to account, in the absence of more detailed notices as to the course of his development, generally at the expense of psychological truth. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 149 Oecolampadius and Pcllican themselves had not yet, at the time of his stay in Basle, taken the final step which must lead to an open rupture. The hero- form of the German Reformer had unhappily been met with by our Pole only in the refraction in which this form appeared in the vicinity of Erasmus. It was no longer the clear, great light which at the first blaze of the Reformation the distinguished Humanist likewise had seen and recognised ; at that time the mist had already risen which more and more rendered it impossible for Erasmus to recog- nise and appreciate, behind the dim, shifting out- lines, the true features of the leader of the Reforma- tion. The fatal and incurable rupture between the leader of the Reformation and the acknowledged head of the studies of humanity had already taken place at the time of the companionship with Erasmus, The passionate, irritated language of the Witten- berger at the same time wounded the guest, who, out of sympathy with the master so harshly assailed, chivalrously espoused his side, and thereby aug- mented for himself the trial of piercing through the repulsive exterior to the golden heart of the Reformer. Repelled by the form, his access to the contents was made less easy. That which Erasmus at first rejoined, in the fine tone of superiority which he knew how to wield with such ease and dexterity, to the attacks of Luther, must appear fully convincing to a mind which, under the spell of a so-called sound common sense, had not yet cast a glance into the fearful depths of sin, the utter corruption of human nature, which not yet, standing beside this abyss, had cried only for grace, as a hart crieth after the water-brooks ; must commend itself to a mind which i 5 o JOHN A LA SCO. had not yet trodden the path of an Augustine and a Paul to the point of recognising that we are saved by grace alone through faith which is in Christ Jesus. This was at that time still to our Laski a mystery sealed with seven seals ; and the harsh, unsparing language of the Reformer did not call forth in the refined Pole the desire to unseal this mystery. God was leading him in those days by another path, but to the same goal. A further element of difficulty came also into operation. Our friend had, moreover, opportunity in Basle of seeing the questionable compact made be- tween the movement of the Reformation and the revolutionary insurrection and agitation in the peasant class ; and who would guarantee for him that the current arising in the religious domain would not issue and run out in a political, demagogic domain ? They were certainly very ominous notes which, as early as I 524 and 1525, were raised by the peasants of Upper Swabia in their twelve articles. There, on the other side of the Rhine, in the neighbouring Waldshut, Hubmaier and Reiiblin were engaged in agitating ; in Klettgau Mtinzer roused the peasantry in the autumn of 1524, after, expelled from Miihl- hausen, he had retreated by way of Nuremberg and Basle. The men who headed the excited crowds had till but recently been on friendly terms with the Reformers in Germany and Switzerland. Despite the notorious rupture with them, what an easy and convenient mode of reproach it was for the enemies of the Reformation to characterise these insurrections, which awakened so much apprehension, as the legitimate fruits of the Reformation ! If one did not join in such reproach, this was in itself a THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 151 result of having been brought under the power of the Gospel. For Laski, however, such an opinion had about it something manifestly just ; and he had moved principally in those quarters in which he would be confirmed in this his conclusion. With the impressions thus acquired, our friend had returned to his native land and entered on the ministry of his church. He was soon indeed able to convince his uncle that the reports spread abroad by his rivals and detractors, concerning his leaning to- wards the Reformation, were false. This, however, did not suffice for the Archbishop. That which the opponents had pretty loudly whispered must be publicly refuted ; and so he required of his nephew, that he should publicly confirm that which he had privately acknowledged to him, and should do so by an oath of purgation in presence of one of his most decided opponents, the Bishop of Cracow. The document of this oath, in the handwriting of Laski, is still preserved in the Privy Record Office at Konigsberg.* He protests in this solemn declara- tion that he has read, with the papal licence (ex indulto Apostolicd), many writings even of those who have separated themselves from the Romish Church ; but that he has wittingly and willingly adopted no opinion, no article of faith which is in contradiction to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. If he has fallen through inadvertence, if he has be- come involved in an error, which truly may also happen to the most learned and holiest of men, he disavows this publicly and emphatically, and ac- knowledges of his own free will that he feels no * Reproduced in full by Kuyper, ii. 547. i 5 2 JOHN A LA SCO. desire to follow any sects or doctrines which are opposed to the unity of the Romish Church and its regulations, and that he wishes only firmly to retain that which has been accepted and approved by the Romish Church. In like manner, he vows to the Holy See, his superiors and bishops, a life- long obedience in all things permitted and honour- able. " That swear I ; so help me God and the holy Gospels of God." Our Laski was in those days in sacred earnest with regard to this oath, which perfectly reflects the position in relation to his Church still occupied by him. Anything for him rather than a separa- tion from the one holy, Apostolic mother Church. Outside of it there is no other. It stands indeed in need of reformation ; but, as the bearer of the truth, it carries in itself the power of healing, and will of its own power overcome and heal the ills which his spiritual eye has likewise recognised. Verily it was not fear of being deprived of his benefices, and having to wander forth upon a painful martyrdom, that forced these words upon reluctant lips ; and just as little was it respect and filial affection for the uncle ; it was his full conviction, which only that man would have a right to designate as a declension, yea as a fall, who was in a position to afford the indisputable proof that he had already, inwardly liberated from the Romish Church, attained to the height of evangelic truth. Such proof has not yet been furnished ; nor will it be in the future, even though more abundant sources should be opened to our research. After all the malignant calumnies had been thus conspicuously reduced to silence, our Laski applied THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 153 himself with the liveliest zeal to the duties of his vocation. Cracow indeed would have been capable of enchaining the young ecclesiastical prince if his mind had been set upon worldly entertainment and enjoyment. Here, at the court, festival was suc- ceeding festival. Bona, the new queen, an Italian princess, passionately fond of pleasure, but also dejighting in intrigues and machinations, dearly loved a brilliant court. Then came the lively, ex- cited life at the capital, produced by the con- stant apprehension of some severe and disastrous reverse in arms. On the north the Prussians as- sumed a threatening attitude, unwilling to bear the yoke of the Poles ; on the east the Russians were lying in wait ; on the south the victorious S oilman was ominously lifting his head. Where his wild hordes trod all was over for decades of years with the prosperity of the people ; and Poland's frontier was contiguous along a wide tract with the ill-defined boundaries of the threatening Turkish neighbour. Courtly festivals and wild din of arms were not, however, to the taste of the pupil of Erasmus. With a sigh, he writes to Basle, " Here only battles, dreadful battles, nothing else."* He flees from the royal court and plunges into the administration of his wide ecclesiastical jurisdiction. t But violently, like a startled roe, is he ever afresh drawn away, and must keep his eye fixed upon the turbulent course of political events ; members of his house have laid hold of the spokes of the rolling wheel ; fraternal * "Hie bella, horrida bella, praeterea nihil." t He mentions to Amerbach that he would gladly resign for a journey to Basle that administration, " quam in primo hue reditu meo, aulam fugiens, susceperam." IS4 JOHN A LA SCO. love does not suffer him to close his eyes to that which may draw the family itself into a common distress.* 2. LASKI'S ACTIVITY IN THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOMAIN. Against his will our Laski had been drawn even into the tumult of battles and all the disquiet of wildly surging party conflicts. He may well often have sighed at the thought of being thus for years together forced away from the calmer island of retired studies after which he longed. But the political sea, rising in mighty waves, was yet not able to draw down the resolute swimmer into its depths. We see him appear above the surface ever * In order to follow the thread of the narrative, it is neces- sary to understand the part played by the Laskis between the years 1526 and 1535. Upon the death of the young and chi- valrous Lewis of Hungary, nephew to the King of Poland, in conflict with the hordes of Soliman (2gth August, 1526), the throne was claimed by John Zapolya, Vayvode of Transylvania, Sigismund's brother-in-law, and by Ferdinand of Austria, brother of the Emperor. The former was favoured by Francis I., and the latter by Charles V. The Polish nobility sympathised undisguisedly with the cause of Zapolya. Sigismund tried to bring about an agreement between the claimants. Jerome Laski threw himself unreservedly on the side of Zapolya, to whose service he sacrificed the best days of his life. After visiting Paris, London, Venice, in his interest, he repaired to Constantinople towards the end of 1527, where he passed some months in securing the support of Soliman. Eventually, at Ratisbon, he made good the claim of Zapolya to the throne. He was rewarded with the lands of Kesmark, at the foot of the Carpathians, while the bishopric of Vesprim was bestowed upon his brother John. In 1533 the governor of Transylvania was murdered at the instigation of the treacherous Gritti, son of the Doge of Venice, who aimed at supplanting Zapolya by the aid of Soliman. Gritti paid the penalty of his life. Zapolya, however, suspected Jerome of complicity, and ac- THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 155 and anon, straining every nerve to cast the anchor of his life's ship in that firm ground in which God, by the peculiar leading of His providence, would hold him fast. We must again retrace our steps for a few years, in order to accompany him upon the path of his spiritual development, so far as only very isolated traces enable us thus to accompany him. The political events, as also the troubles of his native land, specially as occasioned by the continued far-reaching disorders and vicissitudes of war in the neighbouring States, would in themselves suffice to force somewhat into the background the seriously pressing religious questions;* but for Poland, as other lands, these threatened to assume too much of a burning character to admit either of being passed over in silence or forcibly suppressed. While, in Germany especially, they were standing in the very forefront of the whole movement of the age, their giant shadows also fell threateningly upon Poland, which had the reputation of being such a stronghold cordingly imprisoned him at Ofen. The tidings reached Johannes only in 1534. He instantly made the most heroic efforts for the liberation of his beloved brother, and was at length successful. Zapolya, who owed his throne to Jerome, at length yielded to the expostulations raised on every side, and released his ambassador from the shameful captivity. After retiring for a time to his estates at Kesmark, Jerome proffered his services to Ferdinand, by whom they were eagerly accepted. He had laboured from the year 1530 for the establishment of peace between the rival candidates, and this end he finally attained in 1535. The bearing of the two claimants towards the Reformation is fully examined by Dalton. For the evidence on this point, and for a list of authorities, the historian must be referred to the original work. * The Bishop of Breslau, too, complains in a letter to the Pope of the year 1531 (Theiner, Vetera Monumenta, ii. 472) that, owing to the Turkish war, the King has not the time for applying a remedy to the ecclesiastical disorders. 156 JOHN A LA SCO. of Catholicism. We have already observed at an earlier stage how in the old edifice there began to be heard strange creakings. In the years which had now expired no thought had been given to the improvement of the defective places ; it was thought that enough had been done when the attempt had been made to suppress every murmur. The sterner measures, however, to which recourse was had, were no longer successful against the spirit of the Refor- mation violently bursting forth. Even the severest menaces proved no more than blows dealt upon the water. Mention has already been made how the evangelic movement first came to a head in Dantsic, then the most important seaport town of Poland. Whilst our friend was pursuing his studies abroad, the Archbishop of Gnesen had himself repaired to the town, then in the fervour of excitement, though without any substantial result from his visit. The Primate was ill-adapted for the quelling of such a fermentation, for the very reason that he was unac- quainted with its nature. That is made fully mani- fest from a document in which he expounds his opinion with regard to the Dantsic differences.* On the one side stands the ecclesiastical prince, well versed in jurisprudence, who sees a Church with its doctrine unassailed from Apostolic times ; on the other side he sees opinions of people addicted to innovation (iieoterici), who like to follow their own judgment in particular rites and ecclesiastical regula- tions. In connection with such a division, the man who has grown grey in the observances of his Church * Tomiciana, vii. 387. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 157 cannot for a moment doubt on which side stands right and truth. Equally little result had the mission of the four royal counsellors, among whom was numbered Jerome Laski (1525). Even the most skilful statecraft shows itself powerless in the solution of ques- tions which have arisen out of true faith, and are advanced by a conscience established in the peace of the Gospel. These are no other than voices out of a kingdom which is not of this world, and their abiding guardian is that holy form which has over- come the world. By way of rejoinder to the decision of these counsellors, the Protestants of Dantsic sent, it is true, a long detailed defence of their doctrines to the King. Krzycki, of whose incisive and facile pen the bishops had gladly availed themselves in the difficult questions of the faith ever since he had won his spurs by his defamatory writing against Luther, was appointed to compose the written reply which was then delivered to the Protestant deputies of Dantsic by the Bishop of Cracow. Both writings are to be prized as voices from the first days of the Reformation, and seem from their nature to demand a comparison.* In the one writing breathes the language of conscience, which rises against gross distortion of Divine truth, against abuses crying to Heaven in the Church and among its ministers, the clear, firm, fearless word of a disciple who has attained to the all-surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, and, from the height of this free watch-tower, is ready to give up even the Church, which he sees corrupted in worldly ways, to separate from it in order to be * Tomiciana, vii. 358, 400. i 5 8 JOHN A LA SCO. henceforth bound to the Saviour alone. We gather from the tone of the discourse that these freed ones have travelled by the bitter way of deep knowledge of sin to the abyss of utter despairing of their own righteousness, but that at this very abyss they have been saved of grace alone. The episcopal answer, on the other hand, is couched in a tone of superiority, frigid, taking its stand upon the legal ground of the Church as the only body of Christ, and, from the aristocratic height of this secularised standpoint, dis- missing in a few words the complaints and grievances of this little, disobedient people. No trace of any pity for their troubles, no intelligence for the cry of anguish wrung from a conscience which is concerned about its salvation, as though they were no spiritual fathers, only police-officers of the man there in Rome. But the days for such decrees, as also for finding obedience and subjection among those who had tasted the liberty of the children of God, the " good old days," were irrevocably past, even for the priests and bishops of Poland. About the time of these negotiations our Laski returned home. Even during his absence he had, through the interest of his uncle, been appointed administrator in Gnesen. He seems to have found this new dignity awaiting him as a sort of welcome on his return to Posen ; at any rate, he adds the title for the first time, in his joy at the attainment of this office, to a signature in a letter from this place. It would appear to us that the new office corresponded to his wishes ; it afforded him the desired opportunity of escaping the life and move- ment at the noisy and bustling court, and in greater retirement living for his vocation. With all THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 159 earnestness he joined in the work of ecclesiastical life. We have unhappily no evidence in what sense he participated in the measures now deemed urgent against the supposed seditious ones, or whether he approved of all the measures adopted by his Church. With regard to particular pheno- mena, of which he received tidings, he could certainly point to similar incidents in Switzerland and the evil consequences which had already attended them. The King still wavered for a short time as regards having recourse to more serious measures after the episcopal letter against the Dantsic insur- gents had exploded ineffectually. A really devout mind may certainly have paralysed for him the arm that would hastily draw the sword in matters of faith. And then there was the unfavourable character of the time everywhere the swelling waves of political disorder ; threatening foes along almost the whole length of his frontiers, specially in the east and south ; and then the serious com- plications with the German Grand Master not yet brought to a peaceful solution. Everybody felt that a storm, pregnant with decisive consequences, was, as it were, in the air in that tempest-charged age ; and men sought as far as possible to keep their hands free, that at the moment of the dis- charge they might be able to appear with undivided strength on the field of conflict. Sigismund knew that in connection with this expected course of war- like events his kingdom would be threatened in the first line ; and political caution must suggest to him not on the eve of the crisis, out of sheer light- heartedness, too greatly to irritate the people of Dantsic, and to play with that which constituted his :6o JOHN A LA SCO. most important key to the sea and the outlet for his commerce. And yet he was not permitted to defer proceeding with decision, when those about him had succeeded in persuading him that the prime source of the whole rebellious movement was not of a religious but of a revolutionary nature, the perilous rising of the people against the hereditary power of the nobles and kings. With the assailing of the Church, the two other main buttresses of the State were threatened. Almost everywhere, with the proclamation of the freedom of the Gospel, there had penetrated into the lower ranks of the people the consciousness, now so oppressive, of their position of bondage and depriva- tion of civil rights under their lords and mighty ones. Here and there, goaded on by deceivers or deceived, the unhappy masses had already attempted by violence to throw off the yoke, now that they had become conscious of its full weight, so intolerable for them. The peasants, once aroused, had broken out in ungoverned fury, with almost simultaneous action, in the most varied and remote localities ; burning and destroying on their way, they had unfurled the standard of revolt and gone forth against the castles and strongholds of their tyrants, like a fierce, blood-red, avenging host, intent on exacting repara- tion for centuries of injustice ; and had at the same time taken upon themselves to discharge the functions alike of accuser and judge and execu- tioner. That which had been done by the Swabian peasants was attempted likewise by their East Prussian companions in suffering, not in imitation of that which was done in South Germany ; at least, the proof for such imitation has not been given. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 161 Like conditions have only forced open the valve, and the steam everywhere plenteously accumulated has escaped from its narrow enclosure with a shrill hissing. What then if the harsh note should penetrate deep into the forests or the desolate marshy plains of Poland, where the unspeakably wretched kmetons dragged out their slavish exist- ence, if, as was not to be doubted, the note should there too find an intelligent response ? The inflammable material was indeed abundantly piled up. The nobles, the clergy, instinctively felt the danger, and so it became easy to persuade the King that every act of concession on the ecclesiastical side would only afford support to the threatened insur- rection of the lower classes against all authority. This representation, as also the profiting by its use, was charged with fatal effects for the Romish Church. It is to be enumerated among the most prominent marks of the Divine truth of the Refor- mation that, with the same sacred earnestness with which it dissociated itself from the humanistic studies which, in proud seclusion, took no care for the people, it now refused to make common cause with the tumultuous multitudes, but following the Gospel alone, gave unto God that which is God's, and to Caesar that which is Caesar's. But the Romish Church in Poland too had lulled itself to sleep, in the fond supposition that only one and the same revolutionary movement was to be perceived in the Reformation and in the risings of the peasants, and composing itself under this delusion, had let pass unused the time of its visitation for healing the inner defects. The clergy in Poland urged upon the King, con- 1 1 162 JOHN A LA SCO. vinced of the threatening danger, the necessity for instantly taking severe measures. No time was now to be lost. That which was manifesting itself in Dantsic was repeated, though in a milder form, in Thorn, in Elbing, in Braunsberg, in Posen, in so many other places then under Polish sway. Yea, even in Cracow, and farther in the interior of the land, there were witnessed strange flashes of light- ning. At the National Diet held in Petrikow, only at the close of which our Laski returned home, the religious disturbances formed a main subject of excited debate. In the very message to the pro- vincial diets, in which the King enumerates the sub- jects on which counsel is to be taken by way of preparation for the National Diet, it was stated that the King had indeed made peace with the Duke of Prussia, but that the whole land was still confused and endangered by the presence of the Lutheran sect. Already the peasants too, after the example of the peasants in Germany, and upon the pretext of evangelical freedom, had taken up arms against their masters, had slain many of them, and reduced their dwellings to ashes. Only swift measures of force, we are told, were now in a position to extirpate this widely diffused pestilence.* The National Diet in alarm gave its sanction to such measures. The King himself, at the head of a great retinue, marched against Dantsic. Thrown upon its own resources alone, the town ventured upon no resistance ; helpless, it was obliged to submit to all the con- ditions imposed, t The Reformational movement * Tomiciana, viii. g. t Hartknock, Preussische Kirchenhistorie (Leipsic, 1686), F- 067 ; and, yet more fully, Tomiciana, viii. 40. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 163 was accordingly delayed for a few years ; suppressed, as the hastily tranquillised Poles believed, it was not by any means. The spirit which had animated the last National Diet at Petrikow was naturally transplanted to the ecclesiastical assembly which the Archbishop of Gnesen summoned for the following year at Leczyc (1527), and in which our Laski took part. The bishoprics of Breslau and Cujavia were specially signalised as infected with the heretical plague. It was resolved to proceed vigorously against the recognised heretics, as also against those only sus- pected of heresy, and that upon the basis of the severe measures adopted in the previous assemblies, to set aside all fear in the carrying out of the same, to have only God, the faith, and the holy religion before one's eyes, and in connection therewith to spare neither money nor toil.* Here, for the first time, mention is made of an attempt not merely to suppress the heresy with strong hand, but also to instruct the people. May we perhaps trace this turn of affairs to the influence of our dean, who had oppor- tunity enough for recognising that this spirit could no longer be quelled by violent measures alone ? The assembly resolved, namely : " Since even the most searching investigation and chastisement would avail but little to root out this sect, unless the genuine pasture of the Word of God is applied and taught by true Catholic men, who stand high on account of their own works and example, and who, by their sound doctrine, can bring men to reject the * Friese, Kirchengesch. des Konigreichs Polen (Breslau, 1786), pp. 2, 4;. 1 64 JOHN A LA SCO. evil and to choose the good, it is ordained that the archbishops and bishops, particularly those of Breslau* and Cujavia, shall maintain at their courts, metropolitan, cathedral, and collegiate churches, and in particular those where the Lutheran sect appears still to be spreading, learned men, theologians and preachers of the word of God, who shall be able to make known and expound to the orthodox the Gospel of Christ, the Holy Scripture, by thorough instruction and a good discourse." We have no means of knowing to what extent the several bishops followed this wise counsel in their jurisdictions ; sundry indications lead to the conclusion that matters did not go beyond good resolutions. But our Laski rested not. Repeatedly did he urge upon the leader of the Humanists to give the King of Poland hints and advice ; at length the cautious man gave way. His letter is composed with wondrous skill, brilliant, replenished with reminiscences of the fair vanished world which had been called forth to new life by the Humanists, graceful, and stamped with dignity, and, moreover, rendering a delicate homage to the powerful King, * The Bishop of Breslau had two years before made his complaint to the papal see regarding the inroads of heresy. " From the neighbouring Meissen, whence the monster in Wittenberg has found an outlet ' ' so he complained to his chief shepherd " this accursed sect has invaded my ecclesi- astical province also, and that which there appears in books is with me realised in the life " (compare Theiner, ii. 431). Here, too, again and again only the hue and cry over the change of some ecclesiastical customs, neglect of the tithes, the abridgment of ecclesiastical rights, but no entering into the deeper-lying causes because no comprehension of them of which the disorders now arising are nothing more than the necessary consequences. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 165 a fragrant blossom of the time of the Renaissance, but with all its well-chosen words powerless to reach and lay bare the ills, and to contribute to their healing.* Erasmus, with all his gifts, was not the man for this ; and there is something tragic about the effect of the letter, certainly an undesigned one, which has come to our knowledge a royal present to the Humanist, f By yet another sign of life, in the same year (i 527), Erasmus manifested as well his friendly disposition towards the family of Laski, as likewise his wish to act with stimulating influence upon the Polish clergy through the medium of the archbishop of the kingdom. He dedicated to the Primate his edition of Ambrose, not only because this particular Father of the Church was ready to issue from the press, but because the Humanist recognised many a trait of resemblance between the first prefect of the Church at Milan and the present primate of Poland, and wished, for the purpose of animating the contemporary Archbishop of Gnesen, to bring before his mind the spiritual picture of the venerable Archbishop of Milan. Very soon the ecclesiastical relations seem to have wrought with paralysing effect upon our Laski. As early as a year after his return to his native land he complains to his friend AmerbacJi that in the province of faith no changes whatever had taken place. All that has been done has been slightly to curtail the great booty of the monks. The senate, namely, had decreed that no monastic property could be divided among private individuals, and that the private property of monks and nuns should * Tomiciana, ix. 180. t Erasmus, p. 895. 1 66 JOHN A LA SCO. after their death revert to their relatives. " Sic forte pauciores monachos habebimus " (" So we shall perhaps have somewhat fewer monks ") ; with this exclamation the earnest-minded Dean seeks to console himself in his grief over the state of his Church. It was but a dreary consolation. The longer the time that passed, the more did the faith- ful son become conscious that the mother Church was fixed and immovable in its old ruts, and the scandalised vision was rendered more acute to perceive the failings of this Church. It was in those days that our friend formed in Cracow the acquaint- ance of a young man preparing for the priesthood, who was then twenty-three years of age, a bachelor of the University, and on the point of completing his studies by a residence of some years in Padua and Bolcgna. The gifted and devout young man had already attracted the attention and won the favour of the Bishop of Cracow ; nor could the student remain concealed from the searching eye of our Laski, since by his serious walk and conversation he towered so prominently above the life and doings of his fellow-students. A Lasco had then indeed no conception that one day there would arise for him, in the young man to whom he now turned with so much kindness, his own most dangerous enemy, and that of the whole Reformational develop- ment of Poland : Stanislas Hosius. A generation later he recalls to the memory of his opponent those conversations which he held with him in Cracow, in which Laski not only blamed the life of many false servants of his Church (pseudo-ecclesi- asttci\ but also was already scandalised at many of their articles of doctrine. At that time there still THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 167 existed a friendly interchange of thought between Hosius and Laski on this point.