[640] Spiritus ille cœlestis non solam Palestinam vel creaverat vel fovebat, sed mundum universum...... (Œcol. et Zw. Ep. p. 9.) That celestial Spirit had created and continued to cherish not only Palestine, but the whole world. [641] Nisi religiosi nunquam fuissent magnanimi. (Ibid.) [Sidenote: ZUINGLIUS IN REGARD TO ERASMUS.] Zuinglius diffused around him a love of letters. Several choice youths were trained in his school. "You offered me not only books, but also yourself," wrote Valentine Tschudi, son of one of the heroes of the wars of Burgundy; and this young man, who at that time had already studied at Vienna and Bâle, under the most celebrated teachers, adds, "I have never met with any one who explained the classics with so much precision and profundity as yourself."[642] Tschudi repaired to Paris, and was able to compare the spirit which prevailed in that university, with that which he had found in the narrow Alpine valley, over which impend the gigantic peaks and eternal snows of the Dodi, the Glarnisch, the Viggis, and the Freyberg. "How frivolously," says he, "the French youth are educated! No poison is so bad as the sophistical art in which they are trained--an art which stupifies the senses, destroys the judgment, brutifies the whole man. Man is thenceforth, like the echo, an empty sound. Ten women could not keep pace with one of these rhetoricians.[643] In their prayers even they present their sophisms to God, (I know the fact,) and pretend, by their syllogisms, to constrain the Holy Spirit to hear them." Such, then, were Paris and Glaris; the intellectual metropolis of Christendom, and a village of Alpine shepherds. A ray of the Divine Word gives more light than all human wisdom. [642] Nam qui sit acrioris in enodandis autoribus judicii, vidi neminem. (Zw. Ep. p. 13.) For I have never seen any one so acute and judicious in unravelling authors. [643] Ut nec decem mulierculæ .... uni sophistæ adæquari queant (Zw. Ep., p. 13.) CHAP. IV. Zuinglius in regard to Erasmus--Oswald Myconius--The Vagrants--Œcolampadius--Zuinglius at Marignan--Zuinglius and Italy--Method of Zuinglius--Commencement of Reform--Discovery.