Scholasticism had become a dry and stilted system, well qualified to call down ridicule on all learning. Its professors delighted in hairsplitting and quibbles. Luis de León speaks with a scathing sarcasm of the type of professor who said that he was ... “content with a knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints ... and had no wish for any new learning (_novedades_);” of those who “flatter themselves and fancy that, because they have in their rooms a score of books covered with dust, and have obtained the degree of master of arts, they have well earned the name of men of letters, and may for the rest give themselves up quite securely to sleep and good living ... and they consider that the mere fact of having the books and dipping into some part of them once a year bestows on them a knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints.” But the new spirit of inquiry and reform led those who belonged to the old school to fence themselves the more closely with narrow and bigoted beliefs, to cling to conventionalities of dogma, and to cry out on the most innocent innovations. Violent attacks on Scholasticism had the effect of showing more moderate attempts at reform in an odious light. Suspicions were everywhere rife, and it required no little care to avoid the accusation of being anxious for “new things.” The highest ecclesiastics were not exempt from attack. Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, had spent a certain number of years in England. In 1556 he had visited Oxford and found it Catholic, _la encontró católica_, but in the following year at Cambridge he burnt many heretical books and English Bibles. On his return to Spain he was thought to have been contaminated by contact with so many heretics, though he boasted that he had done more than any other in discovering them. II.--SALAMANCA UNIVERSITY