“If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the Humanist movement which she had so brilliantly encouraged, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is the result of research, and research must be free and cannot co-exist with the claim of the Catholic religion to be superior to enquiry. The French school, it will be observed, was wholly, in fact or in intention, Protestant. As soon as it was decided (as it was before 1600) that France was to be a Catholic country and the University of Paris a Catholic University, learning was extinguished in France. France saw without regret and without repentance the expatriation of her unrivalled scholars. With Scaliger and Saumaise, the seat of learning was transferred from France to Holland. The third period of classical learning thus coincides with the Dutch school. From 1593, the date of Scaliger’s removal to Leyden, the supremacy in the republic of learning was possessed by the Dutch. In the course of the 18th century, the Dutch school was gradually supplanted by the North German, which from that time forward has taken, and still possesses, the lead in philological science.” As early as 1323, the University of Paris was the most important in Europe for theological studies, as that of Bologna was the authority on jurisprudence, and that of Padua for medicine. The early development of theological studies in Paris was one of the influences that brought about the authority of the College of the Sorbonne in the censorship of the book productions of the kingdom. An anonymous author of a polemical tract, written in the previous century for the purpose of pointing out the errors of some heretical production, says: _Is autem erroneus liber positus fuit publice ad exemplandum Parisiis anno Domini 1254. Unde certum est quod jam publice predicaretur nisi boni prelati et predicatores impedirent._ (“This heretical tract was openly given to the scribes to be copied in Paris in the year of our Lord, 1254. Whence it is evident what manner of doctrine would now be set forth to the public had not good priests and preachers interfered.”)[93] By the beginning of the 16th century, the University of Vienna had taken a leading place among the centres of education in Europe. It is said to have contained at this time no less than seven thousand students and the work of the Humanists in furthering the revival of interest in the classic authors was in Vienna at this time particularly active. Within a quarter of a century after Luther had begun his protests, the Jesuits secured the controlling influence in matters in Vienna and from this time the relative importance of the university steadily declined.[94]