Germany was quick to absorb Italian erudition. Hebrew, Greek, and Latin scholars, rivalling those of Italy, became numerous in German universities and in the free cities of Nüremburg, Augsburg, Basel, and Strassburg. But even students who attended the universities of Italy escaped the Pagan influence. They returned to a homeland which was not strewn with classic remains, and whose traditions were still deeply rooted in mediævalism and expressed in the Gothic spirit. It was the same with the artists. For example, the art of Schongauer, Dürer, Holbein, and Cranach is untouched by that sense of beauty which their Italian contemporaries had evolved from classic influence. Moreover, the German mind was more penetrating, earnest, argumentative than the Italian, more occupied with substantial than with abstract problems. The German temperament also was more combative; incapable of the Italian cynical toleration and at once deeper and narrower in its character. Consequently the German erudition began to apply itself to concrete problems, such as theological criticism and the absolute authority claimed by the Church. The Bible was opened up to the Germans as a new book. As the Classics had served to emancipate the Italian intellect and will, so the Bible emancipated the German conscience. “The touch of the new spirit which in Italy had evolved literature, art, and culture, sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity.” The sale of Indulgences by Leo X and Luther’s protest but served to set the spark to the explosion, which, long in preparation, split Teutonic and Latin Christianity, and involved Western Europe for two centuries in politico-religious strife. For gradually it had become recognised that the new “heresy” threatened the authority alike of monarchical government and the Papacy. Orthodoxy and absolutism were the two sides of the same shield. The Church had begun to realise that there was as much danger to its authority in the Pagan revival of the Italian Renaissance as in Protestantism. Both papal and imperial authority were threatened. Accordingly, Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V entered into a compact at Bologna in 1530, to maintain in its integrity the Catholic Faith. Thus began the Counter-Reformation, which reformed many of the abuses that had crept into the Church and renewed the fervour of the Catholic religion, but on the other hand, arrayed the forces of conservatism against the march of progress. SPANISH RENAISSANCE