* Once Laski in his inner life had entered upon these paths and given room to such convictions, the natural result could only be that they drew him ever farther upon by-paths perilous for a faithful son of the Romish Church. He was not in the mood, with his earnest studies, to confine himself now to the practical work of his office ; he must, in accord- ance with his whole constitution of mind, though at present only from afar, follow the mighty intellec- tual current without, in the home lands of Humanism and the Reformation. Almost insensibly he was carried away by the surging waves which, though only after long years, landed the earnest man upon the shore of the Evangelical Church. The first letter from him contained in Kuyper's collection is to the well-known JoJianncs Hess, in Breslau, written from Kalisch, the chief town of the palatinate of the same name, to which also Gnesen belonged. The name of Hess was a familiar one to the Humanists and Reformers in Germany and Switzerland. His renowned theses of the year 1524, on the word of God, the high-priestly office of Christ, and on -marriage, breathe a fresh Reformation spirit ; they penetrated deep into France ; and Lefevre testifies in a charming letter to Farel from Meaux his warm assent to their contents, f It would appear that Laski during his stay in Basle heard nothing con- cerning this Nuremberger, for whom Poland had * So I understand the statement, " nee raro mecum ser- mones suas ea de re miscebat" (Kuyper, i. 396). t The letter, printed for the first time, inHerminjard(i. 219), at the close of it also the theses. i68 JOHN A LA SCO. become a second fatherland ; but in Poland itself men spoke much in liberal circles of the renowned Breslau doctor, and so our Laski turned to him, animated at first by the wish of coming into intellectual contact with the fresh and lively scholar,* but then also through him to become possessed of the most recent products of the book-market. For the Dean of Gnesen the stern inhibition of books does not seem to have existed, so far as concerns the importation of Lutheran writings. He has at that time already read the Hyperaspistes j~ of Erasmus against Luther ; he wishes to obtain all the writings which have since then proceeded from the pen of Erasmus or of LutJier. The Hyperaspistes had made its appearance just at the time when our Laski set out from Venice ; in it the final and irreparable breach between the head of the Reformation and the prince of the Humanists is accomplished. So great is the bitterness and irritation of Erasmus, ordinarily so refined in language, so calm and lofty in tone, that, even as regards the form, he exposed himself to a perceptible weakening by the surrender cf the wonted moderation in which his strength lay. In point of contents, too, the Humanist occupies a lower standpoint than the Reformer, in presence of the deepest and most mysterious question of life, that of the freedom or unfreedom of the human will. There the Humanist, with his weapons drawn avowedly from the armoury of Church doctrine, but it is nevertheless rather Pelagius than Augustine * Zwingli, in a letter to Vadian, describes him (Hess) as " homo tersus sane et alacer " (Zwingli, vii. 342). t The full title is Hyperaspistes Diatribes (1526), a defence of his Diatribe de Libero Arbitrio (published 1524) against Luther's reply De Servo Arbitrio (152$}. TR. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 169 who is there suffered to speak ; here the monk and hero, who has taken up the giant conflict against Rome, and for whom buckler and sword is the word of God alone. Calvin has in after-days hardly laid such decided stress upon the unfreedom of the human will, as Luther in his controversial writing. Many, and those even earnest-minded believers, will not be able to follow the colossal man in all his most daring conclusions ; and Erasmus by his sharp, unsparing rhetoric would easily win for him- self the approbation of those whose so-called sound common sense prefers to evade the serious, difficult questions with a convenient dictatorial utterance, rather than make the attempt to sound their depths, much less to think of their solution. Dorner is thus right in his verdict on this controversy when he says : " Erasmus makes man, to begin with, richer than Luther ; but how much superior in the long run is Luther's notion of freedom to that of Erasmus, for whom the highest and best in the same is re- solved into freedom of choice, who thus, as a logical consequence, must teach an everlasting pos- sibility of falling. Luther's notion of freedom leads to the Godlike real freedom of grace ; for this it could not appear a privilege, but only a defect, to be still involved in choice and hesitancy. Here, too, as in the Christology, it is the goal of the yet to be perfectly realised idea which Luther has apprehended, though he has been less successful in completely and distinctly marking out the stages to the attainment of the goal and the factors enter- ing into such attainment. Erasmus' notion of freedom, with its everlasting twofold possibility, and with its uncertainty in regard to salvation, can- 1 70 JOHN A LA SCO. not appear to him an enviable one ; nor can he perceive a loss in that condition in which man, through the power of God-given love, even as God by virtue of His own free eternal love, can eventually will only the good."* In addition to the second part of the above- mentioned work, which appeared in the course of the following year, Hess had yet many other writings to send to our Laski, in accordance with his request ; for with the most strained attention th'e circles of the Humanists and the adherents of the Reformation followed the decisive conflict of the two leaders, and from the opposite camps resounded now one cry, now the other. The biographer of Erasmus points to a few isolated expressions of those who had been repelled by the assertions of Luther from a contemplated adhesion to the cause of the Reforma- tion ;t the final issue, however, shows us not Luther driven into a corner, but the Humanist retiring in vexation from Basle to Freiburg, and thereby abandoning the field of battle. If we had only an expression of our Laski showing us what was the effect of this feud upon him in those days! But no sound from his mouth. One thing only has become manifest for us : that a slight cooling of the relations between Erasmus and Laski must have already set in towards the close of the twentieth years of the century (i 527 1529). Long * Dorner, Geschichte der Prot. Theologie (Munich, 1867), p. 209. Feugere(p. 274), as a Catholic, attacks the statement of this German Protestant, as well as that of Stichart Erasmus von Rotterdam (Leipsic, 1870, p. 368), who has appealed thereto, but, as it seems to us, with no valid arguments. t Feugere, Erasme (Paris, 1874), p. 273. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. i;i separation, no doubt, causes many an epistolary correspondence to languish. With ever longer intervals is the correspondence now pursued which was at one time so warmly and zealously maintained between the master and his scholar. That is not the striking part ; it is more significant that Erasmus in his numerous letters to Poland ever more rarely sends greetings to his once so heartily esteemed comrade. Nay, in the somewhat boastful epistle of the elderly Erasmus, from his place of retreat at Freiburg, in the year 1530, in which he speaks of his friends and acquaintances in Poland, there is not one word of Laski* Was it the political attitude of Laski, the partisan of Zapolya, which imposed silence upon the timid man out of consideration for the Emperor ? or had the difference of religious sentiment brought about a tension ? Another cursory notice affords us the opportunity of observing our Laski in his lonely studies. He had prayed his friend Amcrbach to forward him the lucubrations of Sadolet (1527)^ We shall cer- tainly not err if we think of Laski in those days as being at the standpoint of the upright, prudent, and able Bishop of Carpentras, in the duchy of Avignon. Sadolet, already in early years at the time when Laski as a boy was staying with his uncle in Rome appointed, along with Peter Bembo, secretary to Leo X., had, without immediately par- ticipating in the feud between Luther and Erasmus, sought on this important question to preserve an intermediate position between the two combatants ; * Erasmus, p. 1383. t Gabbema, Epistolarum Centuries Trcs (Harlingce, 1663), p. 7. 172 JOHN A LA SCO. he conceded more to Divine grace than Erasmus was willing to do, declared himself in favour of the doctrine of justification by faith,* and kept up a friendly interchange of letters with men of the Reformation, such as Buccr, Sturm, Mclanclithon. He adhered faithfully to his Church, sought to pre- serve his diocese free from all contact with Pro- testantism ; to a persecution of the Protestants, however, he would not suffer himself to be led away, but would much rather apply the hand kindly and gently to remove the crying evils in the mother Church. We can well suppose that his writings, in the case of minds having such elective affinity, served as a bridge for the establishing of a spiritual converse with the men and the doctrine of the Reformation, however decided the protest which the Bishop himself would have raised against such effect. Was our Laski perhaps entering upon this bridge when he applied to his friend in Basle for the books ? 3. THE SEVERANCE FROM CHURCH AND FATHER- LAND. So passed the years for our Laski in his native land, storm-tossed without when the fate of his relatives called him to take part in the events of the world, but also storm-tossed in mind, because he inwardly shared in the conflict of spirits of that time, because his soul entered into the questions raised by the Reformation, and raised with a force and distinctness which demanded of a pious heart * Herzog, xiii. 299. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 173 answer and solution, and because on a glance at the Church of his native land he must see how its ministers lived on without the understanding of these questions, without deeper interest, ready, indeed, to proceed with the constable against all freer movement, but disinclined in earnest repentance to begin in their own lives the healing of the gaping wounds of the Church. In the midst of this movement there fell a severe visitation. The last years of the uncle's life were saddened in manifold ways. He had more than once to make a bitter experience of the hostile spirit of his powerful and closely combined opponents. He saw the mysterious shadow of the Reformation fall, too, within the bounds of his own spiritual jurisdiction ; but he no longer knew how to explain the varying outlines, and had a conception only of the great peril with which the Church, entrusted to his oversight, was threatened by this movement. Still more heavily did the course of events in Hun- gary press upon the aged man. His heart was with the nephew upon the side of Zapolya, and, with the ardour of Polish patriotism, he allowed his words and his means to be drawn with his heart into the support of the brother-in-law of his king. Even a heavy loss in earthly possessions the failing man might be able to overcome ; more distressing, how- ever, was it to him to see that even this his bearing towards Zapolya, of which he could hardly be said to make any secret, and in which he was conscious of being in harmony with the most eminent men of Poland, was turned to account by his never-resting detractors in order to render him suspected at Rome. The labour does not seem to have been in vain. JOHN A LA SCO. We are told that Pope Clement VII. placed the Archbishop and his family under the ban. The Cardinal of Ancona is said to have summoned the legatus natus to Rome to answer in his own defence, and that in a citation so boundlessly violent that he designated Laski therein as " only in name archbishop, in reality arch-devil, standing on one level with Datan, Korym, Abyron, Judas." While the letter branded the nephew Jerome as a second Herostratus, the Cardinal did not shrink from the charge that the Primate had acquired arms by means of the sum obtained from the alienation of ecclesi- astical properties, and that these had been sent to the Turks in Hungary. The shameful document itself I have not been able to find anywhere, and on several weighty grounds doubt its existence. But the fact that such a rumour should be able at all to attach to the name of Laski at a very early period reflects the disposi- tion of the opponents, which he had still to experience himself, and which shed a gloom over the late evening of his life. In February, I 5 30, he officiated at the coronation of the son of his king, at that time a youth of ten years ; afterwards he still held a synod in Petrikow, none of which he could have done if he had been placed under a ban. On the igth of May, 1531, he fell asleep, now seventy-five years of age and weary of life, in his castle at Kalisch. Only our Johannes seems to have been present at his deathbed. Stanislas had already returned from France to Poland in 1527; his occupation in life, however, detained him for the most part far from the uncle. Jerome was still in Hungary ; at the intelli- gence of the death he hastened to his native country. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 175 By the end of June the brothers met in Cracow at a sort of family council. The testament of the uncle had been continued up to within a few days of his decease : they were called to carry into effect the very minute instructions, which afford also to us an extremely interesting glimpse into the sumptuous style of housekeeping of a Polish archbishop of the sixteenth century ; at the same time they had on this occasion to arrange and divide their father's property. JoJiannes had already a few years before, immediately after the death of the father, voluntarily renounced his portion of the inheritance in favour of his brothers. Jerome, as the eldest, received the ancestral castle in Lask, the youngest brother a few other possessions, among which the principal was the township of Strykon, with all its outlying lands and villages. The brothers could not remain to- gether long. Jerome repaired from Cracow direct to Linz, in order to treat with Sigismimd of Herberstein, the ambassador of Ferdinand, with regard to the projects of compensation and exchange to be made \v\\h John Zapolya. These negotiations, together with all the mental strains of the past months, exerted so wearing an effect upon Jerome Laski, that he had hardly returned to Transylvania, when he fell into a severe and dangerous illness, which prostrated him for seven weeks upon the bed of pain. Nor was this the whole of his troubles. While he was still mourning over the loss of the uncle, a son and a daughter were carried off in rapid succession, and, so far as we can learn from the letters preserved to us from that time, it does not appear that either of the brothers was able to tend him.* * Bucholtz, Urkundenbuch, p. 48 ; but there is an inextricable 176 JOHN A LA SCO. The departure of the Archbishop affected the destiny of our Johannes most of all. By the uncle's death he had been deprived of his strongest support for the ascending of the high ladder of ecclesiastical dignities. Shortly before his decease the uncle had, with friendly concern, obtained for him the appointment as Provost of Gnesen and Leczyc. Now, however, he took his place as the nephew and namesake of the deceased Arch- bishop, and thus also in part as heir to the hostile sentiment which was cherished on so many sides towards the departed. Men could now with im- punity vent upon him their rancour at his having been so long by preference the object of a too paternal solicitude on the part of the mighty Primate. We do not hear that such interruption on the path of rapid advancement had the effect of causing the bereaved nephew to despond ; his earnest purpose of mind imposed upon him other and higher tasks, and in the accomplishment of these the ill-will of the envious could not disturb him. His grief over the Church had long drawn its nourishment from other and very different sources than the pitiful laughter of un gratified ambition. With the departure of the venerable form, however, the bond was loosened which with a heartfelt filial affection attached the nephew to the uncle who had manifested such faithful paternal love, which, more- over, attached the Dean to his archbishop ; he could now unhindered follow the guidance of those thoughts which led him ever more deeply into the confusion in the dates on p. 48 (Wysko, 3ist October, 1531) and p 49 (Vienna, 2nd November, 1531). THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 177 word of God, and ever farther from the ordinances of his Church. The change was not quickly accomplished. We are glad on Laski's account that a few years yet elapsed before the completed rupture, since in this way the reproach brought against him by his defamers is deprived of its force that from the days of his stay in Basle he had, as a sort of disguised apostate, hypocritically preserved the semblance of attachment to the Romish Church so long as the high position of his uncle afforded him the prospect of an equally high succession. It was not the case that the disappointment of this hope, with which he is credited, impelled him in vexation to burn the ships behind him. He was still fight- ing a giant's fight to be able to remain in his mother Church ; he fought it faithfully, earnestly, with the feeling of sadness that it was a contest also involving his fatherland, his beloved Poland, but ever more also with the impression, with the dawn- ing conviction, that the wrestling mysterious form in the night was the Lord Himself, and from that moment with the imploring wish, " Lord, I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." As the blessed of the Lord, then, at the dawn of the morning, he had no utterance of complaint that the sinew of the thigh was thus shrunken. In the first place, the death of the Archbishop brought about for the young Provost of Gnesen a series of official labours, even before his domestic affairs had been arranged with his brothers. The cathedral chapter of Gnesen deputed him to convey to the Bishop of Cujavia, Matthias Drscwicki, the intelligence of the election of the last-named to the 12 1 7 8 JOHN A LA SCO. archbishopric.* He availed himself of the oppor- tunity for coming to an arrangement with the successor in office as to the revenues from the archbishopric due to the heirs of the Primate in accordance with the terms of the testament. These negotiations may not have been altogether easy. The Bishop of Cujavia was among the opponents of the departed Archbishop. In the expostulation which the heads of the opposite party once (1527) presented to the Queen Bona^ begging her support against Laski, we find the name of Drzewicki. The difficult negotiations, however, found a peaceful conclusion. It seems on the whole that the new Archbishop did not transfer his old rancour to the nephew, and that the ability of the latter was such as to win for him recognition and esteem even after he had been deprived of the more than paternal support of the Primate. Almost seven years after the death of his uncle the office of archdeacon of Warsaw was conferred upon him (2 ist March, 1538) \% the right of presenting to this important post had been obtained of the King by Laski before his death on behalf of the Arch- bishop of Gnesen for the time being, to the great annoyance of Queen Bona, who promised to take good care that during her lifetime he should carry out no more of his devices with the King. Thus the intriguing Queen intermeddled with feminine hand in the ecclesiastical questions ; thus rose and * The papal ratification of the election in Theiner, Vetera Monumenta, ii. , p. 478. f Compare Zeissberg, Johannes Laski undsein Testament, p. 588. \ Acta Capit. Gnesn. et Posn. Lib. Install., i. 49. Zeissberg, p. 589. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 179 fell at court the designing game of envious prelates ; and all this while the fire of the Reformation around was now blazing high, and there was urgent need of laying aside all domestic contention and turning the combined strength against the opponents, from day to day growing more numerous. The dignity of an archdeacon of Warsaw, which the uncle had certainly intended for his nephew when he acquired the patronage, was the last distinction which the Romish Church bestowed upon this her gifted, but already half-recreant son. Exceedingly sparse as are the data from that momentous time, we shall not be wrong in sup- posing our friend had then already advanced by one foot beyond the tent of his mother Church. As early as 1536 the rumour was current that Laski had quitted his native land and repaired to LutJicr and Melanchthon at Wittenberg. The report turned out to be false, but it shows what was thought likely to be true with regard to him in Cracow, whence the intelligence comes. There is still extant an interesting letter bearing on this rumour.* The letter, addressed to Laski by a certain Andreas Fr., under which ab- breviation I am inclined to recognise the Polish statesman Andreas Fricius Modrzewski a man of some literary note, and subsequently a member of the Protestant Church, whom we shall meet with once or twice in the after-history treats the report, made known by Sbigneus in Cracow, as nothing at all improbable or even surprising. We discover from this letter how the change on the part of Laski then appeared to his friends a matter for * Gabbema, Epistolarum Centuries Tres, p. 19. 180 JOHN A LA SCO. discussion. There had already been gathered by this time at Cracow a little band of kindred spirits (among whom at the close of our narrative we shall seek admission) who raised bitter complaints the letter itself affords evidence enough of this con- cerning the condition of the State and the Church, and who had a secret sympathy with the progress of the Reformation, as with its leaders. It is true, the visiting of Wittenberg had been interdicted a year before by a very stern edict of the King ; but that such measure should have become necessary shows in what great numbers Polish students had already repaired to this stronghold of heresy ; and, as man is constituted, we know that even the severest edicts of this nature avail but little, as they availed but little then. Modrzewski, in that letter, gives us a detailed report of the diets of the Wittenberg Concord (Sunday, 2ist, to Monday, 29th May, 1536). That which was effected by Bucer and his men of Upper Germany in their negotiations with Luther during this week was entirely after the mind of our Laski in subsequent times ; and it is like a fair prediction when rumour speaks of him as already in those very days present at Wittenberg. Never did the German Reformer hold out so conciliatory a hand to the people of Strassburg, Augsburg, and the other towns of Upper Germany, as on that 23rd of May, when " his eyes and face beamed in elate, joyful, and kindly mood;"* he will not contend with the people who do not admit that the ungodly partake in the Supper of the body of the Lord. * Kostlin, Martin Luther (Elberfeld, 1875), ii., p. 342. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 18 1 The diversity of views was not inwardly overcome, but in that one hour Lntlicr was able to extend the brotherly hand above and beyond this diversity. Many freer views with regard to the Supper than were admitted here had Laski already heard ex- pressed by Erasmus twelve years before, only orally, indeed, at the symposium with a little chosen company. From the nature of the description given by Modrzewski it is clear that our Laski had re- mained no stranger to the development of the doctrine of the Supper since those days. Not as early as 1536 was the breach with the mother Church completed.* Two years later, soon after he had been made Archdeacon of Warsaw, he quitted his native land to our eyes, suddenly and that with the definite intention of thereby separating himself at the same time from the Romish Church. But he did not take this important step in secret, like a fugitive. His high position in life, socially as well as ecclesiastically, had often brought him into intimate contact with the King ; and Sigismnnd remained to the last well-disposed towards the earnest and influential man, as witness Laskfs appointment to the archdeaconship as late as 1538 ; and to this we must add the further brilliant testi- mony, that the King in the same year offered him likewise the vacant bishopric of Cujavia. The fact * Notwithstanding the explicit statement of Utenhove Simplex et Fidelis Narratio (Bas., 1560), p. 234 " Porro Joannes aLasco 1556 tandem inpatriamrevocatur, unde >/7>//V amplius annos nomine religionis sponte sua jam exulaverat," I doubt the correctness of the date assigned, since Laski could not possibly have been appointed Archdeacon of Warsaw two years after such manifest forsaking of the Church of his native land. We must not accept without examination such notes of time coming from those days. i32 JOHN A LA SCO. indeed is not to be reasoned away ; the friend who delivered the funeral oration over his grave two- and-twcnty years later attests it aloud in the pre- sence of those who were in a position to have raised objection to his statement.* So soon as Laski had received any tidings of this intention, he went to the King and candidly explained to him the reasons which compelled him to decline such favour. Ambition had no attractions for him, cer- tainly in any case not any longer ; on the eve of his departure the episcopal dignity no longer cap- tivated him ; the cross of Christ and the reproach and persecution of an evangelical preacher seemed to him more desirable. It reflects honour on the King that he knew how to appreciate such plain statements, and forgot or overlooked all his severe measures in presence of the greatness of a mind which preferred poverty for Christ's sake to the luxurious life of a bishop. The King knew that he had not many such men in his land. He did not refuse to this rare phenomenon of a man the right of travelling abroad ; nay, he graciously provided Laskr with letters of recommendation to the princes of other lands. To the end of his life Sigismund could not forget this man.j" It may well thus have been a sad leave-taking as. our friend, standing on that frontier which borders on Germany, bade a last farewell to the land of his fathers, and cast one more lingering glance upon that country which he loved with all the fiery ardour of a Pole, and from which he now tore * Statorius, Funebris Oratio in obitum Johannis a Lascv (Pinczovice, 1560), p. 6. t See the letter of Laski to the young King, Kuyper, ii., p. 30. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. 183 himself, perhaps never to see it again. Another step, and the momentous die is cast. And he took that step in obedience to the Divine voice within his heart, in which he soon already rejoices as being the grace of God. It has commanded him, as once the father of the faithful, to depart out of his country, and from his kindred, and from his father's house, away into a yet unknown distance, of which he only knew that it would be the land which his God purposed to show him. God has indeed demanded of many, in those hero-days of the Reformation, the same heavy sacrifice ; and the host of the exiles in Geneva, in Zurich, and in so many another hospitable hearth of the Reformation, who at home in high position passed their days of ease, and now ate the bread of indigence in a strange land, testifies that they willingly presented that sacrifice for the sacred treasure of their faith, and praised their Lord on account of it. But yet among the hosts of hero-forms there are not many who had, at their Lord's command, to tear themselves from such seductive embraces as our Pole there on the frontier of his fatherland. Yet long after there resounds in his letters the note of that which he had then to surrender, not indeed in the melancholy tone of an exile who longs for the forsaken scenes of home, but rather in the jubilant tone of one who is conscious of having passed through such a sacrifice into the liberty of the children of God. Thus six years afterwards he describes that time to Bullinger, his companion in the faith, in the beautiful words : " In brief, to make known to thee also the benefit and kindness of the Lord towards me, I was once a Pharisee of repute, adorned with many titles and 184 JOHN A LA SCO. dignities, splendidly endowed with many and rich benefices from the days of my boyhood ; but now, after I have voluntarily left all this behind through the grace of God, after I have given up my country and my friends, because I saw that I could not live in the midst of them according to Christ's mind and spirit, now I am in a strange land only a poor servant of my poor Lord Christ, crucified for me, lately here [in Friesland] minister of the Church, to make known the doctrine of the Gospel, after the will of Him who, of His compassion, has called me out of the net of the Pharisees into His flock." * To another Swiss friend he speaks about the same time of the decisive step, in this wise : " In a miserable way I had spent and wasted all my time in running about in the disquiet of martial din, in the commotions of the court. But the gracious God has restored me to myself again, and called me out of the midst of Pharisaism in a wondrous manner to the true knowledge of Himself ; to Him be the glory for ever. Amen. Thus now restored to myself by God's grace, I venture, according to my little ability, to serve that Church of Christ which once, in my Pharisaism and ignorance, I hated, and pray God He will, in His mercy, not despise my humble mite beside the brilliant gifts of others, after the example of the widow in the Gospel, but will vouchsafe to make use of it for the edification of His Church."t Thus did our friend, too, as all his predecessors, as all his successors upon the same trying path in the name of God, never experience a regret, never a pang on account of such leading of his Lord. On * Kuyper, ii. 569. f Ibz'd,, p. 583. THE LAST DECADE AS A CATHOLIC. the contrary, he, as all those other heroes, was privileged to learn the truth of his Master's words, " Every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." II. JOHN A LASCO AS A PROTESTANT IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND. VII ON THE PILGRIMAGE. IT may have been at the end of the summer in the year 1538 that JoJin a Lasco crossed the frontiers of his native land and entered upon German soil. It was not merely a quitting of the fatherland and a going forth into a strange territory, but much more, a forsaking of the ancient Church, a dissolving of the most intimate family ties, and a journeying into the hazy distance to which the Divine voice powerfully and irresistibly called him, the voice which will yet make known to him the unknown land of his dwelling. Our pilgrim there upon the Polish frontier stood in the full strength of his prime ; soon he will have passed out of his fourth decennium, a fine, well-formed son of his fatherland, with lofty brow, great, open eyes, sharply cut nose, about the closed mouth the expression of an inflex- ibly firm will, the whole vigorous outward appear- ance full of nobility, an attractive, earnest type of manhood. Those who had first seen him in those great days commend in that manly form the serious dignity expressed in the countenance, combined with a trait of amiable grace, as also the whole majesty of the bearing, which at once proclaimed a hero.