his conversation have been preserved, the
unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the
Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific titles: 'doctor
angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable.' 'Was
Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and
that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three
languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as a phantom: I have read him in
Greece in his own words.' To Ostendorp, then a young man, but
afterwards to become head master of Deventer school, he gave the
counsel: 'Read the ancients, sacred and profane: modern doctors, with
their robes and distinctions, will soon be drummed out of town.' At
Mount St. Agnes once he was asked why he never used rosary nor book of
hours. 'I try', he replied, 'to pray always. I say the Lord's Prayer
once every day. Said once a year in the right spirit it would have
more weight than all these vain repetitions.'

He loved to read aloud to the brethren on Sunday evenings; his
favourite passage being John xiii-xviii, the discourse at the Last
Supper. As he grew older, he sometimes stumbled over his words. He was
not an imposing figure, with his eyes somewhat a-squint and his slight
limp; and sometimes the younger monks fell into a titter, irreverent
souls, to hear him so eager in his reading and so unconscious. It was
not his eyesight that was at fault: to the end he could read the
smallest hand without any glasses, like his great namesake, John
Wesley, whom a German traveller noticed on the packet-boat between
Flushing and London reading the fine print of the Elzevir Virgil, with
his eyes unaided, though at an advanced age.

On his death-bed Wessel was assailed with scepticism, and began to
doubt about the truth of the Christian religion. But the cloud was of
short duration. That supreme moment of revelation, which comes to
every man once, is no time for fear. Patient hope cast out
questioning, and he passed through the deep waters with his eyes on
the Cross which had been his guide through the life that was ending.

Of Rudolph Agricola we know more than of the others; his striking
personality, it seems, moved many of his friends to put on record
their impressions of him. One of the best of these sketches is by
Goswin of Halen (d. 1530), who had been Wessel's servant at Groningen,
and had frequently met Agricola. Rudolph's father, Henry Huusman, was
the parish priest of Baflo, a v