The scholastic education of a John Wyclif or a Martin Luther had this in common with Augustine's education in the schools of rhetoric of the late Roman world, that both involved a most thorough and vigorous training of the mind in sophisticated verbal skills and abstract conceptions which were held in high respect by their contemporaries. The Bible surprised and stirred each of them. To Augustine it seemed at first crudely-written and lacking in the eloquence he would have expected of the compositions of the divine mind. His own exegetical endeavour was to show that it had an eloquentia of its own, obeying its own rules and far superior to anything the mind of man could devise. Wyclif discovered the force of the Bible's truth after a long theological training which had made him conscious of the degree to which its veracity was being attacked in the course of school disputations. Once he had hit upon this notion it proved to be the key to all that made him uncomfortable or angry in contemporary scholarship or polemic. Luther discovered the Bible as a whole after a training which had introduced it to him in parts. For each of them something in the training which had formed his mind had obscured the Bible for him or made it appear less than itself until a shift of perspective showed him its importance with great simplicity. Once he had a grasp of his particular insight, each of them felt the Bible's power.

Why did the same powerful sense of the Bible not come to others? The answer must be that it did, and we can see plentiful evidence of the fact in the evocative language of the late mediaeval mystics and even in the enormous care the scholastics took to find the right interpretation of fine points in the text.