At rare intervals, however, history offers an example of the slaying power of satire. Idolatry was killed by ridicule. Some people--among them Renan, who ought to have known better--deny to ancient Israel a sense of humor. But who can doubt that the most effective of the attacks on idolatry were Elijah’s sarcastic invective against the Baal of the populace (I Kings 18. 27) and Isaiah’s grim yet droll picture of the carpenter taking some timber and using part of it to bake his bread and the rest to make his god (Isaiah 44. 15)? It is far from our purpose to recite the success, in after ages, of less inspired efforts by satirists. Satire has been termed the “chief refuge of the weak”; it has certainly been a weapon by which one, standing alone, has often equalized the odds against him. It would be delightful to give illustrations of the methods by which the various warriors of the pen have used their sword: to contrast a pagan Juvenal and a Hebrew Kalonymos--both writing in Rome, but with more than a millennium between them--or to revel in the feats of Rabelais’ _Gargantua_ (1534), Cervantes’ _Don Quixote_ (1605), Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_ (1656), and Voltaire’s eighteenth century _Candide_. We are now concerned with a work and a group of authors who first made Europe laugh in 1515. Ulrich von Hutten and his associates, in their “Letters of Obscure Men” (_Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_), did just the right thing at the right moment. What they attempted, what they accomplished, will now be told. Cervantes, tilting against the wearisome nonsense of the later romances of chivalry, Pascal exposing--even though he did it unfairly--the dangers of casuistry, Voltaire plumbing the shallow optimism of Leibnitz, served good ends. But far higher than these was the cause triumphantly upheld by the _Letters of Obscure Men_. The cause was humanism, another name for intellectual freedom and width of view.