* * Gerdes, Introductio in Hist. Evangel. Saec. XVI. Renovati (Groningae, 1744), iii., p. 83. j 9 o JOHN A LA SCO. His spirit's eye found the land of the Reforma- tion essentially altered since those days, now, indeed, already separated by an interval of twelve years in which upon the border territory he had looked forth from the quiet room in the house of Erasmus upon the rising tide of the Reformation. At that time the whole movement was in full fermentation, and only the seething foam lay before the gate of the great Humanist in Basle. Erasmus had just entered upon his decision-fraught passage of arms with Luther ; for the companion of the leader of the Humanists, in those days universally recognised as such, it might still appear doubtful whether the Reformer so sturdily hacking away would come out eventually conqueror ; and upon that victory depended the existence of the Church. The mighty on-rolling spirit of the Reformation, springing from the heart, and now also laying hold of the whole popular soul in its depths, had set free likewise other long, long-pent-up forces ; and these now broke for themselves their stormy channel and called inexorably for solution, even on the part of the Reformation ; and yet their source lay far away in another domain. It was still very uncertain what would be the issue, and whether the Reforma- tion would succeed in holding itself aloof from the various heterogeneous demands, and in separating from itself the impetuous allies who, with bold Radicalism, forsook even the ground of the Gospel to enter upon a path of their own choosing. The relations had in the meantime become essentially simplified. Easily, and decidedly had emerged from the conflict of opposing elements the clearly outlined form of that which was then known THE PILGRIMAGE. 191 as the Reformed Church. One saw upon its face the traces of the arduous conflict in which it had fought out its fights, and at the same time the holy, joyful enthusiasm with which that conflict for the Gospel inspires the confessor. The youthful Church of the Reformation, in lofty consciousness of this its Divine right, could now more calmly derive the consequences of its victory. In the Retscher* at Spires in 1529 it entered its protest against the decision of the Imperial Diet. Its adherents had now become Protestants, counterpart, indeed, but also coequal part, to the Romish Church. A year later the youthful combatant had already presented to the Imperial Assembly at Augsburg, to the Kaiser and the empire, her confession, as yet somewhat strongly emphasising the agreement with the old mother Church, not yet bringing rather into bold relief the clearly manifest differences. But this was per- haps the more prudent course ; the adversary did not feel called upon, as some Hotspurs wished, to dip his pen in blood ; his deplorable writing in ink served, on the other hand, only to raise the courage of the young heroes. Again, a year afterwards, we see the Protestant States combine more closely for mutual defence and succour in the League of Sinal- calden (March, 1531) ; they were manly, able, princes whom this league selected as its leaders The Emperor and his people had henceforth to reckon with this league ; and the Religious Peace at * A palace, now in ruins, situated near the cathedral. It is famous on account of the "protestation" made (April igth) by the five German princes Saxony, Brandenburg, Bruns- wick, Hesse, and Anhalt and delivered in writing, 20th April, 1529, from which, as is known, the Church of the Reformation received the name of "Protestant." Tk. ig 2 JOHN A LA SCO. Nuremberg in 1532 shows that CJiarles V. had made up his mind for such reckoning. Both parties therein pledged themselves to peace until the settle- ment of the whole matter at a council presently to be summoned. The Protestants had already become so strong in those days, that, in the opinion of the best judges, they might have wrested much more important concessions from the Emperor, then pressed as he was on many sides. The deeply religious character of the German Reformation restrained them for the most part from winning for themselves the more favourable political position. But the violent political movements, which threatened to draw all the lands of Europe into a vortex, advanced in an unexpected manner the firm establishment of the Church, reformed in accord- ance with God's Word. We have already once stood at the spot where this whirlpool threw up its angriest waves. Upon the wide, fruitful plains of Hungary it seemed for a moment as though the fate of Europe was to be decided for centuries in the bloody conflict of the two pretenders to the crown there, a conflict which, on the one hand, brought the victorious S oilman, with his bloodthirsty hordes, under the very walls of Vienna (October, 1529), which, on the. other hand, seemed to bring to an issue the hostile politics of Charles V. and Francis 1. and those who rallied around them in the varying fortune of arms. Kaiser Charles did not venture, considering the serious turn of military affairs, to drive the German Protestant States into the camp of his enemies, and had therefore to tolerate very many things on their part which he would assuredly under other circumstances have suppressed with ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 193 fire and sword. King Francis, himself a Catholic, and not willing to afford any support to the Protest- ant movement in his kingdom, sued for the goodwill of the Protestant princes, with the ulterior object of an alliance in arms. He failed indeed in his endeavour ; but the advantage of this political cur- rent accrued to the Protestants in those years. The political events upon the stage of the world in this fourth decade had been nothing but favourable to Protestantism in its national position. The hin- drance in the way of attaining the full result within its reach arose, in a manner ruinous to all subse- quent development, out of its own midst. The Con- vention at Marburg (beginning of October, 1529) had clearly shown the dissimilar mental tendency of the two heads of the movement, LutJicr and Ziuingli, upon one decisive point. The shadows of these two forms rested thenceforth upon the hosts which followed their leading, and gave to them differing outlines. The merit of having maintained their personal conviction must be acknowledged to both alike. The greater and more hearty sympathy must be accorded to the action of that leader who, reaching over the irreconcilable point of difference, extends the brotherly hand to the German Reformer, and has with tars to see it repelled. How unspeakably much sorrow has since then come upon the Evan- gelical Church, which saw in the rejection of the proffered hand discord carried into its own bosom.* " You have another spirit than we ! " That fata!, lamentable utterance became a sort of watchword, which divided the allies into two camps, between * An account of this conference in Abr. Scultetus, Annalcs Evangel. (Heidelb., 1620), pp. 187 seqq. TR. 13 1 94 JOHX A LA SCO. which the common adversary then skilfully drove in his most dangerous wedge. It is true, there was felt on the one side and the other the need rather of filling up the slight division, than of widening it, in order not themselves to work into the hands of the Romish Church by their own discord. This feeling was more lively in the towns of Upper Germany and in the Swiss cantons ; with the others the feeling of being on their guard against mingling with this sup- posed " other spirit " continued to predominate. But Luther, too, saw the necessity for an approxima- tion, and overcame for a time his scruples regard- ing all contact with the Sacramentarians. Bucer, indefatigably active to this end, found at Wittenberg an essential support for his praiseworthy endeavours in the person of Melanchthon; LutJier looked on in silence, and allowed the matter to take its course ; nay we have already spoken of the fact that Laski was thought to be in Germany on that eventful day, which for a moment seemed to have called into existence that which afterwards became the most zealous task of our friend's life on the 2Qth May, 1 5 36, a sort of union was established, and sub- scribed to by Luther also in the Wittenberg' Concord. What joy was called forth by this step, and the letter of Luther further accompanying it, in Switzer- land, in all Upper Germany ! Zurich despatched to Wittenberg a magistrate's courier in the Zurich colours and badges during the summer of 1538 with a letter from the noble Bullinger relating to this matter. The letter concludes with the beauti- ful words : " God, our heavenly Father, who is the Lord of hosts, the Father of all mercy and of all consolation, kindle in us on both sides the fire of ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 195 His Divine love, that we may happily preserve the Christian work of this concord, to the hallowing and honour of His holy name, and to the blessedness of many souls, which has been brought about by the grace of God in opposition to Satan, the world, and all their adherents." About this time Laski entered the home-land of the Reformation. It was as though in the ordering of his life's course the moment had been waited for in which just the personality could enter upon the theatre of action which in the whole endow- ment of natural gifts seemed to be the chosen instru- ment for further labouring on the edifice of the Reformation upon the basis of this concord. But yet God's ways are not our ways. The stranger, who had turned his back upon Poland and the Romish Church, was led to his work only by long circuitous paths. Laski directed his steps, in the first place, not to Wittenberg, where the friend had two years before conjectured him to be. He seems purposely to have shunned the presence of the great Reformer, whether it was that the conception of Luther once formed in the vicinity of Erasmus had not yet entirely vanished, or that he had given the promise to his king, who had allowed the highly distinguished son of his country to depart, that he would avoid immediate intercourse with this most redoubtable heretic. But neither did he, in the first instance, enter upon the way of personal contact with the Reformers of the other line. In Switzerland he might quickly have renewed the old connections. The intrepid Zwingli indeed had already fallen upon the bloody field, a valiant Swiss ; Occolampadius too, 196 JOHN A LA SCO. the brave Reformer in Basle, had been called away by his Lord and Master out of the militant Church into the Church triumphant. But Pellican yet stood faithful and firm on the watch there on the Rhine ; and Basle, once as much endeared to our friend as is his alma mater to a student, had entered with- out much conflict, with calm, measured pace, upon the path of the Reformation ; while Zurich enjoyed the labours of Bullinger, the man of so intimate spiritual companionship with Laski in after-years. Further to the south, on the charming shore of the Lake of Geneva, there was working indefatigably, and in the power of an Old Testament prophet, William Farel, with whom our Pole had once be- come acquainted as a fugitive in Basle ; beside him, however, was also his master Calvin already labouring both heroes lately expelled from Geneva, because they were too great and stern for the people, who would there enjoy a life devoted to external amusements, both unquelled, for they had experienced this their fate in the faithful service of their Lord. Farel had already taken his stand again, with the same uncompromising severity, the same fiery ardour of love, upon the other side of the lake, in the zealous endeavour to sanctify to God the walk of the Christians in Neufchatel. Calvin had gone farther : in Strassburg he had found a pulpit wherein to proclaim the Gospel. What an im- pression would he have made upon the exile from Poland ! And, besides these, so many another towering form would have fascinated our Laski in the fair German imperial city of those days, kindred spirits, who would soon have stamped upon his thought and labour their characteristic and peculiar ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 197 mark, not essentially different from the impress eventually borne by himself. We are unfortunately ignorant of the motives which led our friend to strike out another path. At the first glance the way seems like a play of chance, the drifting of a shipwrecked mariner at the sport of the waves ; with a deeper penetration, we recognise the leading of the Lord, who guides the destinies of men as the streams of water. First, we see the form of our wanderer emerging at Frankfort-on-the-Main, somewhere about the time when, in the latter autumn, the master-printers were wont to assemble from all parts, with their new stores of books, to the fair in the then so important com- mercial town. Even from Cracow, from Thorn, Posen, and Breslau, the people repaired to the Main, generally in intimate association, in order the more easily to obtain protection for themselves and their wares upon the insecure highways. He took up his quarters at the house of a certain Hadrianus, who is said to have been a bookseller on the Liebfrauenberg, and who in after-years effected for him the purchase of books and performed other commissions, by birth a Netherlander, but naturalised as a citizen of Frankfort* Perhaps it was just the book fair which attracted the Pole to the city of the Main. For certainly not every fresh contribution to the literature of the Reformation was able to pass the jealously guarded frontier of his own land ; and such a fair afforded the most favourable opportunity for enjoying one or other fruit forbidden and perforce dispensed with at * Frankfurtische Religions handlungen (Frankfort, 1726), ii., Supplement, p. 50. 198 JOHN A LA SCO. home, as also of becoming acquainted with the present position of spiritual affairs. Whether or not Laski, on this his first sojourn in Frankfort, encountered any of the leading celebrities, we are not informed by the well-kept records of the town. The free imperial city, its vigorous sons full of a lively sense of independence, had for the greater part attached itself to the Reformation, at that time still with a marked preference for the type emanating from Zwingli and the Upper German towns. Laski formed an acquaintance with a stranger within the walls of the city, which ripened into an intimate bond of friendship a bond which in some respects determined the whole after-course of his life. Albert Hardenberg, a native of the Netherlands, had fallen dangerously ill with an obstinate fever while he was on his way to Italy. Hardenberg happened to be entertained at the same lodgings as our friend. Some ten years younger than Laski, and not very distantly related to Pope Hadrian, he had as a boy entered the renowned Brothers' house at Groningen, called into life and endowed with an abiding reputation by the noble, gifted John Wessel ; grown up to be a serious young man, he exchanged the pious Brothers' house for the adjacent Bernardin convent at Aduard. His teacher, Goswin van Halen, had indeed advised him to enter that convent in which men like Rudolph Agricola, John Wessel, and others had once laboured, and regarding which he had himself said, " If formerly you sought a learned man in Friesland, you would find him either in Aduard or nowhere."* * Spiegel, Albert Rizdus Hardenberg (Bremen, 1869), p. ii. ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 199 At the age of twenty, Hardenberg, arrayed in the white cowl, with the black scapulary of the Bernardins, repaired to Louvain, to complete the eight years' course of a theologian preparatory to the bachelor's degree. He had become an object of suspicion to the professors of a narrow creed on account of his more liberal conceptions, and he had the intention at the time of the autumn fair of 1538 to travel by way of Frankfort to Italy. The obstinate attack of sickness compelled him to change his plan. Instead of journeying to Italy he repaired to Mayence, to acquire at the university of that city the highest dignity of his vocation, the honour of the doctor's diploma. The new-found friend accompanied him to the neighbouring city, which in those days had received, chiefly on account of the renown of its university, the distinguishing appellation of " the golden Mayence." Just at that time, days of noisy excitement and turbulence prevailed in Mayence. After a wilful absence of years, the Elector Albert of Mayence had at length been compelled to yield to the ever more impetuous urgency of his people, and had come from Halle into his cathedral city. From February to June, 1539,* he held his court in Mayence, not as a spiritual shepherd, who cares for the soul's welfare of the flock entrusted to him, rather as a secular prince, in whose veins flows the blood of the Hohen- zollern, zealously occupied with the raising of mer- cenaries and exercising them for speedy service. If the oft-recurring assertion is correct, that Laski was provided at his departure with letters of recom- May, Kurfiirst A Ibrecht von Mainz (Munich, 1875), ii., P-35 1 - JOHN A LA SCO. mendation from his king, there was assuredly among them one to the King's relative, the Elector and Cardinal, in whose hand the ultimate destiny of Germany would have lain more than once if the moral earnestness, the religious depth of his cha- racter had corresponded to his influence. At that time the pleasure-seeking ecclesiastical prince could no longer afford any guidance to our Laski, even though the latter had at all approached him. A quarter of a century earlier perhaps it would have been otherwise. That was the brilliant period in which the studious and art-loving prince was the friend of Hutten, and still bowed with heartfelt reverence and devotion before the kingly intellect of Erasmus. At that time the distinguished ecclesi- astical prince was animated by the ardent desire of transforming his university of Mayence into a model school for the studies of Humanism, and at the same time also, quite in the spirit of the great German Humanist, of exerting a reforming influence upon the Church. Humanism proved even in his powerful hands inadequate to accomplish so great a work. Moreover, there was wanting to this its enthusiastic disciple the sacred moral earnestness for caring for the salvation of one's own soul ; he too failed of the realisation of his purpose, because he forgot that the sanctuary can be cleansed not with merely learned or humanitarian, but only with holy hands. The Elector, in his fondness for dis- play, would enjoy life in like manner as the Medician in those days upon the papal throne, perhaps with somewhat more of German seriousness, but in essential features the same. Elector Albert and our Laski had started from the school of Humanism and ON THE PILGRIMAGE. its great master ; the after-path, however, of their spiritual development had led them ever farther asunder; in that spring of 1539 there was already no longer any point of contact. One of them had risen to the dignity of a cardinal, yea, to the eagerly coveted possession of the golden rose from the Pope, but at the same time had been turned aside to the most manifest rupture with the Reformation. He died, deeply aggrieved at the course of history, and inexorably pushed aside by it in earnest judgment, to his very deathbed dunned by his creditors, while even on his inanimate dust rests the unkindly shadow of the pedlar in indulgences, plying his dis- graceful trade, half the profits of which went to the treasury of the splendour-loving Elector, yet without being able to fill it. The path of the other led him into the Evangelical Church, all his ecclesiastical benefices and dignities and he could perhaps have risen as high .in his own land as Albert in Germany resigned of his own free-will, a poor servant of his only Lord, henceforth ever willing and ready to suffer hardship as a soldier of Christ, to the end joyous in the blissful possession of the grace of Christ Jesus. Laski seems to have remained nearly a year in Mayence, remote from that which was passing in the sumptuous chambers of the Bishop, and devoted to serious studies, if we are not at this time already to seek him in the Netherlands. Our sources fail us for this year ; the stay in Louvain, however, seems, from all the indications, to have had a longer dura- tion than the short interval which is left if we think of Laski as remaining in Mayence until his friend received his diploma, and not rather suppose him 202 JOHN" A LA SCO. to have hastened out of the Netherlands to be present at the ceremony. His friend in the pursuit of the doctor's degree had given lectures on the books of the Sentences and some epistles of Paul. The latter in particular must of necessity confirm the two men in their Reformational views. The year did not come to a close without Hardenberg having acquired the wished-for dignity. Laski was present at the conferring of it. The Emden Library still contains the book which he gave on this oc- casion to his friend, now crowned with the doctor's cap ; it was Reuchlin's Elements of the Hebrew Language. At one time the precious volume belonged to Erasmus, whose handwriting (" sum Erasmi, nee muto dominum"*) it yet bears. Nevertheless it did change its owner when the liberal Pole in so magnanimous a style purchased of the renowned scholar his collec- tion of books. Hardenberg, too, regarded the book as doubly valuable on account of the giver ; and eight years afterwards wrote upon the title-page, " Therefore [because he had received it as a present from Laski on the festive occasion] this book shall not change its master so long as I live, which I testify by this subscription with my own hand."j~ When, in the following year, the agents of the In- quisition at Louvain burnt at least the books of Hardenberg, in vexation that the heretic had escaped them, this book, so highly prized by him, escaped the flames. Soon after receiving his diploma Hardenberg departed to his native land. The faithful friend accompanied him down the Rhine. They had no * "I belong to Erasmus, and I do not change my owner." t Spiegel, p. 19. ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 203 wish to separate from each other ; the Netherlands possessed many a point of attraction which might entice A Lasco in the course of his spiritual develop- ment. The home-land of Erasmus had not remained foreign to him in his studies of humanity and in his common life with the then most famous son of that land ; he had learnt to know and esteem many a scion of this land ; we call to mind, for instance, his converse with UtcnJiove. His own brother Jerome had been called to fulfil more than one difficult diplomatic mission in Brussels ; and his name had there too a good sound in the highest circles. The Regent of the Netherlands at that time was Mary* the widow of the unfortunate King of Hungary, who lost his young and promising life in the marshes of Mohacz. In her maiden days this highly gifted and studious pupil of Humanism had been much esteemed, and even lauded, by Erasmus. Her pious mind had led the young Queen to the study of the Holy Scrip- tures ; she showed herself not unfavourable to the evangelical movements now spreading in Hungary ; and Luther thought himself justified in expecting great things from her. When he received the intelligence of the severe visitation which had befallen the pious widow, he sent to her at Vienna, whither she had * Peter Alexander, afterwards secretary to Cranmer, Rector of All Hallows, Lombard Street, and Prebendary of Canterbury,- was formerly chaplain to this queen (until 1545, to judge from a letter of Myconius to Calvin of March, 1545). He came to England in 1547, was exiled in 1553, and in September, 1554, was, with some hesitation, commended by Peter Martyr to Calvin. Returned to England in March, 1559, and spent the remainder of his life there. He is referred to in Original Letters relative to the English Reformation (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1846), pp. 67, 331 ; Zurich Letters (Parker Soc.), ser. i., pp. 79, 119 ; ser. ii., p. 50. TR. 204 JOHN A LA SCO. fled from the wild hordes of Soliman, together with the exposition of four psalms, that well-known beautiful letter of consolation.* It was a false position in which the Kaiser Charles placed his sister by the call to be vicegerent of the Nether- lands, because to this position was attached the task of suppressing Protestantism by every means in the land of the Emperor's birth. And the Emperor displayed upon this point his whole uncom- promising, lordly, intolerant character, which at least would carry out in the beloved land of his ancestors that which he failed to accomplish in Germany, not- withstanding all his attempts. He purged the suspected surroundings of his sister, even down to the attendants ; while she bent to the cruel will of her brother, and was too powerless to decline the dread task, or on her own account to renounce the splendour of viceregal life and with it the friendship of her brother.f In what a painful position did those find themselves, in those grand but stein days, who weakly remained standing at half-way, and therefore were bitterly exposed to the judgment of the word, " He that is not with Me is against Me " ! Laski would have been no stranger to the Regent. No other name was more frequently in the mouth of friend and foe, in those bloody conflicts which lacerated the fair Hungarian land, than this ; and she would certainly have granted the noble Pole a distinguished reception at her court. But not for the sake of court life and court favour had Laski * Compare Luther^ xxxviii. 370 seq. The psalms ex- pounded are xxxvii., Ixii., xciv., and cix. t Compare the letter of the Emperor to his sister : Lanz, Korresfiondenz Kaisers Karl F. (Leipsic, 1864), i., p. 418. ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 205 turned his back upon the royal court of his own land and wandered forth into straitened exile, nor could he have any pleasure in the sight of a woman who was toiling upon the unnatural task the accomplishment of which could eventually be purchased only at the sacrifice of the denial of her better endeavours. Such persons he was far from seeking ; he avoided them. Other brilliant offers, too, he rejected with decision. When, in the summer days of 1540, he spent a short time at Antwerp, he was visited by the Archchancellor, as likewise by the Margrave of Brandenburg, who was staying there ; offers were made to him in vain on the part of the Emperor as well as on that of King Ferdinand.* Laski passed by Brussels and its splendid court to return to Louvain. The friendly seat of the Muses was to afford him for the space of a year a desired place of retreat for inwardly maturing in silence. Erasmus had on one occasion lauded the renowned University and its fair situation. " No- where," said he, " can one with greater quiet and freedom from interruption apply one's self to study ; moreover, the neighbourhood is pleasant and health- ful, overspread by an Italian sky." t More than three thousand students out of all lands, at that time great numbers from France, and not a few from Spain, assembled in the different lecture rooms ; the number and scientific rank of the professors was * Kuyper, ii. 552. As regards the chronology of this letter compare the detailed notices in Bohmer, Bibliotheca Wiffe- niana (Londini, 1874), i. 166, who affords conclusive evidence for the correctness of the date assigned by Kuyper. t De Ram, Considerations sur I Hist, de I' Univ. de Lou- vain (Bruxelles, 1854), p. 12. 206 JOHN A LA SCO. in due proportion to the great throng of students ; an ample collection of books afforded the desired means for profound research. But Louvain had become at that time in its theological faculty, through the influence of its leaders, a stronghold against the Protestant Church and its doctrine, the worthy, nay even distancing rival of the Sorbonne and of Cologne in opposition to every evangelic movement. The rule, already in force during that year, was confirmed by law in 1545, that no student should be admitted to the University who did not avow himself by a solemn oath to be the enemy of all the doctrinal articles of Luther and Calvin* At the head of these most pronounced and militant opponents stood LatomuS) the authorised spokesman of the faculty, stigmatised by Luther as the Louvain sophist and Ishbi (2 Sam. xxi. 16), whom a pamphlet in my possession characterises as an assuming syco- phant, j" Not to sit once more in late years as a student at the feet of teachers who expounded a defunct scholastic theology did A Lasco come to Louvain. Nothing leads us to suppose that he held any kind of intercourse with these men, with whose eccle- siastical standpoint he had already entirely broken, and who soon enough discovered what a suspicious kind of person this stranger from Poland was. At * De Ram, Considerations sur I' Hist, de /' Univ. de Lotfuain, p. 62. t " Epistola de magistris nostris Lovaniensibus quot et quales sint, quibus debemus magistralem illam damnationem Lutherianam." The letter is addressed to Zwingli a charming proof how soon the bold act of Luther found a glad response even in Louvain. The tractate appeared five months after Luther had nailed up his theses. The writer has not given his name. ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 207 least, it is related that they regarded with distrust Hardenberg's intimate converse with him, and that difficulties arose for Hardenberg in consequence. Among the students, who in part were of much more mature age than our university scholars are wont to be, might already be discovered one or another enterprising personality, who, resenting the un- natural restraint in the sacred domain of the faith, inclined to the doctrine of the pure Gospel. Many a Reformation al book passed secretly from hand to hand, and eagerly was the free, salvation-bringing word received by the young devout spirits. We know of a few youths who, though with great shyness and reverence for the noble Pole, yet drew towards him in Louvain. Amongst these stands especially prominent Francisco de Enzinas, who, as a lad of seventeen, had been brought under Protestant in- fluences in his native town of Burgos in 1537, and two years afterwards, already entirely won to the Gospel, had come to Louvain, simultaneously with Laski, in order to continue his studies. He had soon heard of the illustrious Pole, who for the faith's sake quitted the land of his birth, and descended from the brilliant height of an ecclesiastical prince into so obscure and quiet a position. A letter from him to Laski, written two years later, describes with eloquence and grace the deep and abiding impression made by the Pole upon the susceptible and ardent Spaniard.* Enzinas was already occu- pied at that time with the translation of the Holy Scriptures into his mother-tongue a highly lauded work, which procured for the believing young man a * Gerdes, iii. 82 ; compare also Bohmer, Bibliotheca Wiffeniana, i. 134. 208 JOHN A LA SCO. rigorous imprisonment, endured by him with forti- tude. Among the Flemings, too, many a devout young man was stirred by the new breathing of the Spirit in the Gospel, and in consequence assumed a friendly bearing towards Laski. We think of the gentle Cassander, who, less decided than Ensinas, subsequently wore himself out in the life-long attempt to bridge over the painful gulf between the two severed Churches, a fruitless endeavour, accept- able to neither of the two parties. The circles in which Laski especially moved in Louvain, and in which he found the greatest profit to his spiritual life, are to be sought not under the shadow of the lecture rooms of the University. They lay out of the way, still contemptuously over- looked at that time and unmolested by the leaders of the Church, hidden fountain-chambers, wherein the living water collected which for ever slakes the thirst. It is a charming glimpse which is afforded us into these little modest circles ; we willingly enter their assembly for a moment with our friend. As early as a century and a half before the events of our history there had been kindled in the Nether- lands a fire of which the light and warmth was felt with beneficent effect far and wide, and whose blesi- ings extended even beyond the frontiers of the land. He who kindled that fire in the temple was Gerhard Groot, this " truly Christian man of the people, a man of marked and deeply earnest character, not- withstanding all the geniality and kindness of a soul- seeking love, of vigorous, resolute, trenchant person- ality, without fear or favour of men a man of the most comprehensive knowledge and many sided acquaintance with men, of great acumen, and affect- CLV THE PILGRIMAGE. 