rland had at least one great shrine, that of
Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the
plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and
penalty of sin. Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating
scandals enacted by the contemporary church. [Sidenote: The Jetzer
scandal] A passionately contested theological issue of the day was
whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by
the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans
of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair
was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they
conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died
after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an
imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the
Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception
sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not
in the immaculate, manner. [Sidenote: 1509] When the fraud was at
last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved
were burnt at the stake.

But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a
definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli.
[Sidenote: Zwingli] He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg,
amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and
beauty from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed
how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the
squirrel crossed the stream on a chip. When he returned to the home of
his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149}
stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his
soul a deep love of his native land. The religion he learned was good
Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less
weird and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remembered one little
tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept
together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the
housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.

Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, the parish priest.
At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle to study. Here he progressed well,
becoming the head scholar, and here he developed a love of music and
considerable skill in it. Later he went to school at Berne