rned. At Oxford, the Realists, in following out their
principles in a more independent spirit, had arrived at results dangerous
to the peace of the Church. As philosophers, they began to carry out the
doctrines of Plato in good earnest; as reformers, they looked wistfully to
the early centuries of the Christian Church. The same liberal and
independent spirit reached from Oxford to Prague, and the expulsion of the
German nation from that university may be traced to the same movement. The
Realists were at that time no longer in the good odor of orthodoxy; and,
at the Council of Constanz, the Nominalists, such as Joh. Gerson and
Petrus de Alliaco, gained triumphs which seemed for a time to make them
the arbiters of public opinion in Germany, and to give them the means of
securing the Church against the attacks of Huss on one side, and against
the more dangerous encroachments of the Pope and the monks on the other.
This triumph, however, was of short duration. All the rights which the
Germans seemed to have conquered at the Councils of Constanz and Basle
were sacrificed by their own Emperor. No one dared to say again what
Gregory von Heimburg had said to the Italian clergy,--"Quid fines alienos
invaditis? quid falcem vestram in messem alienam extenditis?" Under AEneas
Sylvius, the power of the Pope in Germany was as absolute as ever. The
Nominalist party lost all the ground which it had gained before. It was
looked upon with suspicion by Pope and Emperor. It was banished from
courts and universities, and the disciples of the Realistic school began a
complete crusade against the followers of Ockam.

Johannes Heynlin a Lapide, a former head of a house in Paris, migrated to
Basle, in order to lend his influence and authority to the Realist party
in that rising university. Trithemius says of him: "Hic doctrinam eorum
Parisiensium qui reales appellantur primus ad Basiliensium universitatem
transtulit, ibidemque plantavit, roboravit et auxit." This Johannes
Heynlin a Lapide, however, though a violent champion of the then
victorious Realist party, was by no means a man without liberal
sentiments. On many points the Realists were more tolerant, or at least
more enlightened, than the Nominalists. They counted among themselves
better scholars than the adherents of Ockam. They were the first and
foremost to point out the uselessness of the dry scholastic system of
teaching grammar and logic, and nothing else. And though they cherished