209 ing, moving eloquence." * Were it not impracticable to compare with each other the towering forms of different ages, who bear each the stamp of his own age, one might certainly speak of Groot as the Spener of the Romish Church in the time of its decline. Great was the incitement which he gave ; one recog- nises how much it was in accordance with the need of the best spirits of his time, as also of his free and devout people, when he founded the brother and sister-houses, as opposed to the sadly corrupt cloisters, with their beggar-like, degraded occupants. Those who retired into these newly founded houses were truly pious souls, who had calmly broken with the world and all that it has to offer of pleasure and honour, and in quiet and seclusion, almost like a pietistic conventicle, would live for the peace of their own hearts, but not exclusively in contempla- tive indolent repose. A deep sympathy with the distresses of the time passed through their soul, and they sought the lever for their activity, in checking the prevailing corruption, by preference in the train- ing of the young. Where their brother-houses stood and that was soon almost everywhere through- out the land one saw also the most peaceful indus- trious occupants at once busy in the schools ; and the blessing upon their labours was everywhere to be traced, especially among the burghers, who at that time filled the thriving cities of the Netherlands with prosperity. A voice from those brother- houses has given such wonderfully classic expression to the peculiar tone of mind there current, that this voice can since then nevermore be reduced to silence, and * Herzog, i. 680 (2nd ed.). 14 2io JOHN A LA SCO. finds its devoutly listening hearers in countless numbers within the Evangelical and the Romish Church it is the ardent, sweet, devout, profoundly contemplative word of Thomas a Kempis, who in a unique manner possessed the secret of making him- self heard as a solitary voice between the two Churches, a nightingale in the twilight of the break- ing day. We do not recognise, in its full tones, the home note of our beloved Evangelical Church in the word of the pious quiet man of the Agnetenberg, near Zwolle ; we detect in more than one passage that his preaching does not entirely accord with that of a Paul : that bent of mind was not exactly the Reformation, and could not offer a substitute for it, however essential a preparatory labour it neverthe- less remains in the Netherlands. In Louvain, too, a powerful influence of these brother-houses is to be traced in the instruction of the young. Here too the free spirit of the citizens was awakened ; and that profound pious earnestness, which sought to investigate Divine truth at the fountain-head, was effectually kindled. Precisely in the burgher circles was stirred up a vigorous self- consciousness, which would not any longer blindly submit to all the arbitrary precepts of the Church and its dominating priests, whose immoral walk caused so great scandal and offence to the honest burgher- folk. Specially the Guild of the Cloth-weavers was very strongly represented in Louvain also ; Flemish cloth was everywhere in high request. Even as far as Cracow the wealthy merchants despatched their bales of costly wares, and by this time also beyond the seas and to the farthest coasts. The other trades, too, were flourishing in this populous CLV THE PILGRIMAGE. 211 university town. There was present a lively, assiduous zeal, which now turned to those great religious questions that knocked in particular at the door of the quiet burgher-houses, and there too claimed admittance and solution. Let us enter one of these houses, in which our friend was wont often to be found, yea, where he even made his abode for a considerable time. The unpretending burgher-house lies not in the centre of the town and of its intellectual life, where at that time, in the freshness of sumptuous and cheerful splendour, stood the monumental structure of the Council House, to this day the fair witness to the lively, active mind of the citizens of that period ; we have to seek it in the outskirts of the town, close to the ramparts, where the little stream La Voer mingles with the rivulet of the town La Dyle. There, on the Bolleborre, dwelt Antoinette van Rosmers, who was closely connected with the best families of the place. The year before (1539) she had lost her husband and two children during the pre- valence of a pestilence ; only the one grown-up daughter, Gudula, had remained to her. A widow at the age of fifty, she had also been deprived of her property ; she must seek a more modest dwelling ; perhaps also she made some small addition to her income by the letting of her rooms, for we know from Enzinas that Laski dwelt at her house and went in and out thereat* The trying visitation had only led the pious widow and her Jike-mindcd * Campan, Memoires de Franzisco de Enzinas (Bruxelies, 1862), i., p. 102 : " Antoinette etait presque de la plus honeste et principale famille de toute la ville ; Monsieur Jan Laski avail quelquefois loge en sa maison." 212 JOHN A LA SCO. daughter more deeply into the Word of God ; that which the Church, with its priests, did not afford her, the Lord conferred upon her in the Gospel, the German translation of which she had been able secretly to obtain. The good Word of God became her con- soler and her only teacher, at whose feet she sat, supremely intent on learning the one thing needful. And God led her to the discovery of the pearl of great price. Her house became the centre of a group of companions in the faith, who often found themselves in a wondrous way gathered together, as though God Himself had brought them there. Only quite in secret, in a stolen manner, did they assemble in the back room of the widow, with closed doors, as the Apostles at the Paschal time for fear of the Jews. Of us the quiet believing people need be in no terror ; and undisturbed can we, with Laski, join for one evening in their little gathering. There are always but few who meet at the house on the Bolleborre, in order to escape all attention, for the Quintin's church stands not far from the house, and who knows but the suspicious priests have their doubts, or even have their informers in the neighbourhood ? To-day there have assembled in the house of the widow the rarely absent Josse van Ousberghen, a furrier by trade, deeply grounded in the Gospel, full of peace of soul, of a quiet nature, but immovably steadfast and robust in his faith. With him enters one of the sculptors, Jan Beyarts, along with his already aged wife, Catharine Metsys ; the member of their household, too, Jan Schats, is not absent this evening. If we were to enter again another time, we should meet with new faces. When, at the expiration of about three years, ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 213 the enemies stretched forth their blood-seeking hands against this little flock of believers, they apprehended a band of forty-three companions in the faith (March, 1543). The edification begins with Josses reading a passage of the New Testament, and endeavouring to explain it. Those present take part in the ex- position ; one thing helps the other in the unfolding of Scripture ; and we observe from the deeply edifying remarks that those present are no longer children in understanding. After this the Postil is brought in, long a specially favourite book of edification with them. They know not much of him who wrote the book, the great German Reformer, and are in no kind of communication with him ; but what they read there agrees so fully with the dear Word of God and so powerfully refreshes their souls by its vigorous way of speaking. The book then has eluded the prying eyes of the censors and the priests ; over there in Amsterdam there were already many booksellers who kept the forbidden Reformational writings and knew how to deliver them to the purchaser, and full many an enkindling tractate found its way into the workroom even in Louvain. By cunning secret paths it had eluded the vigilance of those on the watch. A method to which recourse was frequently had, and that with success, was to bind up the coveted Evangelical fly-sheet with a bulky volume of indifferent contents, to which the cursory glance of the censor heedlessly granted the privilege of diffusion.* This reading from the Postil, or some other book * Compare Campan, ii. 338. 214 JOHN A LA SCO. of edification, was followed by a free conversation on one or other article of the faith. Of one accord were they in the rejection of purgatory. The Sacred Supper they regarded for the most part only as a commemorative meal ; they could find no passage in their New Testament which constrained them to suppose the actual bodily presence of the Lord in the sign of the bread and wine, or, yet more, to infer the transubstantiation of the Romish Church. These views were not at all strange to Laski. He had already heard them uttered in Basle, in the private circle of Erasmus and his intimate friends. One would hear them at that time in different places, even where there was no imagination of their fully outlined form in Zwingli. Perhaps at the close of the meeting, after the prayer, they would sing in a suppressed tone one of the Psalms, translated into the Flemish by a clergyman of the cathedral church, Paul van Rovere, an old devoted master, feeble in body, but vigorous in spirit and well-disposed to- wards the Evangelicals in Louvain.* With sacred earnestness did they hold these con- ferences. When once a word of derision escaped the lips of one present concerning the doctrine of purgatory, of the untruth of which all were con- vinced, the derider drew down upon himself a stern rebuke. They did not wish to separate from the Church ; they wished to remain with it in peace, so long as they were only let alone in their Bible- searching and mutual edification. They had already indeed passed beyond the boundary line marked for them by the Church, even farther than those * Campan, ii. 466. ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 215 Brothers of the Common Life from whom the spiritual incentive had unquestionably proceeded to them ; but they were fain to leave the whole decision -fraught question untouched, if they were only suffered to live quietly in accordance with their faith. And they lived out this life of faith also among themselves in a form as beautiful as that of the first little assemblies of the Apostolic time. Where one was sick, the others held faithful watch- ing ; and with the spiritual ministry went hand in hand the ceaseless bodily tending of the sick brother. They had collected their little fund out of the voluntary alms, and from this were wont to aid such as were in distress ; moreover, they went in search of others in the town who were indigent and necessitous, to confer upon them the alms willingly bestowed. They lived and moved in the Word of God as their native element. When in the evening after labour they met on their walks along the ramparts, or when on the warm summer days they passed beyond the city gates, perhaps to the adja- cent Rosselberg, and met, as they supposed, unob- served, the one or the other would draw forth his securely guarded Testament from its leathern pouch ; a few verses would be read, and would afford to those walking in the truth abundant material for coveted interchange of experience. One discovers, from that which is related, the joy and delight of people who have long wandered in devious paths, but now see themselves led by the Lord their Shep- herd in green pastures and by still waters. Laski, who, with Hardenberg and Enzinas, had been brought into contact with this evangelical circle, probably found here that of which he had 216 JOHN A LA SCO. been in quest : a little believing congregation, according to the Word of God, earnestly striving after sanctification of life ; loyal forms, strong in the faith, ready on the morrow to go to the stake and seal their faith with their blood. The dawning light of this coming day already rested upon those illuminated features, the aurora of their martyrdom ; this is ever a refreshing and gladdening sight. Those whose entering into the house of the noble Antoinette for quiet edification we have just wit- nessed, all had the joy within three years of prais- ing the name of the Lord by their death. The men whose names we have mentioned suffered with constancy death by fire and halter ; the heroic women were buried alive. Thus the Romish Church punished the offence of loving the Word of God, and leading a hallowed life in accordance with its truth. The barbarous punishment did not quench the sacred fire ; on the contrary, the sparks flew throughout the whole land, and carried the flames only the farther. How greatly our friend felt himself at home in the midst of these devout people is evident from the fact, among others, that in the social life he lived with them the resolution was matured of trampling down the last plank fora retreat to the old life of the priesthood, and breaking through the injunction of celibacy. This step was the public and final re- nouncing of the ordinances of the Romish Church, the henceforth irremediable breach with that Church. From among the simple burghers' daughters of the city he chose to himself a companion for life. We regret, after much research, not to have been able to discover the faintest trace of her family connections or of her past history ; even the maiden name is O.V THE PILGRIMAGE. 217 unknown to us. We can only suppose that the fair shadow of the spiritual life of this devout circle had fallen fully and abidingly into her soul too ; we may perhaps discover in her a young friend and companion of Gudula, like her too in the flower of her age, of the renowned beauty of the Flemish women, full of nobility of bearing.* She seems indeed to have had relatives in Louvain. A year after Laski had quitted the town she returned for a short time on a visit to her native place, bringing with her the first-born baby-daughter, the very image of the father, with motherly joy to show the child to the grandparents. Enzinas was acquainted with the wife of Laski from her maiden days. Hardly did he hear of her visit to Louvain before he hastened to her house to greet her, and to obtain tidings of her husband, whom he was just then think- ing of looking up in his new home in Friesland.j" Not very long after his marriage did Laski con- tinue to dwell in Louvain. The counsel which he gave a few years afterwards to his friend, still hesitating to leave the cloister, he now fulfilled with swift resolution himself. " I believe those words are given by inspiration of the Spirit of God which are written (fea. Hi. and 2 Cor. vi.), ' Come out from among them, and be ye separate.' If thou referrest this word to flight in spirit, of a certainty he who has once truly and inwardly accomplished this can no longer voluntarily hold converse with those whom he sees continue to dishonour the merits of Christ. "J * As such, at least, the Spaniard describes the daughter of the widow Antoinette, t Gerdes, Hi. 82. t Kuyper, ii. 557. 218 JOHN A LA SCO. Trying times set in. Over in Ghent insurrections had broken out : the friends of the Reformation had attempted to shake off by force the oppressive yoke of the intolerant Church. Kaiser Charles had at the intelligence thereof hastened to the land of his birth, with violence to suppress the dangerous heresy. From every part of the dominant Church he was urged to proceed with unrelenting rigour, and there was no need in his case of any strong pressure to this end. Severe laws were enacted. All books printed in Germany within the past twenty years were interdicted ; no one was permitted to compose, or even sing, spiritual songs in the language of the country ; the conventicles * were forbidden ; even the thoughts were no longer allowed to pass un- challenged. There was no hesitation in Louvain about carrying these Draconian laws into effect. One of the first to experience their operation was Hardenberg. With fearless eloquence the young doctor of theology, after his return from Mayence, expounded the epistles of Paul to a crowded audience ; the citizens, too, loved to listen to the ingenuous speech of the gifted man, who " spake not as the scribes " of Louvain. He was accused at court. The order was given that he should be carried captive to Brussels, whereby his fate would have been sealed ; the capital of the empire had then acquired the melancholy cognomen of "slaughter- house of the Christians." The Louvain citizens interceded on his behalf; the appeal was successful * The name seems here to occur for the first time in this signification : " Prohibentur congressus hominum de religione loquentium ; quae ab illis [who take part therein] conventicula appellantur " (Campan, i. 130). ON THE PILGRIMAGE. 219 to the extent that for this time the inquisitors were content with burning his heretical books and con- demning him in the costs of the proceedings. More- over, he was banished from the city ; he retired accordingly to his cloister of Aduard. Nor did Laski any longer continue to dwell in the inhospitable Louvain, among men who, in place of investigating the truth, preferred to act as bloodhounds for the Inquisition. He went in search of a land where, unmolested, he could live out his faith in the greatest seclusion. Close to the frontier of the Netherlands lay, as a hidden corner of the earth, a little free domain, which offered a friendly asylum in those days of persecution. It was East Friesland. Thither did our friend, again taking in his hand the traveller's staff, direct his steps. The way thither ran northwards, past Groningen. It is more than probable that A Lasco made a diversion from Groningen to the cloister of Aduard, distant only some seven or eight miles, which had received Hardenberg within its walls. The cloister was larger-hearted and more lenient than the Uni- versity. The banished one of Louvain had not only found refuge in the hospitable cell of the monastery ; not only was the liberal-minded monk left without interference in the enjoyment of his evangelical views ; the abbot even granted him the right of preaching and lecturing, and the monks now eagerly listened to a discourse which the students were forbidden to hear. Hardenberg owed this freedom to the accomplished abbot of the widely renowned monastery. For the past twelve years it had been under the oversight of Johannes Reekamp, in the succession of the abbots the one most highly 220 JOHN A LA SCO. distinguished.* Our refined Pole, too, was capti- vated by this noble and intellectual personality. He wishes all monasteries had abbots like this, devoting themselves with like zeal and skill to the education of youth ; yea, he sincerely loves the kindly abbot, and lauds the purity and uncorrupted- ness of his character.! But no cloister can enchain him more ; it is not long before he points out to his friend that an abiding even in the largest-hearted cloister was for a man of his convictions an hypocrisy, which the man must dare to shake off who would stand approved in the truth. As this cloister, lying there hard by the confines of the land, in its doings and practisings had the frontier territory of the Romish Church already behind it, so it would not be difficult to find many similar ones elsewhere, which served as welcome retreats for faint-hearted souls in those unkindly days, in which men could silently cherish the evangelical convictions they had not the courage to avow, and at the same time enjoy the agreeable sense of an existence free from care. Such feeble natures are surely also worthy of no better fate than in this way slowly to wither and disappear, world-forgotten, behind the walls of a monastery. For our friend a more pleasant portion had been provided by his Lord. He passed the cloister by, to advance for his confession's sake farther abroad, deeper into the conflict and into bitter sorrow, but with this also into the gracious knowledge that such a life is a glorifying of God. * Koppius, VitcB ac Gesta Abbatum Adwerdensium (Gron., 1850), p. 37. t Kuyper, ii., p. 553. VIII. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. ALA FRIA FRESENA : " Welcome, free Frisian ! " Such was the salutation with which the deputies out of the seven maritime districts of East Friesland hailed each other in olden times when they assembled on the Tuesday of Whitsun week in each year at Upstallsboom, a rising ground in the vicinity of Aurich, to take counsel together on the rights which every Frieslander was pledged to maintain. Yes, a free people there in the shadow of primeval oaks, and worthy indeed of offering him the greeting of welcome ! They have manfully defended themselves centuries long against wave and billow of the encroaching sea, which threatened to swallow up the low-lying tract of land, and actually did, spite of fence, and dyke, and dam, in the course of the ages swallow up so many a strip of land ; they have also just as manfully and bravely risen against all who would subdue the hardy, stubborn race ; their unvarying answer, spoken with the sword in the bloody conflict of men, was the proud, noble saying : " We will re- main free and Frisian." Jacob Grimm gives to the name the interpretation, that, like the name of the Franks, it signifies a free people. Jealous were the folk of this their treasure ; even the height 222 JOHN A LA SCO. of the houses was prescribed, that not any one in the nation might exalt himself and aspire to high things. With satisfaction does Tacitus in his day describe this race between the Weser and the Ems, high in the north, on the coast of the sea. They are for him a high-minded people among the Germans ; just, without craving for the posses- sion of others ; not men of violence, but heroic and well-nigh invincible when they see their freedom and their soil imperilled. Charles tJie Great (Charle- magne) had need of putting forth all his strength ; it was, moreover, a thirty years' war which he had to wage against this people, and the victor after all was obliged to concede to this hardy race its old laws and equalities. Half a thousand years and more had since then elapsed. The people did homage to no overlord ; almost every village had its own petty chieftain, who built to himself forts, and engaged to protect the inhabitants of the village. But then these hovetlings sought to outvie each other in power and influence. Troublous times ensued, wherein the strength of the nation was exhausted in endless internal feuds, and unfitted for presenting a victorious front to the common external foe. Chieftains who were on terms of friendship concluded on St. Martin's Eve, 1430, a league of freedom, under the Upstallsboom, and chose as the head of the league the son of that noble Enno Cirksena, who had himself declined election on account of his age. It was a happy choice. Rapidly had the family of the Cirksenas risen to eminence ; prudent, full of warm devotion to the nation, maintaining and defending its rights and liberties, they had thereby at the AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 223 same time confirmed the authority of their own house, and had vanquished or paralysed in their influence those hovetlings who refused to bend to their commanding power. The two sons of the venerable Enno, Edzard and Ulric, held sway in succession ; after the death of the latter, his widow Theda, a grand-daughter of Foko Ukena, once the most powerful opponent of the old Enno, a true " Frysan vife" grasped with firm masculine hand the helm of government until the majority of her son Edzard. Theda, the highly revered mother of the country, died in 1494. The prelates and hovetlings of the land assembled, and, with the approval of the popular assemblies, acknowledged her son the Count Edzard as regent. For upwards of thirty years the destinies of the country rested in his hand, and that so securely and prosperously that the grateful people styled him the Great, and the remembrance of him is yet cherished in the land. Strong in war, strong in peace, he was ever the guardian of his people, himself a genuine Frieslander, faithful, temperate, prudent, just, full of glowing love of country, devout with all his heart, and overflowing with kindly feeling, even towards the humblest in the land. In 1528 he fell peacefully asleep, with the words of Simeon upon his dying lips. He had in believing spirit seen the Saviour, as He was made known by the Reformation, and travelled through the German land, blessing, pardoning. Now would he as His servant depart in peace. His son/f#;/0/7. succeeded him in the government, not like the father in all respects, and more addicted to a life of pleasure than to serious labour for the prosperity of his country. For the troublous times in which his 224 JOHN A LA SCO. reign of ten years falls, with their great and momen- tous demands, he was hardly adequate ; he went not to work with certainty and with readiness for self- sacrifice, clearly conscious of his task, and from his heart devoted to it. He rather suffered things to take their own course, and that to happen which he was too indolent and too indifferent to avert. Thus his people had many heavy taxes imposed upon them, and the land was called to suffer irreparable losses : it had become a battle-field for the most diverse views ; a ferment pervaded all ranks of society, and it was felt how much a strong hand was wanting to curb the excited spirits in this time of agitation, and to lead them into the right path. In 1540 Enno died, at the age of only thirty-five, just in those days when Laski arrived in Emden. His widow, Countess Anne, of the house of Oldenburg, akin to the energetic Theda in more than one respect, assumed the reins of government as guardian of her sons. The free and indomitable spirit of the Frisian people distinctly appears likewise in its religious life. It i a devout people, which bows before its God in heaven, but is little disposed to bring its neck under human ordinances. At the threshold of its history stands, in strongly outlined form, its king Radbod. Against Charles Martel he had valiantly defended the liberties of his people, but the superiority of force was too great ; the Prankish duke vanquished the Frisian king. With the victor the missionaries had entered the land, the hero-forms, to be looked upon as messengers of the Lord Himself. The con- quered Radbod had to listen to the preaching of the Cross, and finally became willing to undergo baptism. AT THE GOAL AV EAST FRIESLAND. 225 Already he is standing in the river to receive the consecration, when the Frisian king asks the bishop, " Where may my ancestors be ? In heaven or in hell ? " " Thy ancestors died as heathen, and are consequently all gone down to hell." In perverse mood Radbod came up out of the water, and said, " Then I will sooner be with my own kinsmen in hell, than with the few Christians in heaven." No subsequent persuasion could induce him to receive baptism. After only a few years none of his tribesmen could any longer withstand the preaching of the Cross. Already an old man, Winfrid returned to the land of his early labours ; and now he began to accomplish among the Frieslanders that wherein in former decades he had not been able to succeed. Liudger and Willehad were disciples of Winfrid, and themselves sons of the Frisian people, men to whom the Christians of the land were devotedly attached ; in ever-gathering hosts the people came forward for baptism. Once become Christian, the nation clung with piety and fidelity to its faith ; hardly anywhere did heathendom sink into so dark a night of oblivion as among the Frisians. But in the ecclesiastical province, too, the people made its peculiar impress, and through the centuries defended and preserved its rights. There was no episcopal see in the land : one half of the country was under the pastoral staff of the Bishop of Bremen, the other under that of the Bishop of Munster ; any influence of these ecclesi- astical princes upon the destiny of the country was not perceptible. To the demands of a Gregory VII. for the introduction of celibacy, the Frieslanders opposed their maxim, " The priests are as much IS 22 6 JOHN A LA SCO. men as we are ; " and even the papal power was frustrated by the inflexible will of the people, who would suffer no priests condemned to single life to be forced upon them. Of the storms which so often agitated to its depths the Church in Rome and in its main seats, only a slight surge reached the distant coast of the north, and the minds of men were hardly stirred by it. They lived on after the godly manner of the fathers ; here and there in the land the churches rose in goodly number, and presently also the cloisters. To these mighty stone edifices alone was the right willingly conceded of towering above the simple dwellings of the citizens ; for higher than the Frieslander may only his God dwell. Things became changed in the days of Luther. The writings of the German Reformer fell betimes into the hands of the vigorous Count Edzard II. ; and, with growing pleasure and approval, he became charmed with the pious, daring spirit with which, in a way hitherto unexpected, he was there brought into contact. The fearless manly word of Luther rang forth so bold and free, as though it had been spoken by a Frieslander. The Count desired of LutJter a preacher of the Gospel. In the land itself the fitting and qualified personality was to be found a disciple of the Brothers of the Common Life in Zwolle, Master Aportanus. He did not stand long alone. In the most diverse places of the land a 1 longing for the preaching of the Gospel was awak- ened ; then also men offered themselves, mostly liberal-minded priests, who had been affected in their youth by the teaching of the Brothers of the Common Life, and who saw in the new movement AT THE GOAL IX EAST FRIESLAND. 