Earliest of these is John Wessel (d. 1489), and perhaps also the most notable; certainly the others looked up to him with a veneration which seems to transcend the natural pre-eminence of seniority.  Unfortunately the details of his life have not been fully established.  Thirty years after his death, when it was too late for him to define his own views, the Reformers claimed him for their own; and in consequence his body has been wrangled over with the heat which seeks not truth but victory.  His father, Hermann Wessel, was a baker from the Westphalian village of Gansfort or Goesevort, who settled in Groningen.  After some years in the town school, the boy was about to be apprenticed to a trade, as his parents were too poor to help him further; but the good Oda Jargis, hearing how well he had done at his books, sent him to the school at Zwolle, in which the Brethren of the Common Life took part.  There, as at Groningen, he rose to the top, and in his last years, as a first-form boy, also did some teaching in the third form, according to the custom of the school.  He came into contact with Thomas a Kempis, who was then at the monastery of Mount St. Agnes, half an hour outside Zwolle, and was profoundly influenced by him.  The course at Zwolle lasted eight years, and there is reason to suppose that he completed it in full.  He was lodged in the Parua Domus, a hostel for fifty boys, and we are told that he and his next neighbour made a hole through the wall which divided their rooms—­probably only a wooden partition—­and taught one another:  Wessel imparting earthly wisdom, and receiving in exchange the fear and love of the Lord.  In the autumn of 1449 he matriculated at Cologne, entering the Bursa Laurentiana; in December 1450 he was B.A., and in February 1452, M.A.

By 1455 he had arrived at Paris and entered upon his studies for the theological degree.  Within a year he conceived a profound distaste for the philosophy dominant in the schools; and though he persevered for some time, his frequent dissension from his teachers earned for him the title of ‘Magister contradictionis’.  After this his movements cannot be traced until 1470, when he was at Rome in the train of Cardinal Francesco della Rovere.  In the interval he studied medicine, and, if report be true, travelled far; venturing into the East, just when the fall of Constantinople had turned the tide of Hellenism westward.  In Greece he read Aristotle in the original, and learnt to prefer Plato; in Egypt he sought in vain for the books of Solomon and a mythical library of Hebrew treasures.

In 1471 his Cardinal-patron was elected Pope as Sixtus iv.  The magnificence which characterized the poor peasant’s son in his dealings with Italy, in his embellishment of Rome and the Vatican, was not lacking in his treatment of Wessel.  ’Ask what you please as a parting gift’, he said to the scholar, who was preparing to set out for Friesland.  ‘Give me books from your library, Greek and Hebrew’, was the request.  ’What?  No benefice, no grant of office or fees?  Why not?’ ‘Because I don’t want them’, came the quiet reply.  The books were forthcoming—­one, a Greek Gospels, was perhaps the parent of a copy which reached Erasmus for the second edition of his New Testament.