it remains for centuries the firm foundation of a new world of thought and faith. Without the labors of these Reformers of the Faith, the Reformers of the Church would never have found a whole nation waiting to receive, and ready to support them. There are two other events which prepared the way of the German Reformers of the sixteenth century: the foundation of universities, and the invention of printing. Their importance is the same in the literary and in the political history of Germany. The intellectual and moral character of a nation is formed in schools and universities; and those who educate a people have always been its real masters, though they may go by a more modest name. Under the Roman Empire public schools had been supported by the government, both at Rome and in the chief towns of the Provinces. We know of their existence in Gaul and parts of Germany. With the decline of the central authority, the salaries of the grammarians and rhetors in the Provinces ceased to be paid, and the pagan gymnasia were succeeded by Christian schools, attached to episcopal sees and monasteries. Whilst the clergy retained their vigor and efficiency, their schools were powerful engines for spreading a half clerical and half classical culture in Germany. During the Crusades, when ecclesiastical activity and learning declined very rapidly, we hear of French tutors at the castles of the nobility, and classical learning gave way to the superficial polish of a chivalrous age. And when the nobility likewise relapsed into a state of savage barbarism, new schools were wanted, and they were founded by the towns, the only places where, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we see any evidence of a healthy political life. The first town schools are mentioned in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they were soon followed by the high schools and universities. The University of Prague was founded in 1348; Vienna, 1366; Heidelberg, 1386; Erfurt, 1392; Leipzig, 1408; Basle, 1460; Tübingen, 1477; Mainz, 1482. These universities are a novel feature in the history of German and of European civilization. They are not ecclesiastical seminaries, not restricted to any particular class of society; they are national institutions, open to the rich and the poor, to the knight, the clerk, the citizen. They are real universities of learning: they profess to teach all branches of knowledge,—theology and law, medicine and philosophy. They contain the first practical acknowledgment of the right of every subject to the highest education, and through it to the highest offices in Church and State. Neither Greece nor Rome had known such institutions: neither the Church nor the nobility, during the days of their political supremacy, were sufficiently impressed with the duty which they owed to the nation at large to provide such places of liberal education. It was the nation itself, when forsaken by its clergy and harassed by its nobility, which