227 the realisation of that for which they had once received the incitement in their schools. No one as yet thought of a separation. It might happen that the pure proclamation of the Gospel was made from the pulpit in the same church in which, an hour earlier or later, another priest would read the mass at the altar. The heart of the people, however, turned quickly and with decision from the man at the altar to the man in the pulpit, and to the sacred theme of his preaching. For the Frisian is in earnest in everything, and not least in the domain of faith. " Friesland does not sing " is a well-known saying ; but its people, of robust nature, firm and enduring, courageous and active, ponder over the highest questions of life, and what they have extorted therefrom they preserve, like their country, against every foreign power, against every threatening billow. Averse to all outward pageantry, in the church as elsewhere, they are inclined, on the other hand, to dwell on the word of truth, and by it to be led to repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Their reserved, almost inaccessible nature, as it often meets us under the weather-stained forms in the marsh lands, retains with tenacious fidelity that which it has acquired, at no slight cost, even in the spiritual domain. At the time of EdzarcTs death the evangelical doctrine had been diffused throughout the whole land, the departing Count being attached to it in faithful love. Even on his deathbed he exhorted his sons to continue in this doctrine. His successor kept his word. In the carrying of it out, however, he availed himself of his promise mainly in order to confiscate the abundant possessions of the cloisters, 228 JOHN A LA SCO. and with their wealth to procure for himself the gratifications which his heart desired. He acted in many cases despotically and unjustly. The ill- favoured traits of the violent movement displayed themselves, as in so many other things, in the wrongful encroachments on the ecclesiastical pos- sessions on the part of the Frisian landgrave. But yet the whole movement, in its deepest and inner- most core, was too pure and true to admit of being distorted or forced into a misshapen degeneracy by such acts of violence. No, not in Friesland either. The first decisive impulse to the Reformation movement in these Low German provinces, too, had unquestionably been given by the earliest and unique Reformational writings of Luther y and his bold impetuous confronting of kaiser, and empire, and pope, so heroically free, in submission only to the Gospel of the Lord. But the impulse given did not in East Friesland continue to bind itself closely and slavishly to the giant form of the German Reformer. The free Frisian likes to walk in his own ways ; the well-nigh overpowering influ- ence of the Wiltenberger was broken beyond the Weser and the Ems. In the case of the Magister Aportanus, too, whose mighty personality decidedly impressed upon his land the stamp of its theological bent and bias, there are early manifest in part because he was himself a genuine Frieslander views upon the one decisive point which Luther would have already rejected without hesitation as erroneous doctrine of the Sacramentarians. As early as 1526 the preacher in Emden writes such sentences as this : " God, who has always enabled us to bear in memory His AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 229 great works and wondrous deeds by means of a sign or seal, has given to us Christians baptism and the Supper, as He gave to Noah the rainbow, to Abraham circumcision, to the children of Israel the eating of the paschal lamb. As those are only sign and seal, so also baptism and bread and wine are not the Divine purification and sanctification, but only certain and infallible signs and seals on the part of God regarding the things mentioned. . . . To know Christ and to receive Him with the whole heart through faith, that is truly to drink His blood and truly to eat His flesh. Inasmuch as Christ is corporeally in heaven at the right hand of His heavenly Father, so He is not corporeally, but spiritually, present in the bread." What Apor- tanus taught in this form in Emden, that in Norden his brave companion in the faith and conflict, Hein- rich Rese, in 1527, composed and sang in that spiritual song which quickly passed from mouth to mouth, in which it is said : " Faith is the true eating ; Else we may not suppose To enjoy in a bodily wise Such wholesome meat. Faith receiveth Christ Himself And all that He hath for us done, His flesh and blood, His body and soul, Yea, in Him God Himself altogether." * But that is the loud echo, far in the north, of the doctrine of Zwingli ; it encountered opposition, as well on the Romish side as on the part of evangelical preachers who attached themselves more closely to Lut/ter ; yet it comes out victoriously and clearly in the earliest Confession of Faith, which the evangelical preachers issued immediately after the * Cornelius, Der Anteil Ostfrieslands an der Ref. bis zum y. 1535 (printed for private circulation), p. 20. 2 3 o JOHN A LA SCO. death of Count Edzard (1528),* to which there was appended in the same year a detailed explanation. In accordance with the sense of freedom on the part of its inhabitants, Friesland soon became the asylum of all those persecuted for their faith's sake in the neighbouring States. The influx was very considerable. The little country contained a motley array of persons representing the most diverse religious views, in those days a unique phenomenon as though there by the sea an island had arisen with laws such as have elsewhere been established only within the most recent times. From the Netherlands the adherents of the Evangelical Church flocked in to the hospitable harbour of freedom of conscience. Amongst them, and mingled with them, came also the Anabaptists Heinrich Niclaes here carried on his practices for a time, then again David Joris ; everywhere persecuted, Carlstadt reposed here a while : a real rendezvous of the most manifold enthusiasts. Their influence failed not to make itself felt, especially under the rule of Enno, who readily let things take their course. From Bremen had come preachers who thought they could oppose a barrier to the rising disorder by a close and exclu- sive adhesion to the doctrines of Luther ; but the community rose indignantly against such demand. Nor did laws of government, framed in accordance with the Marburg Articles, prove of great avail, specially inasmuch as no obedience was yielded to * On the origin of this important confessional writing see Emmius, Rerum Frisicaritm Historia (Lugd. Bat., 1616), p. 346. The Confession itself, with its thirty-three articles, is printed in Meiners, Oostvries lands Kerkelijke Geschie- denisse (Gron., 1783), i., p. 53. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 231 them elsewhere. Then the attempt was made by the Count, a few years later, to obtain the ascend- ency for Lutheranism by the agency of certain Luneburg preachers. Equally in vain. As early as 1538 the supposed deliverers were obliged to quit the land ; all their endeavours, supported as they were by the power of authority, were rendered ineffectual by the free sentiment of the people. But the confusion likewise increased to an alarming extent ; no one proved strong enough to restore order and give peace to the land. Such was the state of East Friesland when John a Lasco crossed over from Groningen, here in quiet to live in the midst of his studies. I. THE WAITING TIME. - It must have been in the latter autumn of 1540 that our friend, weary of the rising persecution in Louvain and the whole domains of the regent of the Netherlands, longing for repose to live in accord- ance with the promptings of his faith, sought the friendly shelter of the Frisian land. Emden was not in those days an inviting place of residence. The sea washed right up to the town wall ; and in the chill autumn storms, the murky winter nights, the swelling flood dashed angrily against the town. Damp and raw hung the mists over the low-lying lands. The narrow streets, the little modest dwelling-houses, hardly afforded suffi- cient shelter to the inhabitants, steeled as they were from childhood to all such discomforts of rude climate ; altogether inhospitable must they appear to a stranger, especially to a Pole, used to the comforts of the patrician houses in Cracow. When, 232 JOHN A LA SCO. in the present day, we pass through the clean, spruce, albeit somewhat quiet streets of Emden, we feel as though the town had fallen into a sleep of three hundred years, and we were passing through the very streets which Laski once trod. If this had been so, we should have to describe the houses as more habitable. But the aspirations for greater refinement, of which the eloquent witnesses greet us in the ancient mansions, and particularly in the graceful town house, arose only in the second half of the sixteenth century ; and were, in no small measure, the consequence, as also grateful fruit, of that spirit which Laski ever toiled mightily to enkindle. For by Laski was the fair seal more deeply impressed upon Emden of being the asylum of those persecuted for their faith's sake ; and the fugitive Netherlanders and Englishmen abundantly repaid such right of sanctuary by their diligence and activity. The means, likewise, of our exile seem to have been at that time too scanty for protecting himself by greater conveniences against the stress of wind and weather. He has written home to have his collection of books forwarded by way of Frankfort to him at Emden, and now sends to his friend in Aduard a list of his d-uplicates for the supplementing of the copious library of the monastery, with a view at the same time of defraying from the proceeds his expenses of living. Towards the inhabitants of Emden his relation was that of a stranger. To the educated among them he could easily make himself intelligible in the mother-tongue of the Humanists ; from the people, however, he was separated, as by an impassable gulf, by that Low German (Dutch) AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 233 language, sounding so entirely different from that which he had acquired of the German language in Basle. But it was a people here in Friesland that could not, like a race of Polish kmetons, be passed aside unregarded ; nor certainly would Laski now wish so to slight them. To all these difficulties in the way of becoming at home in this rude and uninviting region there was added, in the case of our friend, that of a painful physical disorder. We have to think of him in this respect as, like Paul, having a thorn in the flesh, may also regard him as otherwise resembling that great Apostle, who had learnt in the school of suffering and in the instruction of the Gospel, that the grace of his Lord was sufficient for him. Even the first reports which we heard concerning Laski in Bologna lead us to infer a delicate state of health, such as to cause anxiety to his immediate friends. During the last thirteen years of his life in his own land he had been physically well.* But now, in the cold, damp, low-lying lands, the attacks of ague had returned with renewed violence. Food to which he was not accustomed had deranged his stomach, which suffered the more from the remedies prescribed to him by the physicians. Continued vomiting tortures the sufferer ; the short journey to the church suffices well-nigh to exhaust him ; if he reads only a little, a dimness comes over his eyes ; a few lines of a letter cost him a day of pain. Yet all this discomfort wrung from him no single murmur. "To God be the glory, who is reminding me in grace by such bodily admonitions of my guilt and * Kuyper, ii. 552. 2 34 JOHN A LA SCO. obligation to Him." He already thought he would have to yield to the urgent exhortations of his friends and to leave Emden. But the winter passed away, and spring brought improvement ; he determined to remain. He had become attached to the place ; here he had found what he sought, a quiet retreat, where he could unmolested devote himself to his studies. It is unfortunately not permitted us to obtain a glimpse of his course of study during the quiet year which followed. We see only that new works of importance in the theological domain do not long escape his attention. He commends on one occasion the vigorous language of Melanchthoris tractate, which appeared in 1539, "The principal [fur- nembste] difference between pure Christian doctrine of the Gospel and the idolatrous papistical doctrine," a production which, as he tells his friend in the cloister, has been read with the most lively interest by the Emperor himself, and wherein, with admirable brevity and condensation, Melanchthon has touched upon the main articles of the faith. From his distant watchtower by the sea Laski followed the progress of events in the ecclesiastical world. It was then the order of the day to treat of the most difficult and obscure questions of theology in lengthy deliberations. He who should wish to follow the course of such a discussion merely as an event of the day would be insensibly placed in presence of the most important problems, and involuntarily called upon to furnish a solution of them. How much more so our friend, whose serious studies con- tinually urged him, for his own enlightenment and confirmation in the faith, to labour on the answering AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 235 of the questions raised. In November, 1540, de- puties from the different States had assembled for conference at Worms. Ranke calls attention to the extraordinary fact that in this instance the representa- tives of the papacy were divided in opinion ; those of Protestantism, on the other hand, were at one.* The Wittenberg Concord as yet cemented the minds together ; Calvin and Melanchthon, both present, were united in intimate confidence. The main question turned upon the point of ecclesiastical law which of the two Churches abides in the fellowship of the true and ancient Church, and, consequently, which has a right to lay claim to the title of Catholic. The question must exert a powerful attraction upon Laski, and urge him to studies of which the results appear in the important labours of after-days. This conference at Worms was followed, in the beginning of the subsequent year, by a Conference on Religion, held at Ratisbon, the latter in presence of the Emperor himself. For years the two Churches had not approached each other in so conciliatory a spirit as here. The Granvellas and Contarinis on the one hand, the Bucers and MelancJitlions on the other, were inclined to concessions which, in the present day, would have carried the one to the bench of the Old Catholics, the other to the vicinity of the Central Party. On that side they were willing to leave the marriage of the priesthood an open question so far as Germany was concerned, and in like manner the concession of the cup to the laity ; on this side some of the princes were not disinclined under certain conditions to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. Nay, even * Ranke, Deutsche Gesch. im Zeitalter der Reformation (Berl., 1852), iv., p. 156. 236 JOHN A LA SCO. as regards the vital point of the doctrine of justifica- tion, there fell from the lips of Contarini and those of kindred spirit utterances which must be character- ised as not widely removed from the doctrine of the Gospel. On the doctrine of transubstantiation first became again glaringly apparent the opposition, which could not be concealed ; and the rift, once opened, became ever wider. Not even this Con- ference on Religion had attained the object for the bringing about of which both sides had shown the most considerate readiness. An accommoda- tion of the differences was no longer possible. To our friend, in his distant asylum, this conference, too, of which the intelligence spread so quickly through Germany, brought with it the necessity of submitting all the points of division once more to the most earnest examination before the bar of his own conscience. The decision could not be doubtful. The result was for him a yet more decided severance from the Romish Church, a yet more powerful emphasising of the Protestant stand- point. The more strongly and decisively the emphasising of Protestantism manifested itself with Laski, the more urgent was he, with his friend in the cloister, to come to decision. Laski must have orally called upon his friend to depart ; Hardenberg still hesi- tated, but the sting against which it was vain to strive had already been implanted in his soul by A Lasco. " That which you write concerning shame, pain, grief, and all the wretchedness that constantly tortures you, how in all the world shall I believe that, since you yourself assert that Christ un- questionably approves of the reasons for your inten- AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 237 tion ? In presence of Him you are thus sure of your cause ; but in presence of me you blush and torment yourself. What, am I then greater than He ? He who sanctifies his repose in Christ can no longer be deprived of it by men. . . . You reject the example of Hezekiah, as, on account of the difference of position, foreign to your office. But what he, the guardian of the outward discipline, did with the iron, that you must do in your lectures, not with vague general reproaches, but with that extra- ordinary hammer which smites even the rocks. It is the task of a theologian to admonish every one of his guilt and duty. If your superiors will yield no obedience to the admonition, nay, if they will not suffer you to admonish, if they compel you to suppress it and to dissemble, and you yield to them, is that to reprove with boldness ? Nor do you rightly compare Babylon with Babylon. For we have no idol which we worship ; but you \t.c. t the Romanists] worship as God that abomination which you set up in the holy place in public worship, and are the servants of such idolatry. If some idols have still remained with us, they lie there publicly despised and neglected. For what drawing of the Spirit you are still waiting I know not. I believe that it is the Spirit of God who says (Isa. Hi. 1 1 ; 2 Cor. vi. 1 7), ' Come out from among them, and be ye separate.' And the same Spirit speaks a like word in the Revelation (xviii. 4), ' Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins.' If you refer this to the spiritual flight, it is certain that he who has once truly in spirit thus pondered on this flight will not still cleave to those whom he sees continually dishonouring the virtue and merit 238 JOHN A LA SCO. of Christ As for myself, I love you, my Albert, as ever ; but your dilatoriness I do not love." * This is the honest, manly language of a true soldier of Christ, who is not ashamed of the Gospel, but boldly confesses the Lord without disguise, and with joyful resolution has for His sake severed every bond which could enchain him to the world, to feel himself held henceforth only by that one bond which links the redeemed and liberated soul to its Saviour. Thus, as entirely separated and inexorably resolved, Laski would not yet have expressed himself while in the circle of the Bible- readers at Louvain ; with rapid strides he presses forward upon the career, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forward to that which is before, recognising his strength to lie in the fact that he has been apprehended of Christ. And he rests not till he has forced the lingering friend to the like momentous step. Hardenberg brings forward a number of difficulties, which show the severe conflict through which his soul was passing ; t in the letter just cited we have indeed the refutation of single points, which the oral converse in Emden had perhaps not fully cleared up. Hardenberg may have seen in the church at Emden the images of the saints, which had not yet been put away ; hence the doubt whether the change would not be, after all, a passing from one Babylon to another Babylon a doubt so easily arising in one who was hesitating. The interchange * Kuyper, ii. 557. t The library of Munich contains the interesting MS. in Hardenberg' s own handwriting. Spiegel (p. 27) reproduces it in a condensed form. AT THE GOAL IN EAS2 FRIESLAND. 259 of letters is continued through a period of some months ; it is an affecting conflict which Laski unremittingly wages with his friend. The lingering Hardenberg could not in the long run withstand this manly and pressing urgency. It is true it was only in the spring of 1543 that the monk in his Bernardin cowl knocked at the door of Laski. The monk's garb was here put aside and laid up, and Laskts wife took care that the moths should not consume the woollen garment.* From Emden Hardenberg very soon went on to Wittenberg, to establish himself in the doctrines of the Evangelical Church under the oversight of MelanchtJwn. An intimate relation of friendship quickly united the two men, who were more spiritually akin to each other than was the case with the resolute, vigorous, uncompromising Pole. Nor were the nunneries of this period more favourably judged of by our Laski, not even those of the mildest ritual, such as we meet with in the Beguine houses of that day on the Lower Rhine communities whose members, without any kind of vows binding them for life, led in ordinary houses a devout life, in simple unpretentious domestic order. In the neighbouring Groningen there lived in the first residence of the Beguines the daughter of an ancient and distinguished Groningen family as a domicella mantellata i.e., one belonging to the leading division of the house the intellectual, pious Gertrude Syssinge. Laski had formed her acquaintance, and was in epistolary correspondence with her, a correspondence which * Kuyper, ii. 577. 2 4 o JOHN A LA SCO. the educated Beguine knew how to conduct in the Latin language, while at the same time so well versed in domestic labours that her spindle and loom were no strange occupation to her. Laski urges upon her too to quit the community in which she lives ; his house in Emden shall be a place of refuge for her. More instant becomes the pressure as the din of war threatens to advance to Groningen. " God will not forsake thee, wherever thou art, if thou wilt only follow Him in truth and with thy whole heart ; and I doubt not of thy willingness. I will not fail of affording thee a stout protection in the time of need." In a further letter * we meet with yet more urgent language : " Though I cannot, and will not, be lord and judge of another's conscience, yet I do not comprehend how any one who has any knowledge of the truth, and knows the mysteries of ungodliness in the convents, can justify his conscience before God if he remains in the midst of those of whom he daily sees and hears that the merits and the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ are dishonoured by them." The ultimate decision was longer delayed in the case of our Beguine than in that of the Bernardin monk of the convent of Aduard ; many a devious step, which cannot be followed by us here, was made with hesitating foot by the maiden before she quitted the threshold of the cloister for ever. Those who in their convent days had not been far from each other now found themselves for the rest of their lives united under the same roof: in 1547 Hardenberg led home his * Kuyper, ii. 562. See the whole history in Spiegel, Hardenberg, pp. 91 105. AT THE GOAL IX EAST FRfESLAXD. 241 " Trutfe" : as companion for life to his Bremen pastorate. The two years of waiting which passed away in Emden before La ski obeyed the call to throw himself with vigour and decision into the course of events did not flow on so smoothly and quietly as he may well have wished. Visits were made from time to time to the neighbouring border district of the Netherlands. A brief stay in Amsterdam brought him many a tempting offer. A journey to his old home-land, the beloved Poland, falls likewise within this time of waiting. The occasion is a painful one. A few years before this, the important action of his renowned brother Jerome and his tragic experiences had already produced a deep effect upon the life of our friend : we remember with what unflagging zeal our Johannes had set all things in movement until he had freed his beloved brother from the disgraceful bonds into which the aspirant to the throne of Hungary had cast him. This shameful treatment on the part of one for whom he had sacrificed everything, and who owed almost everything to him, had driven the deeply injured Pole into the camp of the other pretender. His whole endeavour was henceforth directed to obtaining at last healing and peace for the fair Hungarian land, bleeding as it was from a thousand wounds. And he honestly worked to that end. Kaiser diaries himself bears witness in a letter to Jerome, which is still preserved, f what an essential part Laski had * Thus the Christian name Gertrude appears in its local colouring in the pnly address of a letter which is preserved ; in the Latin letters Laski himself always calls his friend Drusilla. t Printed in the Kerkhistorisch A r chief ( Amsterdam, 1855). p. 171. 16 JOHN A LA SCO. taken in putting an end to the conflict of years between the two claimants to the throne, and in the concluding of the peace between Ferdinand and Zapolya. This peace had been effected without the knowledge or consent of Soliman. No one but Laski was thought sufficiently adroit, and at the same time courageous enough, to go to Constantinople and communicate the tidings to the redoubtable Soliman. The valiant Pole undertook the embassy at the peril of his life. He fearlessly braved the insults of the enraged Sultan ; war was declared, Laski imprisoned ; his nose and ears were to be cut off. A fortunate accident alone preserved him from this horrible mutilation, and opened to him the possibility of return.* So great and unselfish was the devotion of the Pole to the welfare of Hungary, that, despite the danger to which he had just been exposed, he declared himself ready in the following year (1540) to return to the den of the lion on a new and equally perilous embassy. What gave rise to his second journey was this : Zapolya had died (at the age of fifty-three) ; a few weeks before his death his youthful wife, Isabella, the beautiful daughter of the King of Poland, had presented him with a son. This birth kindled afresh the old desire for the government on the part of a few of those who had remained faithful, and led to their forgetting the definite arrangements made in the treaty of peace. A messenger hastened to Constantinople to place the heir lately born under the protection of Soliman ; Laskt's difficult task was favourably to incline the Sultan towards King Ferdinand. If the Hapsburger * Compare Hammer, Gesch. des Osmanischen Reiches (Pest, 1834), ii., p. 167. AT THE GOAL AV EAST FRIES LAND. 243 had only waited, before declaring hostilities against Isabella, until Laski had accomplished his mission, and had found time to escape the talons of the dangerous adversary ! The courageous fidelity of the messenger would have well deserved such con- sideration. As it was, the attack upon the widow, who had placed herself, with her son, under the protection of the Sultan, only kindled the fury of the wild victor, who looked upon himself as master of Hungary. War was declared against Ferdinand ; the first consequence was the imprisonment of the ambassador. Even the enemy respected the daring man, and esteemed his great ability. A high position was offered the captive if lie would enter the service of the Sultan ; but Laski was no renegade, nor was he a hireling who places his sword and pen at the disposal of any one for office and honour. He continued steadfast through the whole winter of I 540 41. The brother in the distant Emden seems to have heard nothing thereof in those days ; he supposes him to be in the vicinity of Ferdinand* Slowly the winter passed away for the captive, who was shut up in the house of the Grand Vizier, and only allowed to attend mass on Sundays at the church of the Greek patriarch.t In the middle of June, 1541, Soliman at last entered upon the war against Hungary ; his savage hordes poured forth as a devastating flood over the land, destroying everything where they settled. The poor captive was dragged with them as far as Belgrade. There in sickness he pined in the dungeon, while Soliman entered Ofen (Buda) as victor. He had set out unwillingly from Belgrade, * Kuyper, ii. 554. t Hammer, ii. 169. 244 JOHN A LA SCO. for he had received tidings that the two ambassa- dors despatched to him by Francis I. had been treacherously assassinated on the Po, by bandits hired for that purpose by the Marquis of Gnasto. One of these was Rinqon, the friend of our Laski in earlier days, who was doomed thus pitiably to end his life, while his former colleague was pining in the dungeons of Belgrade.* When S oilman returned from Oferi to Belgrade, he compassionately released the ambassador of his lately vanquished opponent. Crushed in spirit, worn out with his imprisonment and with sickness, Laski returned to his old home at Cracow. He felt the approach of death, and longed to converse once more with the beloved brother, f Upon the receipt of the melan- choly tidings, Johannes immediately hastened from Emden to be present at the deathbed of his brother. Although the fact of his marriage and his entire secession was well known in his native land, no one sought to hinder his crossing the frontier and making his abode beside the dying man whom he had come to tend. The malady was thought to be the effect of a slow poison administered by Turkish hands, either in Constantinople itself or in Belgrade, out of fear of the powerful ambassador, in order by such a cowardly and miserable expe- dient to put him out of the way. How gladly would we have listened to the con- versation which JoJiannes held with his dying brother. More than one indication points to the conclusion that Jerome was not far from the Gospel ; and had * Hammer, ii., p. 171 ; cf. Rapin, Anno 1542, vol. vii., Bk. 15, IP- 613. t Kuyper, ii. 30, " ipso id [the visit] a me petente." AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 245 only a favourable destiny afforded him greater opportunity for quiet and collectedness of mind, he would perhaps have taken the same step as his brother. Melanchthon was acquainted with the influ- ential diplomatist, and is said to have delivered an oration over him.* Jerome found no fault with his brother either on account of his marriage or of his secession, by either of which acts he had forfeited all present position in his native land. He is not opposed to a post in a foreign land, but prays him to accept such post only on condition that, should his fatherland have need of him, and a change have ensued in the ecclesiastical situation by which he was free to live at home in accordance with his belief, he was to be released from any obligation into which he had entered, and then once more to devote his energies to the well-being of Poland. \ The request of the dying man coincided with his own wishes, with his ardent love of the fatherland, a love which renders more significant and precious the sacrifice of exile for his faith's sake. After the death of the brother our Laski did not remain much longer in Cracow. In the spring of 1542 he is already at Emden again. A passing notice in a letter indicates that he had held serious negotiations with the bishops of his native land.]; It was his intention to make these public ; unfor- tunately he did not carry this intention into effect ; at least, up to the present time no MS. having * Gerdes, Scrinium Antiquarium (Groningen, without date), p 486. This assertion will be examined in the sequel. t Kuyper, ii. 587, 588, as also the beautiful passage ii. 30, and in general the whole letter to his king. \ Ibid., ii. 556. 246 JOHN A LA SCO. reference to them has been discovered. A Lasco supposes that the subject of these negotiations would draw forth a smile from his friend Hardenberg ; at any rate, by means of them it had become notorious, in the other camp also, that the rupture with the old Church was now an accomplished fact. This rupture seems to have had, as its immediate consequence, the result that a few small sources of income which till then had remained to him, without molestation or curtailment, were henceforth cut off. So, at least, I am inclined to explain the statement of the unre- liable Walewski ; the dimensions which he gives to the affair are altogether exaggerated.* With the death of the brother a strong tie which bound him to his native land was broken. The negotiations with the Polish bishops would suffice to convince him that no way was yet opened to the free proclamation of the Gospel in his fatherland, and only on this condition did he conceive of the possibility of returning. He laid himself out for a long sojourn in a foreign land ; and, after all, he felt himself at home by this time in the kindly spot far away in the north upon the bleak coast of the sea. His health had somewhat improved, and was better fitted to contend with the inclemency of the rude climate. The passion for active labour was reviving. It was to be foreseen from the first that a nature like that of our friend could not stand long idle in the market-place once he had inwardly worked his way through all pressing questions, and the Lord had given him the stability of a fixed standpoint. And he was not called to stand long idle ; the Lord had need of him as a chosen vessel. * Bibliutheca (Warsaw, 1872)^.361. AT THE GOAL IN EAST F-R1ESLAND. 