Perhaps the chief reason why Erasmus opposed Protestantism was because he imagined that the theological tempest which Luther aroused all over Catholic Europe would destroy fair-minded scholarship--the very essence of humanism. Be that as it may, the leading humanists of Europe--More in England, Helgesen in Denmark, and Erasmus himself--remained Catholic. And while many of the sixteenth-century humanists of Italy grew skeptical regarding all religion, their country, as we have seen, did not become Protestant but adhered to the Roman Church. [Sidenote: Decline of Humanism] Gradually, as the sixteenth century advanced, many persons who in an earlier generation would have applied their minds to the study of Latin or Greek, now devoted themselves to theological discussion or moral exposition. The religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of the refinements of dispute between Calvinists and Lutherans or Presbyterians and Congregationalists, absorbed much of the mental energy of the time and seriously distracted the humanists. In fact, we may say that, from the second half of the sixteenth century, humanism as an independent intellectual interest slowly but steadily declined. Nevertheless, it was not lost, for it was merged with other interests, and with them has been preserved ever since. Humanism, whose seed was sown by Petrarch in the fourteenth century and whose fruit was plucked by Erasmus in the sixteenth, still lives in higher education throughout Europe and America. The historical "humanities"--Latin, Greek, and history--are still taught in college and in high school. They constitute the contribution of the dominant intellectual interest of the sixteenth century. ART IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY [Sidenote: Humanism and the Renaissance of Art] The effect of the revived interest in Greek and Roman culture, which, as we have seen, dominated European thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, was felt not only in literature and in the outward life of its devotees--in ransacking monasteries for lost manuscripts scripts, in critically studying ancient learning, and in consciously imitating antique behavior--but likewise in a marvelous and many-sided development of art.