THE NEW QUESTIONING ATTITUDE. The student can hardly have followed the history of educational development thus far without realizing that a serious questioning of the practices and of the dogmatic and repressive attitude of the omnipresent mediaeval Church was certain to come, sooner or later, unless the Church itself realized that the mediaeval conditions which once demanded such an attitude were rapidly passing away, and that the new life in Christendom now called for a progressive stand in religious matters as in other affairs. The new life resulting from the Crusades, the rise of commerce and industry, the organization of city governments, the rise of lawyer and merchant classes, the formation of new national States, the rise of a new "Estate" of tradesmen and workers, the new knowledge, the evolution of the university organizations, and the discovery of the art of printing--all these forces had united to develop a new attitude toward the old problems and to prepare western Europe for a rapid evolution out of the mediaeval conditions which had for so long dominated all action and thinking. This the Church should have realized, and it should have assumed toward the progressive tendencies of the time the same intelligent attitude assumed earlier toward the rise of scholastic inquiry. But it did not, and by the fifteenth century the situation had been further aggravated by a marked decline in morality on the part of both monks and clergy, which awakened deep and general criticism in all lands, but particularly among the northern peoples.