All the while, nevertheless, there was proceeding an intellectual process which had not before been possible--a permeation of the northern part of the continent, especially Germany, by a spirit of comparatively orthodox anti-Romanism, based on a growing scholarship, which found in the sacred books themselves a basis for its course. The scholarly impulse had come from Italy, where it had been fostered by the papacy itself; but in the north it had a different social and political effect. In Germany and the Netherlands, to begin with, elementary education was gaining ground. The Brethren of the Common Lot had done much for it, and many of their pupils started fresh schools, which weakened the first, but carried further their work. At the same time sprang up new universities; those of Tübingen, Mayence, Wittemberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder being founded between 1477 and 1506. In the higher Biblical scholarship, further, there had begun a new era. Laurentius Valla's Notes on the New Testament created a spirit of scholarlike criticism; and John Reuchlin, after a training in France, began in Germany an equally vigorous movement of Hebrew scholarship by producing the first Hebrew grammar. Numbers of educated men were now in a position of intellectual superiority to the great mass of the clergy; and all the while the process of translating the New Testament or the gospels into the modern languages for the use of the unlearned was going on in all the more civilized countries. There were German translations before Luther; Wiclif's versions had been current in England among the Lollards; and French and Italian versions had been made by several hands in the fifteenth century. The important result was that anti-clerical heresy began to claim to be the stricter orthodoxy, and the Church could no longer bracket the sin of anti-clericalism with that of rejecting the leading Christian dogmas. Thus, when Erasmus of Rotterdam began with a new and remarkable literary skill to write Latin satires on the old text of the vices and ignorance of the monks and other clergy, he had such an audience as no man had yet had on that theme. In Petrarch's day, a century before, though he too had exclaimed like every other educated layman at the corruption of the papal court and system, humanist literature was still largely a matter of exquisite art for art's sake; in that of Erasmus it had begun to handle the most vital intellectual and moral interests.