o, sought
to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the
same. Approaching the Bible in the simple literary way indicated by
classical study, Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the
New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was forced to adopt an
ingenious but unsound allegorical interpretation. "Philosophy seeks
the truth," he wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it." His
extraordinary personal influence extended through {52} lands beyond the
Alps, even though it failed in accomplishing the rehabilitation of
Italian faith.

[Sidenote: Faber Stapulensis, c. 1455-1536]

The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, James Lefevre
d'Etaples, was one of his disciples. Traveling in Italy in 1492, after
visiting Padua, Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know
Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics
made by Cardinal Bessarion. Returning to Paris he taught, at the
College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did
not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists,
for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was
due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to
himself. He therefore labored to restore the true text, on which he
wrote a number of treatises. It was with the same purpose that he
turned next to the early Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the
Areopagite. But he did not find himself until he found the Bible. In
1509 he published the _Quintuplex Psalterium_, the first treatise on
the Psalms in which the philological and personal interest was
uppermost. Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been studied so
much as the commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile
subtlety. Lefevre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it
became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a
real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret
everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the
emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine
effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he
published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary.
Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple instrument of God, he yet
did more to uncover his personality than any of the previous {53}
commentators. Half mystic as he was, Lefevre di