inquiry, investigation, rational thinking, and to bring forth the modern
spirit. The preservation and transmission of knowledge was by the
university organization transferred from the monastery to the school, from
monks to doctors, and from the Church to a body of logically trained men,
only nominally members of the _clerici_. Their successors would in time
entirely break away from connections with either Church or State, and
stand forth as the independent thinkers and scholars in the arts,
sciences, professions, and even in Theology. University graduates in
Medicine would in time wage a long struggle against bigotry to lay the
foundations of modern medicine. Graduates in Law would contend with kings
and feudal lords for larger privileges for the as yet lowly common man,
and would help to usher in a period of greater political equality. The
university schools of Theology were in time to send forth the keenest
critics of the practices of the Church. Out of the university cloisters
were to come the men--Dante, Petrarch, Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin,
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton--who were to usher in the modern spirit.

The universities as a public force. Almost from the first the universities
availed themselves of their privileges and proclaimed a bold independence.
The freedom from arrest and trial by the civil authorities for petty
offenses, or even for murder, and the right to go on a strike if in any
way interfered with, were but beginnings in independence in an age when
such independence seemed important. These rights were in time given up,
[26] and in their place the much more important rights of liberty to study
as truth seemed to lead, freedom in teaching as the master saw the truth,
and the right to express themselves as an institution on public questions
which seemed to concern them, were slowly but definitely taken on in place
of the earlier privileges. Virtually a new type of members of society--a
new Estate--was evolved, ranking with Church, State, and nobility, and
this new Estate soon began to express itself in no uncertain tones on