2\j We have already sought to present in broad out- line a description of the state of affairs in East Friesland. Count Enno had been cut off in the prime of life in I 540 ; his widow, the Countess Anne, of the house of Oldenburg, had entered upon the government as guardian of her youthful sons. It was an arduous and venturesome enterprise, specially for a woman, to undertake the conduct of the disordered affairs of the land at such a troublous time. The Countess Anne, of devout, earnest mind, shrank not from con- fronting the difficulty ; in firm and masculine hand she held the rein like that The da who, seventy years before, as widow of Ulric Cirksena, had ruled over the land with such abundant blessing in place of her sons, not yet of age. The labour was rendered more difficult to Countess Anne by reason of particular circumstances. Her brother-in-law, Count Jo/in, a brother of the late regent, demanded guardianship of the nephews during their minority, notwithstanding the fact that, on the occasion of his marriage with a natural daughter of the Emperor Maviinilian,\\c had solemnly renounced for himself and his descendants the right of succession in East Friesland, and that under letter and seal. The alliance with an emperor's daughter he had counted worth a pitiable relapse into the Church of Rome ; on account of both of these recommendations he seemed to Charles V. worthy of being acknowledged as the feudal lord of the pro- vince of East Friesland. So much the more un- worthy was he counted by the Frieslanders, who had already promised fidelity to the widow of Count Enno ; with heavy sacrifices of money, almost exceeding the resources of the little country, ex- hausted as it was by the many wars and con- JOHN A LA SCO. tributions, they sought to purchase exemption from the burdensome sway of the regent which was to be imposed on them by force. The money, indeed, was absorbed by Count John ; but that did not hinder him from keeping a jealous eye fixed upon the land, and unceasingly directing the attention of the ran- corous Kaiser and of the suspicious regent of the Netherlands to this little corner of the earth, which in those days possessed the fair distinction of being an asylum for all those persecuted for the faith's sake. It was well that the Countess possessed in her valiant brother, the well-known Count Christopher of Oldenburg, a faithful adviser, a manly protector. He presented a bold front against the exorbitant pre- tensions of the renegade, behind whom stood, as an angry thunder-cloud, the Emperor himself. Count Christopher was, like his sister, attached with all his heart to the cause of the Reformation, a goodly heritage of their pious mother. Both recognised that for the weal of the cruelly straitened land the lever of good order must be applied, in the first instance, in the ecclesiastical domain. The Polish baron dwelling in Emden was well known to them ; to gain him on behalf of the Church was their most zealous endeavour. A new preacher's office was to be founded at the church in Emden. Laski declined the offer, pleading his defective acquaintance with the language of the country ; this would be the second refusal, if the opinion of Emmius could be sustained. In the place of him Thomas Bramius was chosen, an able, pious person, whom our friend likewise esteemed.* Count Christopher still relaxed not in * Emmius, p. 916, as also Meiners, i. 218. AX THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 249 his efforts to gain so important a person as Laski for his Church. On his advice the Countess made the proposal, with the consent of the leading men in Emden, that he should undertake the oversight of all the churches of the land (e^opeiav ecclesiarum oinniinn totius regionis). Laski thought he ought no longer to withstand this third call ; he believed he now heard the voice of the Lord. He declared himself ready to undertake the arduous office, upon the condition that as well the Countess as the whole Church should be found to have only the glory of God in view in the calling of him.* This took place in the beginning of the year 1543, "to the joy of all the well-disposed in the land," as the chronicler observes. 2. THE WORK WITH THE SWORD IN THE HAND. As was the case elsewhere, so was it also in East Friesland. The rupture with the ancient Church was not at once so violent and striking that one might draw with clearness and distinctness the boundary line between the old which had passed away and the new which had occupied its place. It happened not rarely and we could, as regards Friesland, prove this by examples that in the same church the one preacher proclaimed the Gospel as with new tongues, and enthusiastically unfolded the sacred banner of the Reformation our righteousness of grace alone, through faith in Christ Jesus while below at the altar, after as before, the priest read his tradi- tional mass, which ceased only when no one was any longer found ready to attend its performance. So also it was in Emden. For two decades now the * Emmius, p. 916. 250 JOHN A LA SCO. town and land had turned to the preaching of the Gospel ; that, however, did not prevent the Franciscan monks of the town so many of them as had remained faithful to their cloister continuing their ecclesiastical occupations according to the ancient custom. They still preached among themselves, they baptised children, gave the last unction to the dying, preserved and tended the images of the saints, exactly as though the whole of the great movement had passed over them without a trace. And there were not a few to be found who would irresolutely leave affairs to take their course, and would retain this strange indecision, this double-tongued procedure, but only to the damage of the young Evangelical Church, as was now seen. Incited by the Count John, and in the assured sense of having in him a well- protected stay, the monks lifted their heads some- what higher. Of that which had been tacitly overlooked in them through long years they now boasted as a right. The new superintendent at once manfully encoun- tered them : their position seemed to him an anachronism. He forbade to them preaching and baptism, and issued a severe injunction that the images till then tolerated in the Church should be removed. The monks, now grown daring, withstood him. First of all, they held up Laski to suspicion as a stranger who sought to introduce new customs. They owed no obedience to him, the Pole with a beard reaching to his breast. The sly Franciscans knew right well the value of the card they were playing against the hated opponent, for the Fries- lander is almost inaccessible to strangers, and I count it among the strongest marks of the authority of our AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 251 friend that this saying failed to have the desired effect, and that they willingly submitted to the influence of this " stranger " in the land. Laski wishes to convince the monks of their false doctrine in a public disputation ; the monks, however, feel themselves no match for the able theologian, and know how adroitly to defer the disputation till the autumn, hoping that then their protector, Count John, will have returned, and will save them the trouble of the doubtful controversy. Even among the Protestants themselves there were not a few disinclined for a decisive rupture with the papal customs. We receive a distinct impression of their opinion from a writing of A Lasco, published probably about this time : On the holding aloof from Papal Services* The interesting tractate places us in the midst of the movement of that day, and shows us for how many it had become difficult to sever themselves from the customs half understood indeed, but endeared to them from their earliest youth. Patience was demanded for these weak persons ; one may even discover in these forms a Christian sense, and ought at least to let them die out undisturbed. Laski victoriously proves the untenable, hybrid character of such unsettled views, and lays bare the deep injuries inflicted upon the religious life by partici- pation in a religious service which, after all, is built up without any foundation in God's Word. He appeals once in his reasoning to the beautiful words of Calvin> that " nothing in our lives ought to appear so dear and valuable to us, that we should for the * Kuyper, i. 64. 252 JOHN A LA SCO. sake of it in any wise defile ourselves with idolatry." Our La ski was animated in this domain by the sacredly earnest spirit of the Genevan Reformer, who will not make terms, but only contend for God's unsullied honour. The tractate concludes with the words : " I am ready to give heed to any counter-argument, if I seem not to have rightly treated the matter ; for I seek not my own honour, which is of no moment, but the honour of Him to whom every knee must bow, now and in eternity. Amen." It was an unwonted language which the people of Emden now heard pronounced with manly and firm decision. It was not to every one's taste ; it contradicted too bluntly the traditional and now endeared practice ; called for a radical change in the life, such as is heartily accomplished only by those who refuse to confound custom with the truth, and are resolved to follow the latter alone. The demand of the stranger appeared, moreover, to these hybrid beings a curtailment of their freedom ; and on this point the Frieslander is firm. And yet they could not but feel that the word to which they had listened was rather an animating reference to the chain they were still dragging behind them ; only the courage of faith for snapping it asunder was lacking to them. Even the Countess wavered. The timid woman saw the peril which threatened her and her people from the adjoining Netherlands, from the Kaiser himself, if she should proceed with too great decision against the monks and their godless ordinances. She wished, as the mother of her country, to have patience with the weak, as Paul enjoins ; but overlooked the fact that this AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIES LAND. 253 'right and this duty is conceded by the Apostle only to him who is strong in Christ, not to him who does not himself outgrow his weakness. The images were to remain afterwards as before, and no alteration was to be made in them. For Laski it was a question in this edict not of the images alone ; he saw in the feeble yielding an encroach- ment on Gospel freedom ; it was for him a com- pact wherein human considerations were allowed to make stipulations with the pure Word of God. That, however, appeared to him an abomination in the sanctuary. Openly, boldly, with all the courage of a soul which, being made free in Christ, will be only His servant, he enters the lists against the Countess. The document itself which he ad- dressed to her we possess now only in copious excerpts* a valuable, precious page of the Refor- mation time, reminding of Luther s invincible courage of faith, as manifested in his best products. Laski recalls to the mind of the Countess how he had been led to accept his difficult post under the con- viction that the Countess was a God-fearing woman, and eager by all means to promote the glory of Christ. But he has this to charge her with that in matters of religion she is drawn too easily to the one side or the other, and supposes she must follow rather the opinion of her counsellors than the will of God. And yet only God is the supreme Judge, even of kings, and they are called as His servants to enforce God's right, and not the ordi- nance of men. God requires of us to avoid idolatry ; how can we then tolerate the idolatry of the monks * In Emmius, p. oio, from whom it is taken by Kuyper (ii- 558). 254 JOHN A LA SCO. in our churches ? How long are we to halt on both sides ? " I am ready not only to surrender that which pertains to me, little as it is, without any regard to honour or recompense nevertheless only upon one condition, that you, Countess, give an open testimony that you are minded to be led by the Word of God alone and to yield obedience to this. If you will not do this, but hold it more advisable to follow human ordinances and the wisdom of this world, then I can and will no longer continue my labour in your service. I am a servant of the doctrine of the Gospel and the Apostles, and I am not ashamed to receive in- struction from the humblest brother ; a minister of human wisdom and custom, which creeps in beside God's Word, I will not in truth be. In human things human wisdom has its place, but in Divine things God's majesty, His holy will, is be- fore everything. ... I know well my position. I am a stranger, have a family, have need of a settled abode, for the preservation of which I have need of benevolence, not hostility, not injury ; and of a truth my aim and endeavour is to stand on terms of friendship with all, and to accommodate myself to every one's mode of life, but only unto the altar : to cross this limit, even from prudence in such feeling, I am not able, though I should thereby suffer the loss of all friendship, and though I should leave my family in the deepest distress and poverty ; the Lord, who fecdeth all things, will also care for those that are mine if I leave them nothing." He would not have thus written so our Laski concludes his memorable and affecting letter if he did not know the devout mind of the Countess ; AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 255 yea, he is convinced that she understands how it pertains to his office faithfully to exhort to that which he has recognised as belonging to her own salvation and that of the Church, and that she would leniently regard even this his boldness in the letter. He would have been unfaithful if he had not thus written ; he preferred being ungrateful to being unfaithful, and hoped that, though he should less meet the wishes of others, he would at least not appear ungrateful in her eyes. He has done that to which he was under obligation, if perhaps not in an agreeable form, yet at least with an honest intention ; his labour was at the service of the Countess, but only on condition of his being free to obey God rather than men ; if this condition was impracticable, then he would demand his dis- missal. He implored upon her from God His Holy Spirit, to guide her thoughts and deeds to the glory of His name and to the edification of the Church. And God answered the prayer of His faithful servant. The Countess bowed before the earnest and reproving words of the undaunted man ; the letter inspired her with courage, even at the risk of drawing down upon her and her poor little land the imperial displeasure, to lay aside all anxious considerations and to listen to the voice of God, as she believed she heard it in this letter. The letter which she returned to Laski does honour to both ; let us leave it undisfigured in its true-hearted language in the original:* "Our salutations first of all, Worthy, Beloved, Trusty. You have lately * Meiners, i. 249, the original Dutch in Dalton's own work. 256 JOHN A LA SCO. bravely and earnestly reminded us by your letter of that which it becomes us to do by virtue of the honour of God and our government ; namely, that we should put forth the idolatrous images, etc., out of our churches, after the example of many Chris- tian kings. We have now well received such ad- monition, and will pray God that He may give us a heart and mind to do all that is well-pleasing to Him. As regards the images, we can suffer that you remove them out of sight by night, yet not all at once ; and that the foolish folk be not allowed to be present there ; but that you make the same known to the burgomasters and prelates, and that it be carried out without noise : thus is our good pleasure accomplished." The command of the Countess was carried into execution. The monks did not yet abandon all hope of ultimate success. A few weeks after the edict their protector, the apostate Count Jo/in, came again to Emden, glad to have a pretext for inter- vening in the affairs of the little country. The Countess, however, stood firm. Even threats were unavailing ; the God-fearing Reformer had inspired her with resolute courage, the sacred courage for doing God's will, and this makes a woman at any time a match for a man. Nay, even Count John felt the wonderful power which proceeded from Laski, established as he was in the will of God. He had an interview with him ; we know only the result, that tacitly, as though vanquished, the Count left affairs to their own course. The prop of the monks was broken. They had to submit to the inevitable. Angrily they withdrew, like old people retiring upon an annuity when the children AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 257 have grown up. To the monks was farther granted only right of asylum in the cloister ; without influ- ence, without activity, they passed their days, little molested indeed themselves, but placed upon the superannuated list. The time dragged out slowly with them ; only after nearly two decades (1561) the last seven beneficiaries could no longer tolerate a life where on all sides another spirit was prevailing. They were portioned off, and sought out for themselves a fresh resting-place, to die in the faith of their fathers, which they could hand down to no children as heirs. The renegade was not indeed minded for all time to lower his arms to the man who had, it is true, been able to reduce him to silence, but in whom he could not fail to recognise the strongest barrier that arrested him in the execution of his selfish plans. As to the means, one need not be over- scrupulous. So in August, 1544, there appeared, at the instigation of Count John, an ambassador from the regent of the Netherlands at the court of the Countess, to demand the expulsion of Laski as a perjured man and troubler of the peace.* It was not difficult for the accused to prove his innocence. The Countess urgently besought him not to be discouraged by such charges, and only to remain with her ; she gave the crafty brother in-law to understand that she could not dispense with the counsel and co-operation of this man. " But I know," says Laski, " that these people will not cease from their machinations until they have succeeded in driving me hence.""}" * Compare Emmius, p. 926 ; and that which Laski writes to his friend Hardenberg with regard to it (Kuyper, ii. 581). t Kuyper, ii. 581. 17 258 JOHN A LA SCO. Yet not so quickly as these over-powerful oppo- nents thought were they to succeed in the expulsion of this warrior. He proved more and more a chosen vessel of the Lord for the weal of this land. He had yet many a skirmish to sustain, in order to keep the field for his building labours clear of adversaries. It is very interesting to witness his contest with another opponent, in those days a very formidable one. It would lead us too far if we should attempt to show that the Netherlands had for more than a century before this concealed within itself the elements of fermentation in deep and far-reaching operation men who in devout earnestness revolted against the degenerate Church and its corrupt ministry, with inner indignation beheld the abomination of desolation in the sanctuary, and now in manifold and often strangely perverted wise meditated on a remedy, or, aside from the Church, lived out unmolested their quiet, circumscribed life, a godly one after their way. They were still reckoned in the membership of the Church, and appeared of too little significance for directing to them an attentive eye, were it only that of pastoral care ; with light heart those who should have been their shepherds passed by the little, insignificant, disregarded flock. But this was changed from the time of the Reformation. The clear morning note of the Augustin monk had awakened all the spirits ; the long-closed valve was set open, and with shrill sound these forces, hitherto pent up, now burst forth. They are not to be at once designated as children of the Reformation ; and the faults committed by them in sanguinary and misguided fanaticism are not, any more than AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 259 the disturbances of the peasants breaking out on every side, to be laid to the charge of the Refor- mation. They were children of that disorderly and degenerate Church against which the Reformers raised their sacred protest, not seldom in decided insurrection against the Evangelical Church, then rising in youthful beauty, victorious in the light of the truth, above all the fermenting and conflict- ing elements. Most of these fermenting elements collected among the Anabaptists. It was not mainly the protest against the warrant for infant baptism which united on this point the different varieties, but rather the endeavour after a sacred communion, as an angry protest against the Church sunk in vices, which seemed to offer them in the baptism only of the regenerate a barrier against such worldliness. Seemed, but how little in reality afforded it ! And what abominations of a fanaticism let loose, which runs out and comes to an end in the slime of the deepest immorality, were perpetrated behind this supposed bulwark ! .The blood-red infamies of the neighbouring city of Miinster gleamed over evea into East Friesland. We have already pointed out that the free inhabitants of Friesland had transformed their little country into a home for all those driven out for their faith's sake in those evil, troublous days. Nor can this hospitality be too highly lauded. In dense crowds they came, those earnest, believing forms, who had forsaken house and home and native land for the sake of their Lord and Saviour ; and here sought and found a quiet spot in the asylum opened with liberal heart, where they might recover from the wounds inflicted, and live in stillness and gravity,. 260 JOHN A LA SCO. according to their faith. Amongst them, however, arrived others, restless, fanatical, and excited spirits, who as true enthusiasts hurried from land to land, here pining in dungeons, there again, unsubdued by all persecution, publishing their doctrine in con- venticles and houses, and introducing a dire con- fusion among the unjudging multitude. Upon their journeyings hither and thither they gladly made a halt in East Friesland, not in order to rest, but to avail themselves of the hospitality afforded, in order to make their hosts sharers J ( ,of their peculiar opinions, and that in a very manifest and im- perious manner, at a time when the affairs of the Protestant Church in the land were still so little established or settled. Ever more urgently did the regent of the Nether- lands insist upon the expulsion of those fugitives who belonged to her territory. She could not bridle her indignation when she saw, on the very confines of her land, the door opened for all those for whom she had intended to leave open only the gate of the prison and the passage to the stake. Imperial commands arrived in Emden, peremptorily demand- ing the expulsion of the sectaries. In case of refusal the threat was held out of putting a stop to all trade with East Friesland, a kind of Con- tinental blockade by water and land for the poor dreary little country. The threat did not fail of producing its effect, specially among the courtiers, who feared a curtailment of their luxuries. But it did not move our Laski, and his courageous faith imparted itself also to the Countess. He severely reprimanded the timid ones, reproaching them with being Epicureans, more readily alarmed at the edict AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 261 of an emperor than at the threatenings of God, who chastises a negligent government. " They are pre- pared, if God permits it, to banish sects, not for the sake of God, but for the sake of the Emperor."* Formerly there was need only of a timely mildness to restrain the people within bounds ; at that time, however, the authorities suffered anything whatever to take place ; and now they are ready to proceed with such severity as passionately to assail all strangers, without regard to guilt or innocence. Laski enabled the Countess to put a check upon this procedure, by requiring that, in the first place, a distinction should be drawn in the judgment be- tween dangerous and inoffensive sects and sectaries, and only the former should be expelled.. The ministers had to try the individuals ; he who was seen by them to be harmless and innocent was permitted still to enjoy the rights of hospitality undisturbed. A graceful victory of the profoundly Christian spirit of the Reformer, who feared God, and, therefore, no longer any man, even any emperor, over the intolerance of those men of the world who are prepared to bow before any kind of force. It was an immense and toilsome labour which was thus rolled upon the shoulders of Laski and; his colleagues. Our friend cherished the hope that, in a mild and conciliatory mood, an understanding might be arrived at with one or other of these factions. He had preserved a clear and open eye for discovering in the different sects some common property which was akin to the essential character- istic of the Evangelical Church. With the em- * Kuyper, ii. 574. 262 JOHN A LA SCO. phasising of this common possession, he thought he would be able by persuasion to bring those who were misled to the rejection of their sectarian doctrines ; the nobility of his mind, the purity of his character, might well serve as security for a favourable result. His sacred love to the Redeemer, his longing desire to avoid that division in the Evangelical Church, and to render this Church, in its compact unity, strong against the common foe ever more threatening, because led by one mind, inspired him with courage not to shrink from the magnitude of the labour. A man of like mind, Martin Sneer, had lately suc- ceeded in Strassburg, in a similar endeavour that of winning over the Anabaptist elements of that region, by means of kindness and conciliation, to the Evangelical Church ; why should not this also be possible to him in East Friesland ? Among the first attempts to pave the way for an understanding was that directed to the followers of David Joris, one of the strangest and most doubtful leaders of sects of that day, whose adherents were numerously scattered throughout the land. The writer who has succeeded in most clearly working out from the maze of contradictory accounts a fitting picture of this painter and prophet of Delft, fiercely gleaming in boundless self-delusion, sums up the peculiarity of this extraordinary and almost incomprehensible phenomenon in the words : " In the highest degree fired with enthusiasm, exalted above all outward distress in the night-life of the spirit a life subject to the dominion of an overstrained imagination and withal held in bondage at the same time by voluptuous passion ; thus, with the most remarkable mingling of the sublimest and the AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 263 basest thoughts, Joris begins to form his sect, in ever firmer conviction of his Divine mission. Nothing is too high, too remote, too difficult for him, in venturing the attempt to obtain recognition for his prophetic dignity. Fanatical disciples, blindly devoted to him, augment his self-confidence ; and thus he ventures not only to measure himself with different parties of the Anabaptists, but also with the leaders of the Reformation, and even with the leading secular powers of his time. It is in vain that he is visited on every side with repulse, mockery, persecution ; he arises ever more ardent, ever more fanatical, as a reformer of the world ; and ever more blindly do his partisans follow him upon the slippery path, themselves, like him, now drunk with the highest enthusiasm, now enslaved with degraded sensual lust. No toil, no danger, no persecution is shunned by the prophet, nor is it shunned by the disciples ; yet the foolhardy courting of danger does not long hold out in the case of such spirituo-physical enthusiasm, but speedily gives place to the opposite ; when the pinching poverty of the beginning has been replaced by sudden wealth, he who in any case had placed himself in the closest relation to the Christ of David disappears without a trace from the scene of the conflict."* All attempts to bring about a union between the * Nippold, Zeitschr. fur hist. Theol. (Gotha, 1863), p. 163. Toris passed the last years of his life in utter obscurity at Basle, where he went under a feigned name (Johann van Brugge). He assumed the character of an honest citizen, and even put on the hypocritical guise of a devout member of the Reformed Church. The sentence was carried out only upon his lifeless body which, with a more perfect acquaintance, would haply in the days of Servetus have been executed upon the living man himself. 264 JOHN A LA SCO. closer adherents of Joris and the Evangelical Church proved a manifest failure ; nor was a quiet toleration of their doings in the land found to be possible. A regulation issued by the Countess in 1545 ordains that, inasmuch as the Davites (the followers of David Joris) are not to be trusted in their doctrine, it is needless to examine them before the superin- tendent. They are accordingly banished the land, and their return is forbidden under pain of death. Another and more friendly form would the bearing towards the numerous Mennonites assume. As early as 1528 Anabaptists had entered the land, and had met with hospitable reception. At first they were but little noticed. They lived on in quiet, avoided all contact with the world, and were for the most part glad to rest for a while, after the persecu- tion they had undergone in their native land. This state of matters was changed when in 1531 Melchior HofmanncATO&tQ Emden, a rude,excitable, fanatical nature, who had been travelling about for the previous eight years in the character of journeyman furrier, and withal preacher. In the course of his restless wanderings he had come as far as Dorpat ; the little knot of adherents quickly gained there was dissolved again soon after his removal ; no trace of his activity has remained at this distant outpost of the Evangelical Church. Presently Hofmann stood at the head of the Anabaptists in East Friesland ; his messengers traversed the little land through and through, and spread his doctrine in the remotest villages. Soon after his departure to Strassburg his place was taken by Jan Matthiesen, who ere long played a notorious part in Miinster, as the prophet Enoch. The tragedy gleamed from there, AT THE GOAL IJV EAST FRIESLAND. 265 like a bloody Aurora Borealis, even to East Friesland. Then it was a happiness for the Frisian Anabaptists that at their head arose Menno, the son of Symon, himself a Frieslander, and, like his countrymen, vigorous, sensible, freedom-loving. Of an earnest, sober nature, he was an opponent of enthusiasm, of fanaticism ; with great wisdom, he led the excited mind of his companions to the central point of their communion, the entire separation of the pure, believing congregation from the world the un- believers and the Protestant and Romish Churches, with their admixture of unbelief and immorality. The baptism of the regenerate was the mode of incorporating into this believing Church ; the strictest discipline sought to preserve the purity of the spiritual community. We have not here to show that which was false and erroneous in this separation, that of an antichristian nature which reflects itself in this life apart ; the fact must be emphasised, that this community adopted also elements that were sound and true, to which it owes its existence unto the present day. This Mennonite congregation was in the days of Laski in a flourishing state. Almost simultaneously with himself Menno had come to Emden. The community numbered in its midst honest, quiet, rigidly moral citizens. To carry out against them the whole severity of the imperial commands, and thus to deprive the land of these its industrious, honest, quiet people, was that to which Laski would never have consented. He occupied towards them the enviable standpoint which Luther held in the brilliant days of his labour, when he quitted the Wartburg and hastened to Wittenberg, to quench 266 JOHN A LA SCO. there the threatening conflagration. " By the Word heaven and earth was created ; the same Word must also avail here ; by the Word the world has been overcome. Therefore I will preach, speak, write it ; but no one will I compel, or constrain by force." And Laski did not grow weary of dealing with the Mennonites in this truly evangelical spirit. With the consent of the Countess and the approval of his colleagues, he held a prolonged discussion with Menno in the presence of many. The con- troversy proved fruitless ; there were in particular three points on which no unity could be arrived at : on the Incarnation of Christ, on Baptism, and on the warrant for undertaking the Ministry of the Word in the congregation. Both sides, as usually happens, claimed the victory. Specially among the Mennonites was the joy of victory loudly expressed, and there seems to have been no lack of really malicious judgments regarding the Evangelical Church and its ministers. Menno further, during the same year, issued a letter to Laski, in which he treated at large of the first controverted point in their dis- cussion. Laski, who till then had kept silence, thought himself called upon to meet this challenge, the more so since Menno had here too inveighed abundantly against him, against his companions in office, and the whole Evangelical Church, and his adherents had loudly boasted of the silence preserved hitherto, as an acknowledgment of defeat. In spite of the insulting tone of the opponent, Laski preserves his gentle refined repose. " I shall judge that I have rightly answered, not when I have returned invective for invective, or have exposed thee and thine, but if I have, in proportion to my little power, AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 267 in any way advanced the glory of my Lord Jesus, and have taken a step forward towards the settle- ment of a disputed point in a doctrine by which the Church of Christ is rent asunder, and for which surely we ought to have much greater consideration than for ourselves."