His father marked with delight the amiable disposition, the truthful character, and the lively genius of his son, and began to think that higher occupations awaited him than tending flocks on his native mountains. The new day of letters was breaking over Europe. Some solitary rays had penetrated into the secluded valley of the Tockenburg, and awakened aspirations in the bosom of its shepherds. The Bailiff of Wildhaus, we may be sure, shared in the general impulse which was moving men towards the new dawn.

His son Ulric was now in his eighth or ninth year. It was necessary to provide him with better instruction than the valley of the Tockenburg could supply. His uncle was Dean of Wesen, and his father resolved to place him under his superintendence. Setting out one day on their way to Wesen, the father and son climbed the green summits of the Ammon, and now from these heights the young Ulric had his first view of the world lying around his native valley of the Tockenburg. On the south. rose the snowy crests of the Oberland. He could almost look down into the valley of Glarus, which was to be his first charge; more to the north were the wooded heights of Einsiedeln, and beyond them the mountains which enclose the lovely waters of Zurich.

The Dean of Wesen loved his brother's child as his own son. He sent him to the public school of the place. The genius of the boy was quick, his capacity large, but the stores of the teacher were slender. Soon he had communicated to his pupil all he knew himself, and it became necessary to send Zwingle to another school. His father and his uncle took counsel together, and selected that of Basle.

Ulric now exchanged his grand mountains, with their white peaks, for the carpet-like meadows, watered by the Rhine, and the gentle hills, with their sprinkling of fir-trees, which encompass Basle. Basle was one of those points on which the rising day was concentrating its rays, and whence they were radiated over the countries around. It was the seat of a University. It had numerous printingpresses, which were reproducing the master-pieces of the classic age. It was beginning to be the resort of scholars; and when the young student from the Tockenburg entered its gates and took up his residence within it, he felt doubtless that he was breathing a new atmosphere.

The young Zwingle was fortunate as regarded the master under whose care he was placed at Basle. Gregory Binzli, the teacher in St. Theodore's School, was a man of mild temper and warm heart, and in these respects very unlike the ordinary

pedagogues of the sixteenth century, who studied by a stiff demeanour, a severe countenance, and the terrors of discipline to compel the obedience of their pupils, and inspire them with the love of learning. In this case no spur was needed. The pupil from the Tockenburg made rapid progress here as at Wesen. He shone especially in the mimic debates which the youth of that day, in imitation of the wordy tournaments of their elders, often engaged in, and laid the foundation of that power in disputation which he afterwards wielded on a wider arena.1 Again the young Zwingle, distancing his schoolmates, stood abreast of his teacher. It was clear that another school must be found for the pupil of whom the question was not, What is he able to learn! but, Where shall we find one qualified to teach him? The Bailiff of Wildhaus and the Dean of Wesen once more took counsel touching the young scholar, the precocity of whose genius had created for them this embarrassment. The most distinguished school at that time in all Switzerland was that of Bern, where Henry Woelflin, or Lupullus, taught, with great applause, the dead languages. Thither it was resolved to send the boy. Bidding adieu for a time to the banks of the Rhine, Zwingle re-crossed the Jura, and stood once more in sight of those majestic snowy piles, which had been in a sort his companions from his infancy. Morning and night he could gaze upon the pyramidal forms of the Shrekhorn and the Eiger, on the tall peak of the Finster Aarhorn, on the mighty Blumlis Alp, and overtopping them all, the Jungfrau, kindling into glory at the sun's departure, and burning in light long after the rest had vanished in darkness.

But it was the lessons of the school that engrossed him. His teacher was accomplished beyond the measure of his day. He had travelled over Italy and Greece, and had extended his tour as far as Syria and the Holy Sepulchre. He had not merely feasted his eyes upon their scenery, he had mastered the long-forgotten tongues of these celebrated countries. He had drunk in the spirit of the Roman and Greek orators and poets, and the fervour of ancient liberty and philosophy he communicated to his pupils along with the literature in which they were contained. The genius of Zwingle expanded under so sympathetic a master. Lupullus initiated him into the art of verse-making after the ancient models. His poetic vein was developed, and his style now began to assume that classic terseness and chastened glow which marked it in after years. Nor was his talent for music neglected.

But the very success of the young scholar was

like to have cut short his career, or fatally changed its direction. With his faculties just opening into blossom, he was in danger of disappearing in a convent. Luther at a not unsimilar stage of his career had buried himself in the cell, and would never have been heard of more, had not a great storm arisen in his soul and compelled him to leave it. If Zwingle shall bury himself as Luther did, will he be rescued as Luther was? But how came he into this danger?

