226 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
Turks pushed by Pius II., led him to studies in the Koran and the preparation of a tract, — De crihatione Alcoran, — in which he declared that false religions have the true religion as their basis.
It is as an ecclesiastical mediator, and as a reformer of clerical and conventual abuses that the cardinal has his chief place in Tiistory. He preached in the vernacular. In Bamberg he secured the prohibition of new brotherhoods, in Magdeburg the condemnation of the sale of indulgences for money. In Salzburg and other places he introduced reforms in convents, and in connection with other members of his family he founded the hospital at Cues with beds for 33 patients. He showed his interest in studies by providing for the training of 20 boys in Deventer. He dwelt upon the rotation of the earth on its axis nearly a century before Copernicus. He gave reasons for regarding the donation of Constantino spurious, and he also called in question the genuineness of other parts of the Isidorian Decretals.
On the other hand, the cardinal was a thorough churchman and obedient child of the Church. As the agent of Nicolas V. he travelled in Germany announcing the indulgence of the Jubilee Year, and through him, it is said, indulgences to the value of 200,000 gulden were sold for the repair of St. Peter's.
This noble and many-sided man has been coupled together with Gutenberg by Janssen, — the able and learned apologist of the Catholic Church in the closing years of the Middle Ages, — the one as the champion of clerical and Church discipline, the other the inventor of the printing-press. It is no disparagement of the impulses and work of Nicolas to say that he had not the mission of the herald of a new age in thought and religion as it was given to Gutenberg to promote culture and civilization by his invention.^ He did not possess the gift of
^ Janssen, I. 2-6. Here we come for the first time into contact with this author whose work has gone through 20 editions and made such a remarkable sensation. Its conclusions and methods of treatment will be referred to at length farther on. Here it is suificient to call attention to the seductive plausibility of the work, whose purpose it is to show that an orderly reformation was going on in the Church in Germany when Luther appeared and by his revolutionary and immoral tendency brutally rived the unity of the
§ 26. POPULAR PREACHEKS. 227
moral and doctrinal conviction and foresight which made the monk of Wittenberg the exponent and the herald of a radical, religious reformation whose permanent benefits are borne witness to by a large section of Christendom.
§ 26. Popular Preachers.
During the century and a half closing with 1450, there were local groups of preachers as well as isolated pulpit orators who exercised a deep influence upon congregations. The German mystics with Eckart and John Tauler at their head preached in Strassburg, Cologne and along the Rhine. D'Ailly and Gerson stood before select audiences, and give lustre to the French pulpit. Wyclif, at Oxford, and John Huss in Bohemia, attracted great attention by their sermons and brought down upon themselves ecclesiastical condemnation. Huss was one of a number of Bohemian preachers of eminence. Wyclif sought to promote preaching by sending out a special class of men, his "pore preachers."
The popular preachers constitute another group, though the period does not furnish one who can be brought into comparison with the field-preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, the Whitefield of his century, d. 1272. Among the popular preachers of the time the most famous were Bernardino _and John of Capistrano, both Italians, and members of the Observant wing of the Franciscan order, and the Spanish Dominican, Vincent Ferrer. To a later age belong those bright pulpit luminaries, Savonarola of Florence and Geiler of Strassburg.
Bernardino gi-SLJexia, 1 380-1114, was praised by Pius II. as a second Paul. He made a marked impression upon Italiaji audiences and was a favorite with pope Martin V. His voice.
Church and checked the orderly reformation. Such a conclusion is a result of the manipulation of historic materials and the use of superlatives in describing men and influences which were like rills in the history of the onward progress of religion and civilization. The initial comparison between Gutenberg and Nicolas of Cusa begs the whole conclusion which Janssen had in view in writing his work. Of the permanent consequence of the work of the inventor of the printing-press, no one has any doubt. The author makes a great jump when he asserts a like permanent influence for Nicolas in the department of religion.