Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwuerth in Schwabia. He began his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he was following the great events he remained to the end of his University period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform, and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most famous humanists of the day--Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48} Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Duerer, and who were themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation into German of Althamer's _Diallage_, which contained an attack from the Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period, especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck, though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter, outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle, which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his