superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still,
for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature
was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the
Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men were banished from the city.

[Sidenote: French skeptics]

In France, as in Italy, the opening of the century saw signs of
increasing skepticism in the frequent {629} trials of heretics who
denied all Christian doctrines and "all principles save natural ones."
But a spirit far more dangerous to religion than any mere denial
incarnated itself in Rabelais. He did not philosophize, but he poured
forth a torrent of the raw material from which philosophies are made.
He did not argue or attack; he rose like a flood or a tide until men
found themselves either swimming in the sea of mirth and mockery, or
else swept off their feet by it. He studied law, theology and
medicine; he travelled in Germany and Italy and he read the classics,
the schoolmen, the humanists and the heretics. And he found everywhere
that nature and life were good and nothing evil in the world save its
deniers. To live according to nature he built, in his story, the abbey
of Theleme, a sort of hedonist's or anarchist's Utopia where men and
women dwell together under the rule, "Do what thou wilt," and which has
over its gates the punning invitation: "Cy entrez, vous, qui le saint
evangile en sens agile annoncez, quoy qu'on gronde." For Rabelais
there was nothing sacred, or even serious in "revealed religion," and
God was "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and
the circumference nowhere."

Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels
of the day. Bonaventure des Periers, [Sidenote: Des Periers, d. 1544]
in a work called _Cymbalum Mundi_, introduced Luther under the anagram
of Rethulus, a Catholic as Tryocan (_i.e._, Croyant) and a skeptic as
Du Glenier (_i.e._, Incredule), debating their opinions in a way that
redounded much to the advantage of the last named.

Then there was Stephen Dolet [Sidenote: Dolet, 1509-46] the humanist
publisher of Lyons, burned to death as an atheist, because, in
translating the Axiochos, a dialogue then attributed to Plato, he had
written "After death you will be nothing at all" instead of "After
death you will be no {630} more," as the original is literally to be
construed. The charge was frivolous, but the impression was