Carlstadt was even opposed to the Wittenberg graduations because they promoted pride of learning and the worldly spirit instead of humble Bible faith. Melanchthon, at a time when he was still full of Luther’s early ideas, i.e. in Feb., 1521, in a work written under the pseudonym of Didymus Faventinus, attempted to vindicate against Hieronymus Emser his condemnation of the whole philosophy of the universities; physics as taught there consisted merely of monstrous terms and contradicted the teaching of the Bible; metaphysics were but an impudent attempt to storm the heavens under the leadership of the atheist Aristotle. “My complaint is against that wisdom by which you have drawn away Christians from Scripture to reason. Go on, he-goat,” he says to Emser, “and deny that the philosophy of the schools is idolatry”; your ethics is diametrically opposed to Christ; at the Universities human reason had degraded the Church to Sodomitic vices. Nothing more wicked and godless than the Universities had ever been invented; no pope, but the devil himself was their author; this even Wiclif had declared, and he could not have said anything wiser or more pious. The Jews offered young men to Moloch, a prelude to our Universities where the young are sacrificed to heathen idols.[81] To such an extent had the darksome pseudo-mysticism which seethed in Luther’s mind laid hold for a while upon his comrade—glaringly though it contradicted the humanistic tendency found in him both earlier and later. If we look more closely into the decline of the schools, we shall find that it came about with extraordinary rapidity, a fact which proves it to have been the result of a movement both sudden and far-reaching.