Literary cultivation, which during the sixteenth
century was every where else monopolized by the clergy and a few
distinguished individuals, was now in Bohemia the common property of
the people; who for the most part embraced the evangelical doctrines
in their manifold, though but little differing shades. But although
religion was to them the object of chief interest, it was yet far from
occupying their minds exclusively. And this is the point, in which the
history of the Bohemian Reformation materially differs from that of
some other countries. Luther's elevated mind did not indeed give room
to narrow prejudices against those flowers of life, with which a kind
Creator has adorned this earth. But almost all the other Reformers
were led, either by a one-sided zeal or by circumstances, to show
themselves decidedly opposed to the cultivation of elegant literature
and the fine arts; they destroyed or banished pictures, music,
statuary, and every thing which they could in any way regard as
worldly temptations to allure men from the only source of truth and
knowledge; nay, they sometimes went so far as to look at science and
art in themselves only in the light of handmaids to religion; and to
deem a devotion to them without such reference, as sinful worldliness.
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