388 3Ir. A. W. Ward [IMarch 8, 



Nominally, I say, for nowhere shall we find the swashbuckler ways 

 and brutal tone of the students of this period more glaringly exhil)ited 

 than at Helmstildt, where the students were in constant warfare with 

 their authorities, and the university as a whole with the town. The 

 students brought back with them from their summer campaigns, not 

 only the extravagances of military ways and manners (incredible 

 extravagances of costume among the rest), but fire and sword in the 

 most literal sense, to play a part in their winter amusements, and in 

 spreading dismay among the Philistines. I use the word advisedly, 

 because Helmstiidt and Jena, which vied with one another in the 

 excesses of their students, alike claimed the honour of having invented 

 the famous designation for their natural enemies, those outside the 

 pale of academic freedom. The academical seal of Helmstiidt bore 

 the design of Samson and the lion, which certainly seems suggestive 

 of some traditional foundation for the claim ; on the other hand, at 

 Jena a legend ran of a Lutheran pastor having lamented over the 

 corpse of a student done to death by offended burghers : " The 

 Philistines have been upon thee." Be this as it may, we cannot 

 marvel that the time came at last when the patience of outraged 

 authorities was at an end ; and two years after the Peace a visitation 

 of the University of Helmstiidt took place, which sought to bring 

 order into confusion. As, however, a mutual understanding obtained 

 among the students of practically all the German universities, the 

 evil ^vas of such magnitude that the Imperial authority thought fit to 

 intervene, and in 1662 an Imperial ordinance was issued to put an 

 end to pennnlism, and perhaps this arrested some of the most intoler- 

 able excesses in vogue. I could not refrain from lifting just a corner 

 of the curtain of oblivion which covers the distressful and unpleasing 

 features of German university life in the period of the Thirty Years' 

 War — features which were not to be changed in a moment. Happily, 

 here at last a nobler side was not wanting. I have already spoken of 

 Calixtus, whom not only the wide learning and the spirit of concila- 

 tion, which he had inherited from his master in divinity, Melanclithon, 

 lifted above party, and who pointed the way to that union which the 

 Christian Church has not yet seen accomplished on the basis of the 

 ethic of the Gospel. But the seed that he sowed through ihe long 

 dreary years of his academical life was not sown in vain, and no 

 univ^;rsity was more ready to receive and apply the lesson which he 

 taught than the other ancient seat of learning, of which we have 

 spoken — the Palatine University of Heidelberg. 



Although the impulse towards intellectual endeavour could never 

 be altogether deadened in Germany, although the universities and 

 with them the grammar schools or gymnasia, recovered in course of 

 time from their forced inactivity, or from the perverted conditions 

 into which their life degenerated, and although, in accordance with 

 the tendencies of the times noticeable elsewhere (in England, e.g.) 

 learned societies, founded for the more intimate prosecution of 



