This
change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought
man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system
into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the
teaching of Christ by the {3} attitude of the will and by the formation
of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to
man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be
an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be
thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply.
The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect.
Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only
darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which
appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we
thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he
often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of
Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing
toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself--man with his
momentous will--as the centre of interest.

Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down
into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of
greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the
testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and
writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs--generally called
Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa--who died shortly before Luther was
born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in
this period of Renaissance. God is for him, as for his great masters,
Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable
subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all
the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and
immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower
knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned
ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with God.
But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism
formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the
circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such
masterpieces as the _Imitation of Christ_, the _Theologia Germanica_,
and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the