In Bern, as everywhere else, the Dominicans and the Franciscans were keen competitors, the one against the other, for public favour. Their claims to patronage were mainly such as these-a showy church, a gaudy dress, an attractive ceremonial; and if they could add to these a wonder-working image, their triumph was almost secured. The Dominicans now thought that they saw a way by which they would mortify their rivals the Franciscans. They had heard of the scholar of Lupullus. He had a

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fine voice, he was quick-witted, and altogether such a youth as would be a vast acquisition to their order. Could they only enrol him in their ranks, it would do more than a fine altar-piece, or a new ceremonial, to draw crowds to their chapel, and gifts to their treasury. They invited him to take up his abode in their convent as a novitiate.1

Intelligence reached the Amman of Wildhaus of the snares which the Dominicans of Bern were laying for his son. He had imagined a future for him in which, like his uncle the dean, he would be seen discharging with dignity the offices of his Church; but to wear a cowl, to become the mere decoy-duck of monks, to sink into a pantomimic performer, was an idea that found no favour in the eyes of the bailiff. He spoilt the scheme of the Dominicans, by sending his commands to his son to return forthwith to his home in the Tockenburg. The Hand that led Luther into the convent guided Zwingle past it.

THE young Zwingle gave instant obedience to the injunction that summoned him home; but he was no longer the same as when he first left his father's house. He had not yet become a disciple of the Gospel, but he had become a scholar. The solitudes of the Tockenburg had lost their charm for him; neither could the society of its shepherds any longer content him. He longed for more congenial fellowship.

Zwingle, by the advice of his uncle, was next sent to Vienna, in Austria. He entered the high school of that city, which had attained great celebrity under the Emperor Maximilian I. Here he resumed those studies in the Roman classics which had been so suddenly broken off in Bern, adding thereto a beginning in philosophy. He was not the only Swiss youth now living in the capital and studying in the schools of the ancient enemy of his country's independence. Joachim Vadian, the son of a rich merchant of St. Gall; Henry

Loreti, commonly known as Glarean, a peasant's son, from Mollis; and a Suabian youth, John Heigerlin, the son of a blacksmith, and hence called Faber, were at this time in Vienna, and were Zwingle's companions in his studies and in his amusements. All three gave promise of future eminence, and all three attained it; but no one of the three rendered anything like the same service to the world, or achieved the same lasting fame, as the fourth, the shepherd's son from the Tockenburg. After a sojourn of two years at Vienna, Zwingle returned once more (1502) to his home at Wildhaus.

But his native valley could not long retain him. The oftener he quaffed the cup of learning, the more he thirsted to drink thereof. Being now in his eighteenth year, he repaired a second time to Basle, in the hope of turning to use, in that city of

1 Bullinger, Chron,

scholars, the knowledge he had acquired. He taught in the School of St. Martin's, and studied at the University. Here he received the degree of Master of Arts. This title he accepted more from deference to others than from any value which he himself put upon it. At no period did he make use of it, being wont to say, "One is our Master, even Christ."1

Frank and open and joyous, he drew around him a large circle of friends, among whom was Capito,

their refinements the idle, hair-splitting sophistries of the schoolman, with no other intention than that, if ever he should come to close quarters with him, he might know his enemy, and beat him with his own weapons." As one who quits a smiling and fertile field, and crosses the boundary of a gloomy wilderness, where nothing grows that is good for food or pleasant to the eye, so did Zwingle feel when he entered this domain. The scholastic philosophy had received the reverence of ages; the

and Leo Juda, who afterwards became his colleague. His intellectual powers were daily expanding. But all was not toil with him; taking his lute or his horn, he would regale himself and his companions with the airs of his native mountains; or he would sally out along the banks of the Rhine, or climb the hills of the Black Forest on the other side of that stream.

To diversify his labours, Zwingle turned to the scholastic philosophy. Writing of him at this period, Myconius says: "He studied philosophy here with more exactness than ever, and pursued into all

1 Christoffel, p. 8.

great intellects of the preceding centuries had extolled it as the sum of all wisdom. Zwingle found in it only barrenness and confusion; the further he penetrated into it the more waste it became. He turned away, and came back with a keener relish to the study of the classics. There he breathed a freer air, and there he found a wider horizon around him.

Between the years 1512 and 1516 there chanced to settle in Switzerland a number of men of great and varied gifts, all of whom became afterwards distinguished in the great movement of Reform.

