It was the dissemination of literature through the new art of printing rather than the diffusion of education through the university lecture rooms, which brought to the masses of the people the consciousness of mental existence and of individual responsibility for arriving at sound conclusions. Prior to the printing-press, this responsibility had been left by the people with their “spiritual advisers,” who were charged with the duty of doing the thinking for their flocks. It was this change in the mental status of the people which was the precursor (although at a considerable space of years) of the Reformation. With the beginning in Germany of the movement known as Humanism, the representatives of the new thought of the time were not to be found in the university circles, and had not received their inspiration from the lecture rooms. Says Paulsen: “The entire traditional conduct of the universities, and in particular of the instruction in arts and theology, was rejected with the utmost scorn by the new culture through its representatives, the poets and orators, to whom form and substance alike of this teaching seemed the most outrageous barbarism, which they never wearied of denouncing.” In the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, which were issued about 1516 from the band of youthful poets gathered about Mutianus at Erfurt, the hatred and detestation felt by the Humanists for the ancient university system raised to itself a lasting monument. Within a few years from the publication of the _Epistolæ_, the influence of the Humanists had so far extended itself as to have effected a large modification in the systems of study in all the larger universities. “The old ecclesiastical Latin was replaced by classical Latin; Roman authors, particularly the poets, were made the subject of lectures, and the old translations of Aristotelian texts were driven out by new translations on principles advocated by the Humanists. Greek was taken up in the Faculty of arts and courses in the language and literature were established in all universities.”[307]