Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), like Erasmus after him, was very much a man by himself. He entered history at first dramatically enough. A party of Italian Humanists had met in the house of John Argyropoulos in Rome in 1483. Among them was a young unknown German, who had newly arrived with letters of introduction to the host. He had come, he explained, to study Greek. Argyropoulos gave him a Thucydides and asked him to construe a page or two into Latin. Reuchlin construed with such ease and elegance, that the company exclaimed that Greece had flown across the Alps to settle in Germany. The young German spent some years in Italy, enjoying the friendship of the foremost Italian scholars. He was an ardent student of the New Learning, and on his return was the first to make Greek thoroughly popular in Germany. But he was a still more ardent student of Hebrew, and it may almost be said of him that he introduced that ancient language to the peoples of Europe. His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_ (1506), a grammar and dictionary in one, was the first book of its kind. His interest in the language was more than that of a student. He believed that Hebrew was not only the most ancient, but the holiest of languages. God had spoken in it. He had revealed Himself to men not merely in the Hebrew writings of the Old Testament, but had also imparted, through angels and other divine messengers, a hidden wisdom which has been preserved in ancient Hebrew writings outside of the Scriptures,—a wisdom known to Adam, to Noah, and to the Patriarchs. He expounded his strange mystical theosophy in a curious little book, _De Verbo Mirifico_ (1494), full of out-of-the-way learning, and finding sublime mysteries in the very points of the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps his central thought is expressed in the sentence, “God is love; man is hope; the bond between them is faith.... God and man may be so combined in an indescribable union that the human God and the divine man may be considered as one being.”(41) The book is a _Symposium_ where Sidonius, Baruch, and Capnion (Reuchlin) hold prolonged discourse with each other. Reuchlin was fifty-four years of age when a controversy began which gradually divided the scholars of Germany into two camps, and banded the Humanists into one party fighting in defence of free inquiry.