* The controverted point played an important part in the doctrine of the Anabaptists. The Miinster Anabaptists had caused a medal to be struck with the legend, Verbum caro factnm habitavit in nobis : " The Word became flesh and dwelt in us." The second member of the proposition was interpreted by not a few of them in a pantheistic sense ; the first member served them as the main support for their much-involving peculiar doctrine : that the Son of God did not take upon Himself human form, but that the Word of God became man. Hofmann had already strongly emphasised the heavenly de- scent of the flesh of Christ ; Mcnno took up this doctrine again, and sought to support it in particular on the side of the doctrine of sin. Christ cannot have taken upon Himself our guilty, curse-laden, sinful nature, and made it His own ; otherwise He would not have been able to redeem us. He must have a pure, Divine humanity, not the corrupt Adamic nature, that He might be the second Adam.t Laski in his reply J sums up the opposi- * Kuyper, i. 7. t Dorner, Gesch. der Prof. Theologie, ii. 637. Compare also Erbkam, Gesch. der Prot. Sekten (Hamburg, 1848), p. 571. $ Compare Kuyper, i. i 62. In Calvin, xii. 50, the statement is found, that on the advice of Hardenberg, the Archbishop of Cologne, who generally resided at his hunting seat near Bonn, undertook to have the letter printed. Hence Bonn is the place of printing. 268 JOHN A LA SCO. tion in the two forms of doctrine in the words : " This is, however, our point of difference. We, who ascribe to the Lord Jesus Christ true Godhead, and also at the same time true humanity we say, ' That adorable Word, who as to His essence is from eternity to eternity God and also spirit, is still also that which He was ; but now He has in such wise for us united with the Lord Christ, after taking upon Him our flesh and blood, that He is in truth that which His name denotes, Immanuel, God with us.' But thou teachest, the Word, which was once spirit, has, by some kind of mutation, become flesh, not, however, our flesh, but a flesh received and derived from the Holy Ghost." * We are too widely removed in the present day from the point of controversy to be able tolexperi- ence any pleasure in reproducing the whole diffuse analysis in detail. Laski kept the promise he had made in the introduction. As soon as the main proposition of the controverted point was laid down, he attempted, in that earnest dignified manner which is concerned only about the subject itself, to prove the justice of his exposition, as opposed to the adverse opinion. His only weapon he derives from Holy Scripture. He does not arbitrarily separate one or other passage from the connection in order to avail himself of it for the support of his opinion otherwise reached, merely because it seems adapted to this end. With a large acquaintance with Holy Writ, he proves his view as only drawn from Holy Scripture, from Scripture in its fulness. His exposi- tion is calm, intelligent, even as with the great * Kuyper, i. 10. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 269 expositor Calvin in a spirit of edification, from which one discovers the sacred, devout earnestness with which his spirit has been absorbed in the con- templation of the Word of God. Far from all unc- tuous discourse, with which more than a century after so many an otherwise sound exposition of Scripture is amalgamated, not exactly to its advan- tage, a language here prevails which is entirely laid hold of by the august majesty of the Word of God, and which testifies seriously, manfully, power- fully, of the truth recognised. It is a refreshment for every genuine and sound mind, a spiritual tonic, such as is afforded us by Calvin and the other Reformers and Church Fathers of the first rank in ever-abiding freshness. The writing met with great approbation among the theologians of that day.* Melanchthon spoke of it in a letter to the Duke Albert of Prussia as a praiseworthy treatise ; f nay, he commended it to Luther himself for reading. This he would venture to do at that time (it was in the summer of 1545) only if he were quite sure of not creating a fresh scandal for the old master by the writing thus com- mended. For the sacramental controversy had but lately, enkindled anew by Luther, broken out afresh with unexpected energy ; and Melanchthon and his friends had long dreaded lest the vial of the terrible man's wrath should be poured out upon their heads also. What unspeakable misery would such open difference have entailed upon the Evan- gelical Church ! Luther seems not to have read the Compare Bertram, His form Critica Joh. a Lasco (Aurich, 1733), p. 163. f Melanchthon, v. 791. 2 ;o JOHN A LA SCO. work ; not even in his letters is any verdict pro- nounced upon it ; and yet one and another proposi- tion might well appear open to question. A Lasco touches once or twice on that border region at which the peril of a divergence between the two manly forms in Christ would threaten ; Lutlter kept a sharp watch there, and thought he could never too earnestly warn off from the narrow frontier territory. Originally A Lasco cherished the intention of treating the other two polemic writings of Menno with like fulness of detail. Under the pressure of other labours, which beset him on every side, he did not find the time necessary for this work, as also the wish was gradually lost. It was needless, because the opponent was lacking in the requisite preparation and thorough training for the scientific examination of such serious and profound questions ; his opinions and assertions were wanting in the necessary confirmation from Holy Scripture ; nor was he conscious of the presence of this defect. Against such incapacity even the most honest zeal for teaching is powerless. Menno did not remain much longer in Emden after this interchange of correspondence. He was the acknowledged head of that sect which came forth chastened and purified out of the bloody persecutions, whose members were henceforth called by his name, and owe it mainly to his pious activity that they have been preserved through the days so unkindly to them, and brought into a time of greater tolerance. As a son of this more tolerant age, our Laski already granted them generous protection so early as the days of the Reformation. Only a few cross-grained, brawling members were banished AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 271 the land ; the bulk of them were bravely and firmly defended, even against the Emperor. Unmolested in the enjoyment of their faith, these Mennonites, specially in Emden, have lived to the present hour, quiet, peaceful folk, who preserve themselves as far as possible from contact with the wicked world, themselves no longer walking so strictly in the foot- steps of their forefathers, and no longer so rigidly enforcing that Church discipline to which one day. y almost in spite of himself, had to submit. 3. THE WORK WITH THE TROWEL IN THE HAND We turn now to the other important part of the Reformational labours of A Lasco, that which he did for the upbuilding of the work entrusted to him in this his second home. This part does not rise entirely clear of the other, in such wise that he would have only to build undisturbed upon the foundation laid in the Reformation : here too it was needful for him in manly resolution to open a path for himself, and with firm hand to tighten the overlax rein. Serious times for the Church of East Friesland had just preceded ; the unsatisfactory feeling of having not yet attained to the decided entrance on a distinct and fixed direction, after making nothing but endeavours on every side, had attained its culminat- ing point ; everywhere were seen the marks and traces of fatal irresolution, of dispersion of ecclesias- tical affairs ; discipline and order were wanting ; the individuals acted as seemed good to them ; the congregations were involved in the mutation of opinions successively arising. The brave old Count Edzard had been attached to the Reformation with 272 JOHN A LA SCO. all his heart ; the wonderful writings of Luther in his early days, and his bold standing forth in the strength of his faith, had appealed to Edzard's true Frisian nature. He who first in burning eloquence obtained from the pulpit an entrance for the Reformation, Aportanus, inclined in his theological views prepon- derantly to the side of the Upper Rhenish cities and Switzerland ; his most weighty personality firmly impressed this its stamp upon the land of his birth ; the Frieslanders felt themselves sufficiently strong and free to resist the overpowering influence of the German Reformer, and the earliest Confession of the land shows how greatly they had succeeded therein as regards the decisive main points. But after this there came ministers who had received their training at Wittenberg and had sat at the feet of Luther and Melancktkon, and who sought to carry out at home that which they had learnt. Count Enno indeed readily confiscated the possessions of the rich monas- teries ; but he lacked the strong, earnest power of personal conviction. He preferred letting things drift as they would ; and so various currents made a way for themselves. One of these was of a kind which called for the closest adhesion to Luther. It coincided in point of time with the influence which Duke Charles of Gueldres acquired on the destiny of the land by his victory over Enno in I 534 Among the harsh conditions imposed by the victor was that of the restoration of the ancient Church in East Friesland ; only in the meantime the Catholic duke made the concession of resting content for the space of a year with the introduction of the Augsburg Confession and the Saxon Church order.* In con- * Cornelius, as before, p. 42. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 273 sequence of this stern decree, the Sacramentarian preachers were to quit the land ; and the strictly Lutheran Duke of Luneburg, the brother-in-law of the Romish Duke of Gueldres, was to introduce Lutheranism into East Friesland. That which the Luneburgers attempted to bring about with brusque zeal seemed to the Frisians like a gift of the Greeks ; the stranger-preachers, who were under the protection of the harsh Catholic victor, encountered a tough and prolonged resistance. The Duke died in 1538 ; and simultaneously with his death the influence of the Luneburgers came to an end. Their Church order, which had never struck root, fell to the ground ; but now the confusion became greater, and the proud sense of freedom degenerated into lawlessness. It was high time, if the much-tried little country was not to be utterly undone, that the disorder were checked, and a powerful hand laid upon the spokes of the downward-rolling wheel. A Lasco, too, was a stranger, like those unwelcome Luneburg preachers, not, however, a stranger under the protection of a harsh Romish victor, but an exile from his native land, poor, defenceless, standing only in the armour of his Lord, for whom he had joyfully sacrificed his all. The Frisians had taken a liking to the outspoken foreigner who boldly raised his voice for the rights of the people, even against the mightiest despot who should dare to invade these rights. The radically disordered state of affairs was but too clearly apparent ; the necessity for a remedy pressed upon every one who had the welfare of the land at heart. A longing desire was felt for effect- ing an improvement ; and the firm confidence was cherished alike by the Countess as by her people 18 274 JOHN A LA SCO. that the devout Polish noble, who had been living for the past year or two a quiet serious life in the land, was the man qualified for the task. This was no delusion. A Lasco had recognised what was needful for the Church of the land, and, with marvellous tact, he gave to it its permanent stamp ; so that he is rightly designated the Reformer of East Friesland. The existing troubles in ecclesiastical affairs com- pelled him first of all to seek the lever for his Reformational activity in the province of Church discipline. The disorders arising from a long absence of all discipline were terrible. The railing and scolding of the preachers in the pulpit ; their lives, not at all free from reproach, and sometimes even a scandal ; the widespread indifference among the congregations with regard to the schools, the care for the poor, etc., had alienated from the Church many earnest minds. They lived for a while a quiet life apart, addicting themselves only to the study of the Word of God in their houses, afterwards in due time a sure and easy prey to the Anabaptists, who observed so severe a Church discipline among themselves. A Lasco had a clear eye to recognise the disease. " I told the Council we should never want for sectaries so long as we were severe towards others and lenient towards the vices in our own midst. So long as they prevailed among us, we should have to make a distinction between those who submit to the Church's regulations and those who despise the Church of God and its discipline." * There arose a great outcry over such a demand ; * Kuyper, ii. 574. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 275 the freedom was thought to be assailed, where, after all, only limits were being imposed upon lawlessness, in order to afford protection to real freedom. At last, however, A Lasco carried his point, espe- cially in the capital of the land. He found old customs still existing, such as made for the accom- plishment of his endeavour, and which he knew how to turn prudently to account. Even from the days of the Middle Ages the Frieslanders had contrived to retain a much greater share in the ecclesiastical affairs, than the Romish Church had yet been willing to concede elsewhere, among more docile peoples. The congregations had been wont from of old to elect their own preachers, whom they had been able, longer than anywhere else, to protect against the demands of celibacy. So-called churchwardens had part in the exercise of Church discipline ; at synods there were to be found laymen who possessed a vote.* The consciousness of a right, nay of an obligation, to an active participation in ecclesiastical affairs, had been preserved in lively exercise. Even the Luneburg Church regulation had been compelled to respect these firmly established conditions. Taking his ground upon this old traditional practice, A Lasco got it enjoined in the summer of 1544, that with the ministers of the principal church at Emden should be associated four men out of the congregation, earnest, worthy, pious people, the task being assigned to them by the whole congregation (ccclesid) of exercising an oversight in common with the preachers over the life of the citizens, to exhort every one to his duty, and with authority also, in the * Reformierte Kirchenzeitung (Erlangen, 1870), p. 346. 276 JOHN A LA SCO. name of the whole Church, to exclude those from the community who should disregard such exhortation.* The existing distress had suggested this arrange- ment to A Lasco ; it was, however, for him essentially a result of his study of the Word of God, equally as with Calvin. He was firmly convinced that with- out Church discipline there could be no true congre- gation of Christ."}" Therefore he made his stay in Emden dependent on the continuance of this blessing- fraught arrangement. " If our people are content with the Church discipline in accordance with the Word of God, I remain their preacher ; but if not, then they will probably expel me. For wittingly and willingly I will spare no one, and therefore certainly expect that they will not long tolerate me. But I leave everything to the Lord, and pray Him only for this one thing : that He will make my office subserve the glory of His holy name and the edification of His Church." J Vigorously, and without being detained by the manifold difficulties and hindrances, was progress made upon the path struck out. Laski and his colleagues made tours of visitation throughout the land. Minute investigation was made on these journeys into the capabilities and conditions of the single Churches, their position as regards the doctrine, the life, the zeal of the ministry. When an exact insight had thus been gained into the often very sad state of affairs, Laski there also at once applied with vigour a reforming hand. The whole drift of * Kuyper, ii. 575. t So Lechler rightly brings out : Gesch. der Presbyter, u Synodal-verfassung (Leyden, 1854), P- 57- i Kuyper, ii. 575. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 277 his endeavour was towards the removal of all grounds of contention and the embracing of all the Churches of the land, with their ministers, within the bonds of a blessing-fraught concord, here too with all the sacred earnestness of a Reformer, who designates Church discipline the vital nerve of Church life, and regards the Church in its essence as the free and brotherly association of the children of God, designed to lead the whole human race to holiness. For this reason he directed his aim to the ordering of the life of the ministers within legal restraints ; guarding against scandals among them, deposing the unworthy from their office, and advancing sound doctrine in their midst. * In order to the attainment of this end, he organised, with the approval of the Countess and the supreme Senate, the Preachers' Assembly, the so-called CoetJis, without doubt the most important and far-reaching institution of Laski, and one which bears brilliant testimony to his Reformational endow- ment. It well repays us to obtain a near insight into this peculiar " synod." From Easter to Michaelmas the ministers of the land had to meet in Emden every Monday morning. The assembly elected out of its midst a president and a clerk for the whole summer-time. The sitting was opened with a prayer, offered by the president. Its language is still preserved to us,"!" nor is it difficult to re- cognise Laski' s voice in the pithy and hearty- pastoral utterances, specially when we compare this prayer with the numerous ones of his Liturgy, here- * Emmius, p. 927. t Meiners, i. 284. Would that such prayers might be full often heard at our convocations of the preachers ! 278 JOHN A LA SCO. after to be spoken of. Under the hallowed influence of such a prayer, the assembly then enters on the testing of the morals of the individual ministers. That which had become known concerning the life and walk of particular members was with fraternal unreserve discussed and thoroughly investigated. If the charges proved to be well-founded, earnest brotherly admonition followed. No one was exempt from this censura morum ; each one was under obligation to bring forward that which had come to his hearing of an unfavourable nature ; and the right was given to the members of the congregation of having such complaints as they .might have to make brought before the Coetus. After this im- portant point was disposed of, the assembly pro- ceeded to the testing of the candidates for the ministry. No one was admitted to the office of preacher who could not adduce satisfactory testi- monies to his godly and upright life. The candidate who was approved must thereupon deliver a brief discourse before the Coetus, that his preaching gift might be judged of therefrom. It then depended on the verdict of the assembly whether the candi- date could be furnished with a testimony to his maturity or not. After coming to an end with these practical matters, there followed discussions on the principal points of Christian doctrine, especially on the con- troversial questions of the day. The Coetus laid down the subjects for treatment ; two preachers were appointed as opener and respondent, and their theses made known eight days before, that every one might have an opportunity of preparing for the thorough treatment of the subject. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 279 Unfortunately the minutes belonging to the first century of its existence are lost,* an event much to be deplored. For how great would the advantage have been if we had been able to follow the early course of an institution which has preserved itself through the ages, and whence, specially in its first days, so rich a blessing proceeded to the Church of the land ! The French preacher in Emden, Pastor Fremauty even in the seventeenth century testified of this Coetus, " This assembly serves for the preservation of concord and peace amongst the ministers and congregations. It is a good school for young preachers who have a desire for their further training ; I confess I have learnt more there than at the University." "j" A glance at these first minutes, however, would have also afforded us a striking picture of Laski presiding in the circle of his colleagues. For our friend was, as is boasted of him by East Friesland's leading historian, J of a candid spirit, and was wont to set forth his views, specially on Divine things, in clear and frank dis- course. From the minutes still existing in his time Emmius has formed a judgment as to how A Lasco in these assemblies used to summon all to concord. In weighty, expressive words he declared his opinion, and confirmed its truth with valid arguments ; those who doubted or differed were calmly listened to, instructed, as also borne with when he was unable to convince them, if they only maintained peace ; and the others were taught that * The earliest existing- minute-book begins with the entry of Monday, the i8th April, 1642. t Meiners, i. 283. \ Emmius, p. 927. 2 8o JOHN A LA SCO. we must so act, in order not to break up the harmony or imperil the unity on account of a mere difference of opinion. In this way our Reformer attained, in these model synods of the preachers, the so essential supplementing though one generally overlooked of all Church discipline which is to be truly blessed ; the congregation saw those who, with the Church elders, were called to watch over the life and walk of the Church-members, themselves constantly subjected to earnest Church discipline. Though not as a compensation for the lost early minutes, yet at least as a subdued echo of the theological arguments in the Coetus, may we perhaps regard the treatise of Laski on the doctrine of the Churches of East Friesland.* At any rate, this im- portant work affords us an interesting aid for deter- mining the theological standpoint of our A Lasco in those days, for which he was likewise at pains to obtain recognition in the Church entrusted to his guidance. " The only fountain-head of Christian doctrine is God, and that which He has made known in clear words in Holy Scripture. Human opinion has validity only in so far as it subordinates itself to the analogy of faith and to the Word of God. There are two main points around which the whole of Christian doctrine revolves : the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. God can be rightly known only from the Word of God, which is Christ. He teaches us to know God as our Lord, as righteous and true and merciful. To the know- * In Kuyper, i. 481, for the first time appearing in print, under the title Efiitome doctrince ecclesiarum Phrisice orien- talis. Autore Joanne a Lasco, 1544. Compare thereon the account by the fortunate discoverer of his painstaking re- searches (ix. xii.), as also his introductory notices (xlvii. liii.). AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRIESLAND. 281 ledge of God is attached the knowledge of ourselves ; the former affords the mirror for the latter. God created man after His own image, and withal good, though, in contradistinction from Himself, with the possibility of falling. In Adam we all sinned ; from that time we are infected with original and actual sin. We have become subject to everlasting death, if we have no physician to deliver our life from the fearful and otherwise inevitable destruction. God has redeemed us in His Son, not for our own sakes, and still less on account of our merits, but only for His holy name's sake. All promises have Christ in view, and make for Him. He alone is way and truth and life, the only Mediator between God and men ; without Him no one reaches the Father. Faith is an affection of our spirit, wrought in us by the Holy Ghost through the instrumentality of the preaching of God's Word, in virtue of which we believe God, love Him, steadfastly purpose henceforth continually to cleave to Him, although, by reason of our weakness, we sin ever afresh. In order to afford provision against this our weakness, God gives us means by which we strengthen and renew our faith. As such means are to be regarded the preaching of the Word and the visible tokens of His grace, whereby He seals in our hearts that which He has promised us by the testimony of His Word : two sacraments under the new cove- nant Baptism and the Supper, corresponding to circumcision and the paschal meal under the old covenant." Laski then treats with great fulness on the subject of infant baptism, and repels the attacks of the opponents, which were so strongly and decidedly expressed in Emden. 282 JOHN A LA SCO. More briefly does he discourse of the Supper on this occasion, perhaps because Laski felt called about this time to express himself more at large on this subject in an open letter to a friend.* The letter is a valuable document for evidencing his view on this much-controverted article of doctrine, and still more a precious testimony to the liberal spirit of our friend. LutJier expressed himself on the occasion of the Cologne Reformation Scheme (in which, as we shall see, Laski was not without par- ticipation), and with reference to the conclusions concerning the Supper reached, in this document : " The book is for the enthusiasts not only tolerable, but also consolatory, much more favourable to their doctrine than to ours."f This severe judg- ment was shortly after (September, I 544) followed up by the much-to-be-deplored writing of the Reformer, Brief Confession of Dr. Martin Luther concerning the Holy Sacrament^ in which he suffers himself to be carried away into the expression, " For I, who am now going to the grave, will carry with me this testimony and this glory before my Lord's judgment seat, that I have with all earnestness condemned and avoided the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament, Karlstadt, Zwingel, Oecolampa- dius, Stenkefeld (Schwenkfeld), and their disciples at Zurich, and wherever else they are, according to His command (Tit. iii. 10)." Of such unchristian * Kuyper was fortunate enough to come upon the track of this letter, which was thought to be lost (cf. Kuyper, i. 557) ; it bears the title, " Epistola ad amicum quendam doctum scripta, dura aegrotarem, de verbis coenae Domini, ut vocant, qui nostram de Coena doctrinam ex patrum et conciliorum autoritate impugnare, amice tamen, conabatur." t Luther, Ivi. 121. \ Ibid., xxxii. 396. AT THE GOAL IN EAST FRTESLAND. 283 rancour as was shown by the great Reformer, which spread like a fatal shadow over his immediate dis- ciples, and rendered the greatest service to the reviving cause of the Romish Church, there is not the faintest echo in Laski's writing ; of the newly kindled flame of controversy no sound penetrates into the quiet of the writer ; no reproach, no accusa- tion ; everywhere the fine sacred calm, the edification, which is wrought by dwelling in the sanctuary of the mysteries of God. He writes to his friend that there is no more heartfelt, sincere, abiding love than that which arises within us from the contemplation of the Divine gifts. It is the duty of every Chris- tian to employ all his gifts to the glory of the Giver. But the task is not a light one, according to the old saying, " The beautiful is difficult " (^a\7ra ra KaXa). The recognition of Divine things depends not upon the acuteness of our intellect, upon the skill 1 of our judgment, upon the unwearied- ness of our labour ; all these things have their value and their place, for they are indeed God's gifts ; but they occupy only a subordinate position compared with the devout spirit, the ^eocre/Seta (fear of God], as the Greeks say. . . . Firmly must we preserve in memory the doctrine of the Lord, who only acknowledges that Church as His which listens to His word. Such must be the mind of all those who will be at home in the sanctuary of the Word. For to One alone does that Divine voice refer which says, " Him shall ye hear," namely Christ ; outside of Him and beside Him there is no place for the word of the Pythagoreans, AiVros e we ought rather to say, have renewed and preserved it. i. FIRST RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. Three days after the arrival of the imperial messenger in Emden, at the end of August, 1548, A Lasco, with the consent of the Countess, quitted East Friesland. The journey was a perilous one ; everywhere the imperial bailiffs were on the watch to seize the prominent leaders of the Protestants ; and A Lasco in particular would have been a welcome booty to them. He had, moreover, to pursue his route through hostile territory. While the Emperor had already begun to hold his court IN ENGLAND 365 in Brussels, our Pole, in disguise and under an assumed name, rode through Holland, Brabant, Flanders. No one recognised him ; without molesta- tion he was suffered to reach the sea at Calais,* then still in the possession of the English. Here one could always depend on finding a ship bound for the coast of England. In the beginning of September our friend arrived safely in London. Laski found already present on his arrival a capti- vating circle of kindred minds from the Continent, a circle enlarging from week to week, all animated with the earnest wish of assisting with counsel and action the Archbishop and the like-minded men of England in their great work of reformation. In Oxford Peter Martyr had already been labouring almost a year with marked success, and simultane- ously with him OcJdno had arrived (2Oth December, 1547) ; he had been made Prebendary of Canter- bury, and found work among his numerous country- men, fugitives from Italy, f Later on we find Bucer and his congenial fellow- labourer Paul Fagius the guests of Cranmer. Pending the commencement of their university lectures at Cambridge, they were zealously occupied in rendering the sacred Scriptures out of the original text into the Latin language.]: Franzisco * On the fall of Calais, 5th January, 1558, compare, among others, the letter of Sir Anthony Cooke (from Strassburg) to Peter Martyr (Original Letters, i., p. 139). TR. t On the j;th July and 23rd and 3ist December, 1548, Ochino wrote, on behalf of the Archbishop, to urge upon Wolfgang Musculus the duty of coming to England. Musculus wrote back from Berne declining the invitation, "unless there should not be an opportunity of serving Christ in Germany " (Original Letters, p. 337). He remained at Berne until his death in 1563, without being able to return to Augsburg. TR. f Compare Cranmer, p. 423 (ii., p. 149, of the Ecclesiastical 366 JOHN A LA SCO. de Enzinas (Dryander) had likewise come to England, on the warm recommendation of Melanch- thon, and soon afterwards the old intimacy of the Louvain days was renewed with A Lasco* The Protestant Spaniard had been compelled to lead a restless life during a period of ten years ; he had already contemplated retiring into Turkey, to find somewhere in that land greater tolerance than in the wide domains of imperial Spain, f Shortly before his departure for England he had espoused Margaret Elter in Basle a choice on which Laski heartily congratulates him.