IV  THE  SPIRIT  OF  THE  UNIVERSITY  175

till  1510,  when  he  was  chosen  Archdeacon  of  the  Cathedral
at  Erfurt,  and  decided,  to  the  displeasure  of  the  Elector,  to  go
back  to  his  old  academical  allegiance. About  the  same  time
Henning  Gode,  the  chief  law  teacher  at  Erfurt,  left  it  in
consequence  of  the  riots  of  1509-1510,  and  entered  himself  at
Wittenberg. He  was  received  with  open  arms,  was  made
Provost  of  the  College  of  All  Saints,  a  post  which  he  held
tUl  his  death,  and  lectured  upon  canon  law. He  was  one  of
the  last  representatives  of  old  opinions  at  Wittenberg,  a  man
of  great  legal  learning  and  deserved  influence,  who  was  chosen
by  Frederick  to  accompany  him  to  the  election  and  coronation
of  Charles  V,  and  who  lies  buried  with  his  master  and  the
great  Eeformers  in  the  church  over  which  he  presided,  the  last
of  its  Catholic  Provosts. We  know  that  Trutvetter  had  been
Luther's  teacher ;  it  is  not  impossible  that  during  the  few
months  in  which  he  studied  law,  the  future  Reformer  had  been
the  pupU. of  Gode. At  all  events,  lie  found  well-known  Erfurt
faces  in  Wittenberg,  and  could  not  have  felt  wholly  strange
there  from  the  first.^

On  the  whole,  the  intellectual  atmosphere  of  the  Witten-
berg to  which  Luther  came  in  1508  is  fairly  clear  to  us. The
teachers  whose  names  we  know  belong  to  the  class  of  men
upon  whom  the  new  learning  had  begun  to  make  an  impres-
sion, though  it  had  yet  done  little  to  wean  their  minds  from
traditional  methods  of  thought. The  more  pronounced  human-
ism of  Mutian,  of  Eoban  Hess,  of  Crotus,  of  Petreius,  develops
itself  at  Erfurt  in  almost  entire  independence  of  such  influ-
ences as  prevail  at  Wittenberg. Hermann  von  dem  Busche
delivers  an  oration  at  the  opening  of  the  University,  and  enters
his  name  upon  its  books,  but  we  hear  no  more  of  him ;  and  it
is  not  till  1510  that  Ulrich  von  Hutten,  in  the  course  of  his
wanderings,  pays  it  a  passing  visit. Staupitz,  Trutvetter,
Scheurl,  Gode,  PoUich,  had  none  of  them  broken  with  the  past,
either  consciously  or  unconsciously ;  all  we  can  say  of  them  is,
that  they  were  men  not  incapable  of  movement  and  willing  to
turn  their  faces  towards  new  light. Carlstadt,  afterwards  so

1  Kampschulte,  vol. i. p. 53 ;  Er-  Plitt,  JoA. Trutvetter,  pp. 