But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in [Sidenote: 1521-9] {148} part a child of humanism. Nationalism played its role in the revolt from Rome, memories of councils lingered at Constance and Basle, and the desire for a purer religion made itself felt among the more earnest. Switzerland had at least one great shrine, that of Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and penalty of sin. Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. [Sidenote: The Jetzer scandal] A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. [Sidenote: 1509] When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake. But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. [Sidenote: Zwingli] He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg, amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and beauty from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the squirrel crossed the stream on a chip. When he returned to the home of his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149} stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his soul a deep love of his native land. The religion he learned was good Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less weird and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remembered one little tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.