n that of a
knight, the life of a scholar. To Hutten's father Eitelwolf wrote:
"Would you bury a genius like that in the cloister? He must be a man
of letters." But the father had decided once for all. Ulrich must
never return to Steckelberg unless he came back as a priest. And the
son took his fate in his own hands, and fled from Fulda, to make his
way as a scholar in a world in which scholarship received scanty
recognition.

At the same time another young man whose history was to be interwoven
with his own, Martin Luther, fled from the wickedness and deceit of
this same world to the solitude of the monastery of Erfurth. By very
different paths they came at last to work in the same cause, and their
modes of action were not less different.

To the University of Cologne Hutten went, and with the students of that
day he was trained in the mysteries of scholasticism, and in the Latin
of the schoolmen and the priests. Wonderful problems they pondered
over, and they used to write long arguments in Latin for or against
propositions which came nowhere within the domain of fact. That
scholarship stood related to reality, and that it must find its end and
justification in action was no part of the philosophy of those times.

But Hutten and his friends cared little for scholastic puzzles and they
gave themselves to the study of the beauties of Latin poetry and to the
newly opened mine of the literature of Greece. They delighted in
Virgil and Lucian, and still more in Homer and Aeschylus.

The Turks had conquered Constantinople, and the fall of the Greek
Empire had driven many learned Greeks to the West of Europe. There
some of the scholars received them with open arms, and eagerly learned
from them to read Homer and Aristotle in the original tongue, and the
New Testament also. Those who followed these studies came to be known
as Humanists. But most of the universities and the monasteries in
Germany looked upon this revival of Greek culture as pernicious and
antichristian. Poetry they despised. The Latin Vulgate met their
religious needs, and Greek was only another name for Paganism. The
party name of Obscurantists ("Dunkelmaenner") was given to these, and
this name has remained with them on the records of history.

In the letters of one of Hutten's comrades we find this confession of
faith, which is interesting as expressing the feelings of young men of
that time: "There is but one God, but he has many forms,