We do not need to follow the details of the conflict. Suffice it to know that great portions of northern and western Germany followed Luther, as is shown in Figure 88, and that the Western Church, which had remained one for so many centuries and been the one great unifying force in western Europe, was permanently split by the Protestant Revolt. The large success of Luther is easily explained by the new life which now permeated western Europe. The world was rapidly becoming modern, while the Church, with a perversity almost unexplainable, insisted upon remaining mediaeval and tried to force others to remain mediaeval with it. Adams expresses the situation well when he says: [10] A revolution had been wrought in the intellectual world in the century between Huss and Luther. At the death of Huss the world had only just begun the study of Greek. Since that date, the great body of classical literature had been recovered, and the sciences of philology and historical criticism thoroughly established. As a result Luther had at his command a well-developed method ... impossible to any earlier reformer.... The world also had become familiar with independent investigation, and with the proclamation of new views and the upsetting of old ones. By no means the least of the great services of Erasmus to civilization had been to hold up before all the world so conspicuous an example of the scholar following, as his inalienable right, the truth as he found it and wherever it appeared to lead him, and honest in his public utterances as to the results of his studies.... His was the crowning work of a century which had produced in the general public a greatly changed attitude of mind toward intellectual independence since the days of Huss. The printing press was of itself almost enough to account for Luther's success as compared with his predecessors. Wycliffe made almost as direct and vigorous an appeal to the public at large, and with "an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people," but Luther had the advantage in the rapid multiplication of copies and in their cheapness, and he covered Europe with the issues of his press.... Luther spoke to a very different public from that which Wycliffe or Huss had addressed,--a public European in extent, and one not merely familiar with the assertion of new ideas, but tolerant, in a certain way, of the innovator, and expectant of great things in the future.