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their own ideas as to the supreme authority of the Pope, the divine right of the Emperor, or the immaculate conception of the Virgin (a dogma denied by the Dominicans, and defended by the Franciscans), they were always ready to point out abuses and to suggest reforms. The age in which they lived was not an age of decisive thought or decisive action. There was a want of character in individuals as well as in parties; and the points in which they differed were of small importance, though they masked differences of greater weight. At Basle, the men who were gathered round Johannes a Lapide were what we should call Liberal Conservatives, and it is among them that we find Sebastian Brant. Basle could then boast of some of the most eminent men of the time. Besides Agricola, and Wimpheling, and Geiler von Kaisersberg, and Trithemius, Reuchlin was there for a time, and Wessel, and the Greek Kontablacos. Sebastian Brant, though on friendly terms with most of these men, was their junior; and, among his contemporaries, a new generation grew up, more independent and more free-spoken than their masters, though as yet very far from any revolutionary views in matters of Church or State. Feuds broke out very soon between the old and the young schools. Locher, the friend of Brant,--the poet who had turned his "Ship of Fools" into Latin verse,--published a poem, in which he attacked rather petulantly the scholastic philosophy and theology. Wimpheling, at the request of Geiler of Kaisersberg, had to punish him for this audacity, and he did it in a pamphlet full of the most vulgar abuse. Reuchlin also had given offense, and was attacked and persecuted; but his party retaliated by the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." Thus the Conservative, or Realistic party became divided; and when, at the beginning of a new century and a new era in the history of the world, Luther raised his voice in defense of national and religious freedom, he was joined not only by the more advanced descendants of the Nominalistic school, but by all the vigor, the talent, and the intellect of the old Conservatives. Brant himself, though he lived at Strassburg up to 1521, did not join the standard of the Reformation. He had learned to grumble, to find fault, to abuse, and to condemn; but his time was gone when the moment for action arrived. And yet he helped toward the success of the Reformation in Germany. He had been one of the first, after the discovery of printing, to
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