NG AND IN THE BOOKS THEY
PRINTED

IN the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent seventy-two
of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of
Mount St. Agnes near the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic
city on the river Ysel. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he
had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis.
At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where Gerhard Groot,
a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague,
and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the
Brothers of the Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who
tried to live the simple life of the early Apostles of Christ while
working at their regular jobs as carpenters and house-painters and stone
masons. They maintained an excellent school, that deserving boys of poor
parents might be taught the wisdom of the Fathers of the church. At this
school, little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and how
to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had put his little
bundle of books upon his back, had wandered to Zwolle and with a sigh
of relief he had closed the door upon a turbulent world which did not
attract him.

Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In
central Europe, in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannus Huss,
the friend and follower of John Wycliffe, the English reformer, were
avenging with a terrible warfare the death of their beloved leader who
had been burned at the stake by order of that same Council of Constance,
which had promised him a safe-conduct if he would come to Switzerland
and explain his doctrines to the Pope, the Emperor, twenty-three
cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one hundred and fifty
abbots and more than a hundred princes and dukes who had gathered
together to reform their church.

In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that she might
drive the English from her territories and just then was saved from
utter defeat by the fortunate appearance of Joan of Arc. And no sooner
had this struggle come to an end than France and Burgundy were at each
other's throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and death for the
supremacy of western Europe.

In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down
upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who
retaliated in kind. In the far east th