Note 23 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

As regards Switzerland, again, it is the admitted fact that “the educational movement began before the religious revival, and was a cause of the Reformation rather than a result.”23 So in Holland, the Brethren of the Common Lot (Fratres Vitæ Communis), a partially communistic but orthodox order of learned and unlearned laymen which lasted from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, did much for the schooling of the common people, and passed on their impulse to Germany.24 Similarly in Scotland the schools seem to have been fairly numerous even in the later Catholic period.25 There, and in some other countries, it was the main merit of the Reformation to carry on zealously the work so begun, setting up common schools in every parish. In Lutheran Germany this work was for a long period much more poorly done, as regarded the peasantry. These had been trodden down after their revolt into a state of virtual slavery. “The broad midlands and the entire eastern part of Germany were filled with slaves, who had neither status nor property nor education”;26 and it was long before any large number of the people were taught to read and write,27 the schooling given at the best being a scanty theological drill.28