We have not quoted the worst Catholic estimates of Luther’s scholarship.  He has also been called a dunce, an ignoramus, a barbarian.  Again it seems to escape the Catholics that this ill-trained, insufficient, half-baked Doctor of Divinity is a product of their own educational art.  Whatever advancement he received in those days was actually forced upon him by Catholics.  All his academic and ecclesiastical honors came from Catholic sources, came to him, moreover, as a good Catholic.  Also that highest and noblest distinction which made him a duly called and accredited expounder of the Holy Scriptures.  If there is fault to be found with anything in this matter, it lies with the Catholic method and process of making a young man within the space of ten years a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Arts, a priest, a professor, and a Doctor of Sacred Theology; it does not lie with the innocent subject to whom this presto! change! process was applied.

But does this estimate of Luther square with the facts in the case?  For a dunce or a mediocre scholar Luther has been a fair success.  His little ability and scanty preparation makes his achievements all the more remarkable.  The most brilliant minds of the race, for whom the home, the Church and the State, religion, science and art, had done their best, have accomplished immeasurably less than this poor and mostly self-taught country boy.  God give His Church many more such dunces!

The net results of Luther’s learning are open to inspection by the world in his numerous works.  Able scholars of most recent times have looked into Luther’s writings with a view of determining how much learned knowledge he had actually acquired, even before he began his reformatory work, They have found that Luther was “very well versed in the favorite Latin authors of the day:  Vergil, Terence, Ovid, Aesop, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Catullus, Juvenal, Silius, Statius, Lucan, Suetonius, Sallust, Quintilian, Varro, Pomponius Mela, the two Plinies, and the Germania of Tacitus.”  He possessed a creditable amount of knowledge of General History and Church History.  He had made a profound study of the leading philosophers and scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages:  Thomas of Aquinas, Peter Lombard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Duns Scotus, Occam, Gregory of Rimini, Pierre d’Ailly, Gerson, and Biel.  Two of these he knew almost by heart.  He had studied the ancient Church Fathers:  Irenaeus, Cyprian, Eusebius, Athanasius, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory of Nanzianzen, Jerome, and such later theologians as Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Anselm of Canterbury; Tauler, Lefevre, Erasmus, and Pico della Mirandola.  “He was quite at home in the exegetical Middle Ages, in the Canon Law, in Aristotle and Porphyry.”  “He was one of the first German professors to learn Greek and Hebrew.”  Moreover, Luther possessed, besides knowledge, those indispensable requisites in a good professor:  “the faculty of plain, clear, correct, and independent thought, resourcefulness,