Mutian, at one time esteemed as the leader of the Thuringian Humanists, retired into solitude and died in the utmost poverty (1526) after the Christian faith had, as it would appear, once more awakened in him. Eminent lawyers among the Humanists, Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg and Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, openly detached themselves from the Wittenbergers. Scheurl, who had once waxed so enthusiastic about the light which had dawned in Saxony, now declared confidentially to Catholic friends that Wittenberg was a cesspool of errors and intellectual darkness.[97] The reaction which the recognition of Luther’s real aims produced in other Humanists, such as Willibald Pirkheimer, Crotus Rubeanus, Ottmar Luscinius and Henricus Glareanus, has already been referred to.[98] It is no less true of the Humanists favourable to the Church than of those holding Lutheran views, that German Humanism was nipped in the bud by the ecclesiastical innovations. As Paulsen says: “Luther usurped the leadership [from the Humanists] and theology [that of the Protestants] drove the fine arts from the high place they had just secured; at the very moment of their triumph the Humanists saw the fruits of victory snatched from their grasp.”[99] The event of greatest importance for the Humanists was, however, Erasmus’s open repudiation of Luther in 1523, and his attack on that point so closely bound up with all intellectual progress, viz. Luther’s denial of free-will. Quite independent of this attack were the many and bitter complaints which the sight of the decline of his beloved studies drew from Erasmus: “The Lutheran faction is the ruin of our learning.”[100] “We see that the study of tongues and the love of fine literature is everywhere growing cold. Luther has heaped insufferable odium on it.”[101] He regrets the downfall of the schools at Nuremberg: “All this laziness came in with the new Evangel.”[102] He wished to have nothing more to do with these Evangelicals, he declares, because, through their doing, scholarship was everywhere being ruined. “These people [the preachers] are anxious for a living and a wife, for the rest they do not care a hair.”[103] In the above year, 1523, at the beginning of his public estrangement with Erasmus, Luther had written: “Erasmus has done what he was destined to do; he has introduced the study of languages and recalled us from godless studies (‘_a sacrilegis studiis_’). He will in all likelihood die like Moses, in the plains of Moab [i.e. never see the Promised Land]. He is no leader to the higher studies, i.e. to piety”; in other words, unlike Luther, he was not able to lead his followers into the land of promise, where the enslaved will rules.[104] Luther’s use of the term “_sacrilega studia_” invites us to cast a glance on the state of education before his day. _Higher Education before Luther’s Day_