In Switzerland from 1516 to 1525 - James Aitken Wylie

pages of Peter Lombard were diligently studied. If
they wished to alternate their reading they turned,
not to Scripture, but to the writings of Scotus or
Thomas Aquinas. These authors were their lifelong
study; to sit at the feet of Isaiah, or David, or
John, to seek the knowledge of salvation at the
pure sources of truth, was never thought of by
them. Their great authority was Aristotle, not St.
Paul. In Switzerland there were doctors of divinity
who had never read the Holy Scriptures; there were
priests and cures who had never seen a Bible all
their days. In the year 1527 the magistrates of Bern
wrote to Sebastien de Mont-Faulcon, the last
Bishop of Lausanne, saying that a conference was
to be held in their city, on religion, at which all
points were to be decided by an appeal to Sacred
Scripture, and requesting him to come himself, or
at least send some of his theologians, to maintain
their side of the question. Alas! the perplexity of
the good bishop. "I have no person," wrote he to
the lords of Bern, "suttlciently versed in Holy
Scripture to assist at such a dispute." This recalls a
yet more ancient fact of a similar kind. In A.D. 680
the Emperor Constantine Pogonatus summoned a
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