2 Osw. Mycon., Vit. Zwing.

hearers, and while so engaged his own eyes opened to the errors of the Roman Church. By the end of 1517 so matured had his views become that he found he no longer could say mass, and forbore the practice.1

John Hausschein—which signifies in German the "light of the house," and in Greek, Ecolampadius -was born in 1482, at Weinsberg, in Franconia. His family, originally from Basle, was wealthy. So rapid was his progress in the belles lettres, that at the age of twelve he composed verses which were admired for their elegance and fire. He went abroad to study jurisprudence at the Universities of Bologna and Heidelberg. At the latter place he so recommended himself by his exemplary conduct and his proficiency in study, that he was appointed preceptor to the son of the Elector Palatine Philip. In 1514 he preached in his own country. His performance elicited an applause from the learned, which he thought it little merited, for he says of it that it was nothing else than a medley of superstition. Feeling that his doctrine was not true, he resolved to study the Greek and Hebrew languages, that he might be able to read the Scriptures in the original. With this view he repaired to Stuttgart, to profit by the instructions of the celebrated scholar Reuchlin, or Capnion. In the year following (1515) Capito, who was bound to Ecolampadius in the ties of an intimate friendship, had made Christopher of Uttenheim, Bishop of Basle, aoquainted with his merits, and that prelate addressed to him an invitation to become preacher in that city, where we shall afterwards meet him.

About the same time the celebrated Erasmus came to Basle, drawn thither by the fame of its printing-presses. He had translated, with simplicity and elegance, the New Testament into Latin from the original Greek, and he issued it from this city, accompanied with clear and judicious notes, and a dedication to Pope Leo X. To Leo the dedication was appropriate as a member of a house which had given many munificent patrons to letters, and no less appropriate ought it to have been to him as head of the Church. The epistle dedicatory is dated Basle, February 1st, 1516. Erasmus enjoyed the aid of Ecolampadius in this labour, and the great scholar acknowledges, in his preface to the paraphrase, with much laudation, his obligations to the theologian."

We name yet another in this galaxy of lights which was rising over the darkness of this land, and of Christendom as well. Though we mention

1 Ruchat, tom. i., p. 67.

2 Hottinger, 16. Ruchat, tom. i., pp. 76, 77. 3 Hottinger, 16, 17. Ruchat, tom. i., p. 77.

him last, he was the first to arrive. Thomas Wittembach was a native of Bienne, in Switzerland. He studied at Tubingen, and had delivered lectures in its high school. In 1505 he came to that city on the banks of the Rhine, around which its scholars, and its printers scarcely less, were shedding such a halo. It was at the feet of Wittembach that Ulric Zwingle, on his second visit to Basle, found Leo Juda. The student from the Tockenburg sat him down at the feet of the same teacher, and no small influence was Wittembach destined to

exert over him. Wittembach was a disciple of Reuchlin, the famous Hebraist. Basle had already opened its gates to the learning of Greece and Rome, but Wittembach brought thither a yet higher wisdom. Skilled in the sacred tongues, he had drunk at the fountains of Divine knowledge to which these tongues admitted him. There was an older doctrine, he affirmed, than that which Thomas Aquinas had propounded to the men of the Middle Ages-an older doctrine even than that which Aristotle had taught to the men of Greece. The Church had wandered from that old doctrine, but the time was near when men would come back to it. That doctrine in a single sentence was that "the death of Christ is the only ransom for our souls.". When these words were uttered, the first seed of a new life had been cast into the heart of Zwingle.

To pause a moment: the names we have recited were the stars of morning. Verily, to the eyes of men that for a thousand years had dwelt in darkness, it was a pleasant thing to behold their light. With literal truth may we apply the words of the great poet to them, and call their effulgence "holy: the offspring of heaven first-born." Greater luminaries were about to come forth, and fill with their splendour that firmanent where these early harbingers of day were shedding their lovely and welcome rays. But never shall these first pure lights be forgotten or blotted out. Many names, which war has invested with a terrible splendour, and which now attract the universal gaze, grow gradually dim, and at last will vanish altogether. But history will trim these "holy lights" from century to century, and keep them burning throughout the ages; and be the world's day ever so long and ever so bright, the stars that ushered in its dawn will never cease to shine.

We have seen the seed dropped into the heart of

4 "Jesum Christum nobis a Patre justitiam et satisfactionem pro peccatis mundi factum est" (Jesus Christ is made by the Father our righteousness and the satis faction for the sins of the world).-Gerdesius, tom. i., pp. 100-102.