* We also meet in London with two other forms from the Continent, whose lives become henceforth intimately bound up with Laskts fate. First of all John Utenhove^ a History Society's edition, Oxford, 1848): " Fagius entered upon the evangelical prophet Esaias, and Bucer upon the Gospel of the Evangelist John." They were " to give a clear, plain, and succinct interpretation of the Scripture, according to the propriety of the language," and " illustrate difficult and obscure places, and reconcile those that seemed repugnant to one another." Strype relates this on the authority of the Historia Vera de Vita, etc., D. Martini Bticeri ct Pa nil Fagii, published at Strassburg in 1562. A similar work was that of Peter Martyr, as we see, e.g., from his lectures on the Book of Judges, of which the dedication bears date Zurich, 22nd December, 1560. TR. * Kuyper, ii. 619. j- Bohmer, i. 151. J On 25th April, 1549, Bucer and Fagius found at Lambeth Palace Dryander and Imman. Tremellius (who succeeded Fagius at Cambridge), as also Peter Martyr, his wife, and Julius Terentius, with several French Protestants {Original Letters, p. 535). Dryander was settled at Cambridge March, 1549 (Original Letters, p. 348), but towards the end of the year in disappointment left England for Basle (p. 463), where he was rejoined by his wife during the last days of May, 1550 (Ibid., p. 562). It was already the beginning of the end with Enzinas. TR. Utenhove came over to London or Canterbury in the summer of this year, 1548 (Pijper, Jan Utenhove, p. 28). IN ENGLAND. 367 name with which we are already familiar, scion of an ancient and honourable family in Ghent, a half-brother of that Charles whom A Lasco had learnt to know and love in the house of Erasmus, and with whom he had made the journey to Upper Italy.* John had been early won over to the cause of the Gospel ; with this change his native land had been closed against him (from the year 1544).! Engaged as he is upon a multiplicity of journeys, his scarce discernible form is descried now in Switzerland, now among the Strassburgers ; from the present moment, however, we see him as a most faithful companion in the suite of Laski. And then, on the warm recommendation of the citizen of Ghent, a call to England was given to Valcrand Poullain > a nobleman of Lille, who had become attached to the cause of the Reformation and taken up the study of theology. Ochino had been active as a pastor among his countrymen in London, and so now was Poullain among those French who had quitted their native land in order to live agreeably to their faith in the asylum readily opened to them on the banks of the Thames. On the side of the two wives, Enzinas and Poullain were nearly connected.^ These are only the more prominent names in that evangelical brotherhood whom the English arch- bishop had called around him a goodly assemblage gathered out of almost all lands : from Germany, Poland, Spain, France, Belgium, and Switzerland ; possessing in the mother-tongue of the learned a convenient medium for the interchange of thought, * Compare p. 136. + Calendar. Domestic., State Papers (London, 1861), p. 144. \ Bohmer, Bibliotheca Wiffeniana, i., p. 151. 368 JOHN A LA SCO. but in the Gospel the fair home-land in virtue of which they recognised each other as brothers and of one family in the faith. They had almost all left their country on account of their confession ; many of them were fugitives from the powerful wrath of the Romish emperor, here, however, in the sanctuary accorded them, ready to do their best in order to impart to their youngest evangelical sister the meet blessing for the baptism of fire. This baptism was very soon to approach, after hardly more than a lustrum : but their blessing has remained, and to the present hour the characteristic mark of those men from abroad is still recognisable upon the Evangelical Church of England, inasmuch as it is her sacred delight to preach the Gospel to all the world. When A Lasco arrived in England, Cranmer was for the moment absent from London. A Lasco awaited him at his palace, during the first days still a little uncertain what he had to expect from the Archbishop with regard to the ordering of the Church. " But it is in itself a great thing at this time to be assured of an asylum where we can live ourselves, together with those whom the bond of the same Spirit unites with us in the Lord, in the confession of our faith."* One traces in these earnest lines from England the lively satisfaction of now standing in safety upon a coast on which the high-running surge of the Interim does not beat. After a few days the Primate of England reached home, and hospitably received the nephew of the former Primate of Poland in his residence at * Kuyper, ii. 620. IN ENGLAND. 369 Lambeth. A Lasco remained his guest during a stay of nearly eight months in England, and an intimate friendship soon sprang up between the two men. Looking back at the time of their fellowship, Cranmer afterwards testifies to MelancJitJion that during all these months he had lived upon the most familiar and loving terms with this most excellent man John a Lasco* These two distinguished persons possessed many intellectual points of contact. Once they had been brought, in virtue of these qualities, into intimate association, it could not be otherwise than that Laski should exert an influence upon the Archbishop. Cranmer was indeed the senior by ten years (born 1489) ; his position, too, in the State and in the Church far eclipsed the more modest one of the Reformer of East Friesland. But A Lasco was the man of stronger and more inflexible character ; he stood more firmly rooted in his evangelical conviction, which he had pre- served pure, and sealed at the heavy cost of banish- ment from his fatherland ; by merely human con- siderations he never suffered himself to be influenced, free as he was in his Lord alone ; a man of immovable courage, he lived out his conviction without the fear of men, careless in his firm reliance upon his God, and animated by an ard.ent impulse to seek, as in a sacred service of the Lord, to give effect to this conviction. Henry VIII. would not long have hesitated about impressing the seal of martyrdom upon such a person. Moreover, the East Frisian Reformer had, though, it is true, * Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings of (Parker Society, 1846), p. 425 : " Johannes a Lasco, vir optimus, mecum hosce aliquod menses conjunctissime et amantissime vixit." 24 370 JOHN A LA SCO. within a narrower compass, approved himself in a wof'k and gained abundant experience in its execution of a nature such as that which Cranmer would just then undertake for England. In this work the Archbishop sought coadjutors. Proofs are at hand that the support given by Laski to the Primate was widely felt, within even a few months of his coming. A letter from England by a Swiss, Johann von Eschen (Ab Ulmis, afterwards minister at Zurich), bearing date of i8th August, 1548, relates that the Archbishop has become sluggish, and the Protestants are greatly disappointed in their expectations. As an evidence he adduces the translation of a Catechism, which has appeared under Cranmer's name, wherein very perilous con- cessions to the Romish Church are to be met with.* Somewhat over four months afterwards the same * The title of this Catechism is, A Short Instruction into the Christian Religion, for the Syngular Commoditie and Profite of Children and Young People. The so called Bran- denburg-Nuremberg- Catechism, which Justus Jonas translated into Latin in 1529, forms the basis of this work of Cranmer's. In his reply to Gardiner (September, 1551), he was compelled to explain that when he said, " We receive the body and blood of Christ," in the administration of the Supper, the word " spiritually" is to be understood. See Cranmer's Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation, p. 227 and elsewhere. Compare Hardwick, Reformation, 4th edition, p. 207 seq.; Strype's Cranmer (Oxford, 1 848), ii. p. 47, note m. (The matter is fully discussed in the original work of Dalton.) The hasty and magisterial judgment of Ab Ulmis reads, " I would have you know for certain, that this Thomas has fallen into so heavy a slumber, that we entertain but a very cold hope that he will be aroused even by your [Bullinger's] most learned letter. For he has lately published a Catechism in which he not only approved that foul and sacrilegious tran- substantiation of the Papists in the holy supper of our Saviour, but all the dreams of Luther seem to him sufficiently well grounded, perspicuous, and lucid " (Original Letters, p. 381). IN ENGLAND. 371 writer joyfully reports to his friends at home that England is making vigorous steps in advance. "Thomas [Cranmer] himself" so the writer continues "is in a great measure recovered from his dangerous lethargy, by the goodness of God and the instru- mentality of that most upright and judicious man Master John a Lasco."* Other contemporaries too were struck with the change in Cranmer's views during this winter (i 5 4 8-49). f English investigators are inclined to attribute this remarkable change to the influence of Dr. Ridley, then Bishop of Rochester Far be it from us to wish to detract aught, even in this respect, from the eminent merits of this towering leader of the Reformation in England ; but so long as actual facts are not adduced in support of this view, there is surely a greater degree of pro- bability in favour of the judgment that the main influence was exerted by A Lasco upon the Primate of England. Why are we to suppose that the Bishop of Rochester exerted this influence precisely in those months during which Laski was the daily and intimate companion of the Archbishop at Lam- beth ? J Many Englishmen of the present day * Original Letters, p. 383. The letter is addressed to Bullinger. f Hardwick, History of the Christian Church during the Reformation, edition 1865, p. 215. See the remarkable letter of Traheron to Bullinger, December 31 st, 1548; Original Letters, p. 323. From foreign parts also there came letters urging the lingering Archbishop to greater zeal. I am disposed to assign to this period the letter of Calvin to Cranmer (Calvin, xxiii. 632) to which no date is affixed ; the three years there speci- fied are not necessarily to be restricted to the time of the accession of Edward VI., and admit of our taking the year 1545 as the time a quo. Compare Froude, History of England, iv. 196 seq. 372 JOHN A LASCO. may be indisposed to recognise the labours of the foreigner and their influence upon the shaping of the Church of their native land ; and thence arises the wish to reduce them to very modest dimensions ; but in those great days of the Reformation they did not as yet apply the narrow limits of nationality to the domain of the Church. The revival of the sciences, the study of the learned languages, had enlarged their range of vision, and opened to the learned a common intellectual fatherland ; the frontiers of this home domain were deepened and enlarged by the Reformation, which encompassed the most diverse peoples with an intimate bond of brotherhood. The winter which A Lasco spent in the palace at Lambeth, at the centre of the spiritual movement, was a very important one for the progress of the Reformation in England. As early as the preceding spring a lively discussion had arisen with regard to the Supper.* Not long before Laski's arrival Calvin had addressed a few letters to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, inciting him to the reformation of the Church of England. He had just (25th July) dedicated to Somerset his Com- mentary on the Epistles to Timothy^ In November Parliament met. Cranmer was able to submit to the judgment of the House a Book of Common Prayer, whereby the Latin prayers were to be abolished in the English Church, and the Church's doctrine laid down. " Parliament now discussed the faith of England, and laymen decided on the doctrines which the clergy were compelled to teach." ^ * Kuyper ; ii. 616. t Calvin, xiii. 18. \ Froude, iv. 382. The earliest title of this Prayer Book IN ENGLAND. 373 The work was the truit of long and mature delibera- tions. A considerable time before this, a commis- sion of sixteen bishops, supported by six laymen, had been assembled, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York at their head, to submit the various orders of service in the land to an examination, and out of these to frame a new and suitable order of worship.^ The sittings were held at Windsor. f The foreign theologians took no direct part in these important labours ; we have unfortunately not been able to meet with any document from which to infer whether and to what extent our friend took an indirect part in these preliminary deliberations. From some hurried lines to Calvin we can only infer that Laski was present with Cranmer at Windsor, although confined to his bed with a severe illness. J Thus living constantly in the immediate vicinity of the Archbishop, our Laski had abundant oppor- tunity of mingling on terms of friendship and intimacy with the leading men of the evangelical party. With unfeigned respect and recognition the man was received, of whom it was known that at home he had resigned the highest posts in the Church for the Gospel's sake, and whose brilliant administration in East Fricsland was manifest to reads thus : The Booke of the Common Prayer and Adminis- tration of the Sacramentes and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Churche, after the Use of the Churche of England. Londini in officina Edouardi Whitchurche. Cum firivilegio ad imprimendum solum. Anno dom. 1549, Mense Maji. Compare Two Liturgies (Cambridge, 1845), p. 10 seq. * Compare Burnet, ii. 98 seq., and iv. 272 seq. t Burnet, ii. 204. % Kuyper, ii. 620. This editor has rightly corrected the Vomsor ia of the original into Windsorice. 374 JOHN A LA SCO. all. When the celebrated Hugh Latimer delivered his third sermon before the young King, on the 22nd March, 1549, he made mention in it of Laski also : " Johannes a Lasco was here, a great learned man, and, as they say, a nobleman in his country, and is gone his way again. ... I would wish such men as he to be in the realm, for the realm should prosper in receiving of them. ' Who receiveth you receiveth Me,' saith Christ ; and it should be for the King's honour to receive them and keep them."* A few names to whom Laski sends salutations upon his return introduce us in some measure to the circle of his English friends. The letter is addressed to William Cecil, who at the age of twenty-seven was made private secretary to the Lord Protector. Laski seems to have held much and familiar converse with him ; his negotiations in the interest of the Germanic Confederation were carried on with the Duke of Somerset, through the intervention of Cranmer and Cecil. \ He sends also his salutations to Cecil's wife. The young secretary had already wedded as his second wife Mildred, eldest daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke.f In the house of Cecil, Laski had also formed the acquaint- ance of Sir John CJieke, Cecil's brother-in-law by the first marriage, who, with Sir Ant/wny Cooke, was tutor to the young King. Both of these men were warmly attached to the cause of the Reformation. * Sermons, p. 141. The sermon is among those preached before the King during the Fridays of Lent, 1549. t Kuyper, ii. 621. \ Froude, iv. 344. Her younger sister Anne was the mother of the renowned Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. For some interesting letters of the two men, though belonging to subsequent years, see Original Letters, pp. IN ENGLAND. 375 Mention is likewise made of Sir Richard M orison. He was just about this time one of the King's visitors, six in number, who attended at the Oxford disputation between Peter Martyr and Dr. William Tresham on the subject of the Lord's Supper (May 28th, 1549).* Laski also associated much with the celebrated Dr. William Turner^ who had learnt to esteem him at Emden, and had mainly contributed to his call to England. The leave of absence granted to A Lasco had expired in the spring of 1549. Cranmer, and with him the great circle of friends gained in England, pressed him to remain, and not afresh to exchange the quiet haven, where so abundant a field of labour was opening to him, for the storm outside upon the rough swelling sea. But at present he felt himself impelled with force back to the Church entrusted to his oversight. The hour of decision was approaching ; it was to find him well equipped upon the field. In the middle of March A Lasco quitted London. After an exceedingly good passage, the ship safely entered the mouth of the Ems, on the third day after sailing from the English coast. His fellow- passenger was Count Mans/eld^ who was conducting the negotiations with the Lord Protector for the accession of England to the Germanic Confederation. 139 147. [Seven original letters of Sir John Cheke are also appended by Goodwin to his edition of Cheke's MS. transla- tion of St. Matthew's Gospel (Cambridge, 1843). JR.] * Schmidt, Peter Martyr, p. 92 ; and Foxe, Acts and Monu- ments, vi. 298 seq. [Bucer wrote to John Brentz in May, 1550, expressing his dissent from Martyr's teaching on this subject (Original Letters, p. 544). This letter goes far to explain the subsequent hostility towards the fugitive congregations on the part of Brentz. JR.] 376 JOHN A LASCO. It was on his account indeed that Somerset pro- vided an able and experienced captain, who further conveyed the Count from Emden to Bremen.* 2. SECOND RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND. On the 1 3th of May, 1550, our friend arrived again in London, after an interval of about a year from the time of his quitting the English shore, f The voyage was by no means so favourable a one as the return voyage from England in the previous year. Thrice had the ship put off from Hamburg, and thrice was it constrained to return, hardly reaching the high sea before it was driven by terrible storms to make in all haste for the sheltering haven. A fresh cause of delay arose from an attack of Laski's old trouble the ague, which thoroughly prostrated him, and thus brought about his involun- tary detention for a couple of weeks or more at Hamburg. But this trouble was soon forgotten : his arrival had been long awaited, and he was now received with open arms. " His coming gave great joy to all godly persons ; " thus we read in a letter of those days. He once more took up his tem- porary quarters, for the space of six or eight weeks, * Kuyper, ii. 62-. t Original Letters, pp. 187, 560. j Ibid., p. 560. [" A Lasco arrived in England on the I3th of May." In a letter dated 28th May, eight days later than the one from which the above extract is made, Micronius gives us the first indication of A Lasco's presence: "The illustrious lord A Lasco told me, four days since, that he had learned for certain that the Spanish fleet had been dispersed and destroyed by a storm, and that this circum- stance had detained the Emperor in Lower Germany" (p. 563). Micronius himself had come over to England with Hooper in May of the previous year. TR.] IN ENGLAND. 377 in the hospitable palace of Lambeth, with his friend the Archbishop of Canterbury.' :- It is with a keen sense of regret that we lay down the pen at the point of A Lascds settlement in England. We had purposed before closing to describe his ever-memorable work in London and to trace the influence of his Church Order upon the after- history of the Reformed Church in Britain, Germany, and Holland. The dimensions of the present work render a satisfactory account of these labours for the time being impossible. Hereafter it may be our privilege to present to the English reader, in a volume of no less interest, if of somewhat smaller compass, the fruits of his matured experience in the organisation of the Church of the Foreigners at Austin Friars, London, in connection with which account many other noble forms will emerge from the obscurity of a long-vanished past. We propose to relate the history of the dispersion of his beloved congrega- tions on the accession of Queen Mary, and to inter- weave therewith a brief narrative of the sufferings of many of our own countrymen, while more par- ticularly following the course of the fugitive strangers * In a very interesting letter from Martyr to Bullinger, dated Oxford, ist June, 1550, we read (after some encomiums on Hooper and Coverdale), " Master a Lasco also has repaired hither, since his Phrysia has admitted the Imperial Interim ; and, as I suspect (utque olfacio], will be placed over the Church of the Germans in London, which is mightily agreeable to me. He is staying at present with the Primate (apud D. Cantuariensem)." The original letter, transcribed from the Zurich MSS., was furnished by Burnet in his Appendix, as also in Epistolce Tigurince (Cantab., 1848). English in Original Letters, p. 483. TR. 378 JOHN A LA SCO. amidst their severe privations in Denmark and North Germany and watching their career until a friendly asylum once more opens to them in Emden. Such volume would also embrace the history of A Lasco and his faithful Utenhove in their labours for the reformation of Poland, down to the death of the former on the 8th of January, 1560. It would, moreover, glance at the subsequent triumph of his principles in that land by the subscribing of the Treaty of Sendomir (1570). Meanwhile the con- tribution to his history, already placed before the reader, may suffice to embalm in loving esteem the memory of one who laboured with such precious results on our own shores, and who was faithful unto death in the service of his Lord for the well- being of His Church. INDEX. ACHILINUS, Alexander (d. 1518), 70. Achilles de Grassis, 73. ^Epinus, Pastor (d. 1553), 349. Agricola, Rudolph (d. 1485), 198. Albert of Mansfeld, 324. of Mayence (d. 1545), 199. of Prussia (d. 1568), 52, 269, 285 n., 336, 339, 349. Aldus, printer, 140. Alexander VI., Borgia (1492-1503), 56. Ambrogius, Theseus (d. 1540), 69. Ameibach, John (d. 1515). in. Boniface, son (d. 1562), 125, 141, 144, 165. Amsdorf, Nicholas (d. 1565), 315. Anne, Countess, 224, 247, 286. Aportanus, Pastor, 226, 228, 272. Aretino, Pietro (d. 1557), 113, 140. Ariosto (d. 1533), 58. Aristotle, 70. Augsburg, Confession of (1530), 191. Altered Confession of (1540), 3".32i- Diet of (1547), 325. Interim (i5th May, 1548), 326. Augustine, 168. Averroes (d. 1198), 71. BARBARA, Queen, 51. Bartholomaeus of Florence, 39. Beatus Bild, called Rhenanus (d. March, 1547), 73, 13. Bembo, Cardinal (d. January, 1547), 55, !? Bernard of Lublin, 34. Berquin (d. 1529), 105. Beyarts, Jan (d. I543!> 2I2 - Boccaccio (d. 1375), 59, 113. Boleslaw, Duke, 10. Boleyn, Anne, 352. Bona, daughter of Sforza, Duke of Milan (d. 1557), 4, 153, 178. Botzemius, 100. Bramius, Pastor, 248. Braniczki, John, 41, 59. Briconnet, Bishop (d. 1534), IO2. Brudzewo, Albert (tutor of Coper- nicus), 48. Bucer. Martin (d. February, 1551), 172, 180, 194, 262, 309, 322, 325. Bullinger, Henry (d. 1575), 183, 194, 196. Buscoducensis, Nicholas, 348. CALLIMACHUS (d. 1496), 48. Calvin (d. May, 1564), 107, 169, 196, 235, 269, 289, 301, 307, 372. Carlstadt, Andrew (d. 1541), 230, 284. Casalenus, Chrysostom, 68. Casimbrotus, 136, 140. Casimir the Great (1333-70), 14, 38. Cassander, George (d. 1566), 208. Catharine of Arragon (d. 1536), 352. Cecil, William, Lord Burghley (d. 1598), 374- Celtes, Conrad (d. 1508), 48. Charlemagne (d. 814), 222. Charles V., Emperor (1519-56), 192, 204, 2 1 8, 241, 247, 318, 324, 339, 349- Charles of Gueldres (d. 1538), 272. Martel (d. 741), 224. Cheek, Sir John (d. 1557), 374. Christopher of Oldenburg, 248, 315, 318, 324, 335. Chrysostom, 284. Ciolek, Erasmus, Bishop (d. 1522), 90. Stanislas, Bishop, 17. Cirksena, Edzard I., 223. 380 INDEX. Cirksena, Edzard II. (d. 1528), 223, 226, 230, 272, 286. Enno I., 222. II. (d. September, 1540), 223, 230, 247, 272. Ulric, 223. Clement V. (1305-14), 69. VII., Julius de Medici (1523- 34), 33, 174, 352. Cochlseus, John (d. 1552), 66, 72. Contarini (d. 1542), 235. Cooke, Sir Anthony (d. 1576), 374. Cracow, Diet of (1523), 92. Cranmer, Archbishop (d. March, I55 6 ). 35 6 , 3 6 o, 3 6 8. Crespy, Treaty of (September, 1544), 3i 7 DANTE (d. 1321), 58. Dlugosz, 47. Dorner, 169. Dryander. See Enzinas. Drzewicki, Archbishop, 177. EDWARD IV. (1461-83), 352. VI. (1547-53), 336, 357. Egnatius (d. 1553), 136, 140. Elter, Margaret, 366. Emmius, Ubbo (d. 1626), 279. Entfelder, Professor, 285 n., 338. Enzinas, Franzisco de (d. December, 1552). 207, 215, 366. Erasmus (d. July, 1536), 63, 96, 112, 119, 144, 149, 165, 168, 170, 190, 35 6 - Eric, Duke of Brunswick, 324. Eschen, John von (d. 1580), 370. FABER STAPULENSIS (d. 1537), 103, 167. Fagius, Paul (d. November, 1550), 365. Farel, William (d. 1565), 98, 196. Farnese, Cardinal, 317. Pier Luigi (d. 1547), 328. Ferdinand I. of Austria (b. 1503, Emperor (1556-64), 154 n., 242. Ficinus (d. 1499), 71. Francis I. (1515-47), 73. IO 7. 137, 192, 244, 352. Fremaut, Pastor, 279. Froben, printer (d. 1527), in, 114, 119. Fryth, John (d. July, 1533), 355. Fugger, banker, 77, 126. Funck, Pastor (d. 1566), .340. GARDINER, Bishop (d. 1555), 370 n. Giorgione (d. 1511), 139. Glarean, Henry (d. 1563), 131. Gnapheus, William (d. 1568), 338. Gonzaga, Ferrante, 328. Gorcka, Lucas, 87. Goswin van Halen, 198. Granvella (d. 1586), 235. Gregory VII. (d. 1085), 225. Grimani, Doge, 140. Gritti, Andrew, Doge, 140. ambassador (d. 1533), 154 n Groot, Gerhard (d. 1384), 208. Guasto, Marquis, 244. HADRIAN, bookseller, 197. - VI. (1522-23), 95, 198. Haller, printer, 42. Hardenberg, Albert (d. 1574), 198 215, 218, 238, 307, 316, 327. Hedwig, Queen (d. 1399), 3. Henry VIII. (1509-47), 352, 357, 369- Herberstein, Sigismund, 175. Hess, John, 167. Hofmann, Melchior, 264, 267. Holbein (d. 1543), 112, 125. Hosius, Stanislas (d. 1579), 1 66. Hubmaier, 150. Hus, John (d. 1415), 19. Hutten, Ulric von (d. August, 1523), 74, 117,200. JOHANNES DANTISCUS, 138. John, Count, 247, 250, 256. of Brandenburg, 334. of Glogau, 43. Jordan, priest, IO. Joris, David (d. 1556), 230, 262. Julius II. (1503-13), 5 6 - KNADE, Jacob, 86. Koscielecka, Anna, 94. Koscielecky, Bishop (d. l$l$), 83. Krcycki, Bishop, 91, 134, 144, 157. LASCARIS, John (d. 1535), 56. Laski, Andrew (d. 1512), 29, 33. Jaroslaw (d. 1523), 29. INDEX. Laski, Jerome (d. 1541), 37, 93, 133, J54, 157, 174, 241, 337. Johtj, Bishop (d. 1392), 28. Baron (d. 1451), 29. Archbishop- (d. 1531), 29, 35, 52, 174- Stanislas, 37, 137, 174, 328. Barbara (daughter of the Re- former), 303. Jerome (son of the Reformer), 304- John (son of the Reformer), 304- Ludovica (daughter of the Re- former), 303. Latimer, Hugh (d. October, 1555), 374- Latomus, 206. Lauterwald, Professor, 340. Leczyc, Synod of (1523), 89. (1527), 163. Lemsius, Pastor, 295, 343. Lenthius, Hermann, 297, 347. LeoX. (1513-21), 54, 68, 73, 351. Lewis of Hungary (d. 1526), 154 n. Liudger, 225. Loredano, Doge, 54. Lupsetus (d. 1530), 136. Luther (d. February, 1546), 55, 59, "6, 135, 168, 180, 190, 194, 226, 269, 282, 295, 310. MADRUCCI, Cardinal, 328. Mansfeld, Count Volrad von, 332, 335, 375- Marburg, conference at, 193. Margaret of Austria (d. 1530), 112. Marguerite de Valois(d. 1549), 102, 138. Martyr. See Vermigli. Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Low Countries, '531-55 (d. 1558), 203. Matthiesen, Jan, 264. Maurice, Elector (d. 1553), 323. Maximilian I. (1493-1519), 247. Melanchthon (d. April, 1560), 172, 194, 234, 239, 245, 269, 311, 327, 329, 303- Menno, son of Simon (d. 1559), 265. Merle d'Aubigne, 147. Metsys, Catharine, 212. Michael Angelo (d. 1564), 58. Micronius, Martin (d. 1559), 290, 376 . Modrzewski, Frisius, 179. Morison, Sir Richard (d. March, 1556), 375- Munzer, Thomas (d. 1525), 150. Musurus, Marcus (d. 1517), 57. NICLAES, Hendrik, 230. Niebuhr, 133. OCHINO, Bernardino (d. 1564), 360, 365- Oecolampadius, John (d. 1530,98, 127, 149, 195. Oporinus, printer (d. 1568), no. Osiander, Andrew (d. 1552), 337, 34, 356. Ostrorog, Vayvode, 20. Constantine, 60. Stanislas, 52, 54. Otho the Great (d. 973), 10. of Brunswick, 334. Henry, Count Palatine, 317, 329- Ousberghen, Josse van, 212. PAUL II. (1464-71), 48. III., Farnese (1534-49), 324, 328, 353- Pauvant (d. 1525), 105. Peace, Religious (July, 1532), 191. Pellican, Conrad (d. 1556;, 128, 149, 196. Petrarch (d. 1374), 58. Petrikow, Synod of (1521), 84. Diet of (1526), 162. Philip II. of Spain (d. 1598), 331. Pirkheimer, 66. Plato, 57, 70. Platter, Thomas (d. January, 1582), 109. Polentz, George of, 337. Pomponazzo, Pietro (d. April, 1524), 55, 68, 71. Poullain, Valerand, 367. Prasnicius, Lawrence, 335. QUEIS, Erhard von, 337. RADBOD, King, 224. 25 382 INDEX. Radziwill, John, 62. Stanislas, 62. Rambiewski, Martin, 77- Ranke, Leopold von, 235. Raphael (d. 1520), 58. Ratisbon, Colloquy of (1541), 235. Diet of (5th April, 1541), 315. Reekamp, John, 219. Rese, Henry, 229, 295. Reublin, 150. Reuchlin, John (d. 1522), 2O2. Ridley, Bishop (d. October, 1555), 371- Rinfon, French ambassador in Poland (d. 1541), 244. Rosmers, Antoinette van, 211, 216. Gudula van, 211, 217. Rovere, Paul van, 214. SADOLET, Cardinal (d. 1547), 171. Sbigneus, Bishop, 17, 20, 47, 179. Schartlin, Sebastian, 323. Schats, Jan (d. 1543), 212. Seymour, Lady Jane (d. 1538), 357. Sigismund I. (1506-48), 4, 35, 154, 159, 181. Sigismund Augustus (1548-72), 313, 320, 334. Slywnicki, Matthias, 62. Smalcalden, League of, 191. Soliman the Magnificent (d. 1566), 153, 242. Somerset, Duke of (d. January, 1552), 335, 358. Sommerfeld, John, 43. Speratus, Paul (d. 1554), 337, 339. Spires, Diet of (1529), 191. (1544), 3I7- Sta.phileus, John, 51. Staphylus, Frederic (d. 1564), 342. Sturm, John (d. 1589), 172. Sylvius, ^Eneas (d. 1464), 47, 109. Syssinge, Gertrude, 239. TER WESTEN, Frederic, 331. Theda, Countess (d. 1494), 223. Thomas a Kempis (d. 1471), 2IO. Timann, Pastor, 348. Titian (d. 1576), 139. Tomiczki, Peter, Bishop, 87. Tonstal, Bishop (d. 1559), 135. Trent, Council of, 317, 326. Tresham, William, 375. Turner, William, physician (d. 1568), 362, 375. Tyndale, William (d. 1536), 355. UKENA, Foko, 223. Ulmis, John ab. See Eschen. Utenhove, Charles, 136. John (d. 1565), 289, 366. Uttenheim, Bishop, 129. VEIT (or Vitus) STOSS, 39. Vermigli, Peter Martyr (d. 1562), 360. 365, 375- Viterbo, Egidius, 52. WASSILIJ, Grand Duke, 60. Wessel, John (d. 1489), 198. Westphal, Joachim, Pastor (d. 1574), 124, 349. Wied, Hermann von (d. 1552), 314, 318, 319, 337. Willehad (d. 789), 225. Winfried (d. 755), 225. Wingius, Godfridus, 304. Witold, Grand Duke, 19. Wittenberg Concord (May, 1536), 1 80, 194. Wladislaw Jagiello (d. 1434), 3, 15. Wolsey, Thomas (d. 1530), 352. Wolski, Nicholas, 60, 82. Worms, Colloquy at (November, 1540), 235. Diet at (1545), 317. Wyclif, John (d. 1384), 354. XIMENES, Cardinal (d. 1517), 69, "5- ZAPOLYA, John (d. 1540), 154, 173, 242. Stephen, 51. Zasius (d. 1535), 144. Zemblack, Metropolitan, 16. Zemen, Achatius von, 335. Zinzendorf, Count (d. 1760), 112. Zwingli, Huldreich or Ulric (d. 1531), 124, 145, 193, 195, 214, 284. A 000168477 8