But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that the number of Polish students in the different German universities was beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit. And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged Lutherans. At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which had the support of all the other members of the diet. And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property, the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts, barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith which meant money in their pockets. The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles, since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning. During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the kingdom. Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century, the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.