To Erasmus and to other scholarly readers in the Church whose devotion to the religious purposes of the Church organisation was possibly purer minded and more consistent than his own, men like Sir Thomas More, and Dean Colet, it seemed essential for the wise management of the Church upon which depended the maintenance of the true faith, that the leadership and authority should be left in the hands of scholars. They dreaded lest the establishment of the doctrine of individual interpretation, of the right of believers to a direct relation with their Creator, and the shaping of creeds and of rules of action apart from the counsel and guidance of trained ecclesiastics, must of necessity lead to such excesses as were evidenced in the performances of the Anabaptists in Westphalia, or in the utterances of the fanatics who incited the peasant revolt in Saxony. It may be concluded, therefore, that while the machinery of ecclesiastical censorship remained in force only in the countries which the Reformation had not succeeded in detaching from the control of the Church, there was no such immediate advantage, at least during the half-century succeeding the work of Luther, in the production and distribution of literature in the Protestant countries as might have been expected to result from the freedom secured from the interference of the ecclesiastics. By the close of the 16th century, however, when the Protestant control of the States which have since remained Protestant seemed to be fairly assured (an assurance which was, to be sure, rudely interrupted twenty years later, by the opening of the “Thirty Years War”), there came a reaction in the educational centres in these States in favour of the work of higher education. The study of Greek, and to a smaller extent that of Hebrew, was taken up in certain of the Protestant colleges. A wide circulation was secured for the text of the Greek Testament, which had been issued by Erasmus through the presses of Froben in Basel, and in connection more particularly with this Testament the study of Greek was carried on with increasing interest in Wittenberg, Erfurt, and other of the educational centres of North Germany. The introduction, for the purpose of Greek study, of the editions of the great Greek classics, prepared by Aldus and one or two other of the more enterprising printers, naturally brought with it a renewed interest in the works of the Latin writers. These were no longer classed as pagan frivolities but were accepted as belonging to the intellectual property of the world.