 It was not, in any case, his originality that brought him to a position of eminence among his contemporaries. The reason for his enormous impact, within both the university and the wider society, was his capacity to perceive new needs and to respond to new demands. His program of educational reform was, for instance, well suited to the Reformation but even more so to the demands of the early modern states, which needed better educated officials and manufacturers, craftsmen and businessmen. Because Ramist logic made possible a more concise presentation of different questions, it proved more advantageous than scholasticism to Protestant theologians, who began to set out their doctrines in the form of loci or brief passages on a specific topic. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, several Protestant professors tried to combine the ideas of Ramus with those of the Lutheran educational reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560).