In four years the lad had outgrown the teacher's powers of instruction,
and young Zwingli was sent to Bern to a school taught by the Humanist
Heinrich Wölfflin (Lupulus), who was half a follower of Erasmus and half
a Reformer. He was passionately fond of music, and lodged in one of the
Dominican convents in the town which was famed for the care bestowed on
musical education. Zwingli was so carried away by his zeal for the
study, that he had some thoughts of becoming a monk merely to gratify
his musical tastes. His family, who had no desire to see him enter a
monastery, removed him from Bern and sent him to the University of
Vienna, where he spent two years (1500-1502). There he had for friends
and fellow-students, Joachim von Watt[11] (Vadianus), Heinrich
Loriti[12] of Glarus (Glareanus), Johann Heigerlin[13] of Leutkirch
(Faber), and Johann Maier of Eck, the most notable of all Luther's
opponents. In 1502 he returned to Switzerland and matriculated in the
University of Basel. He became B.A. in 1504 and M.A. in 1506, and in the
same year became parish priest of Glarus.
The childhood and youth of Zwingli form a striking contrast to Luther's
early years. He enjoyed the rude plenty of a well-to-do Swiss farmhouse,
and led a joyous young life. He has told us how the family gathered in
the _stube_ in the long winter evenings, and how his grandmother kept
the children entranced with her tales from the Bible and her wonderful
stories of the saints. The family were all musical, and they sang
patriotic folk-songs, recording in rude verse the glories of Morgarten,
Sempach, and the victories over the tyrant of Burgundy. "When I was a
child," says Zwingli, "if anyone said a word against our Fatherland, it
put my back up at once." He was trained to be a patriot. "From boyhood I
have shown so great, eager, and sincere a love for our honourable
Confederacy that I trained myself diligently in every act and discipline
to this end." His uncle Bartholomew was an admirer of the New Learning,
and the boy was nurtured in everything that went to make a Humanist,
with all its virtues and failings. He was educated, one might almost
say, in the art of enjoying the present without discriminating much
between what was good and evil in surrounding society. He was trained to
take life as it came. No great sense of sin troubled his youthful
years. He never shuddered at the wrathful face of Jesus, the Judge,
gazing at him from blazoned church window. If he was once tempted for a
moment to become a monk, it was in order to enjoy musical society, not
to quench the sin that was burning him within, and to win the pardon of
an angry God. He took his ecclesiastical calling in a careless,
professional way. He belonged to a family connected on both sides with
the clergy, and he followed the family arrangement. Until far on in life
the question of personal piety did not seem to trouble him much, and he
never belonged, like Luther and Calvin, to the type of men who are the
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