The so-called wandering scholastics (_scholastici vagantes_, _scholares erratici_) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves as treasure-diggers, selling "_spiritus familiares_," amulets, love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars, and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were associated in a regular guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals in the cities. They were dreaded competitors of the witch-fathers of the cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61] The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to the _renaissance_. This saviour came to the world in the hour of its intensest need. The Hellenic spirit, born again from the study of classic literature and classic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence, all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world. The exhumed monuments of Hellas revealed other state systems than the feudal of the Middle Ages,--states which were organizations, not mere mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded upon a nobler basis than given or assumed privileges. These monuments revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above tradition--a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit and nature, between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and hell to flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great wide world into their power.