judge the least depravation of the words delivered (πaρaSolévтwv) the extreme of blasphemy and impiety."

Ambrose spoke in the same spirit to Constantine: "I would not, O sacred Emperor, that you should trust to argument or any reasoning of mine; let us inquire of the Scriptures; let us interrogate the Apostles; let us interrogate the Prophets; let us interrogate Christ." "The doctrine of the Church, which is the house of God, may be found in the fulness of the Divine books," writes Jerome. "It would be the instigation of a demoniacal spirit," adds Theophilus of Alexandria, "to follow the conceits of the human mind, and to think any thing Divine beyond what has the authority of the Scriptures." Rich are the expressions in which Chrysostom's burning tongue enlarges upon "the depth of the Divine Scriptures," "the secrets of the Divine oracles," "the spiritual weapons," "the Divine charms" of the revealed word. "Let us hear, as many of us as reject the reading of the Scriptures, to what harm we are subjecting ourselves, to what poverty. For where are we to apply ourselves to the real practice of virtue, who do not so much as know the very laws according to which our practice should be guided?" "It is impossible for us," is the devout explanation of Cyril of Alexandria, "to say or at all think any thing concerning God, beyond what has been divinely declared in the Divine oracles of the Old and New Testament." "These are the doctrines of the Divine Spirit, which it behoves every one to follow continually, and to preserve the rule of these doctrines immovable,” argues Theodoret. From the seat of the Roman Episcopate how vigorously sounds the voice of Gregory: "What indeed is Holy Scripture but a letter of the Omnipotent God to His creatures?" Nor must we fail to note the testimony of Augustine: "The city of God believes also the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments which we call canonical, whence that faith itself takes its rise by which

the just lives." Thus clearly sound the voices of the past; and whether we catch the louder tones of the great leaders of the Church, or the lower utterances of the throng of holy witnesses, still it is the same. No dissentient accent or faltering utterance interrupts the swell of testimony. The tone is one and the subject one, and the message is one, "the faith once delivered to the saints," and the centre of that faith "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

Now, however, the Church entered upon a new phase of her life, one period passing away into another gradually as the rainbow hues of sunset. The medieval period was the period alike of religious and of intellectual darkness. Learning of a kind, and piety cramped and narrow like the learning, still survived, but they followed the stagnating tendencies of the times, and were concentrated here and there, like waters locked up in lonely spots, and not flowing freely through the land, carrying abundance and making music in their course. Learning was dwarfed, for it was confined within a most limited range and fettered with technicalities. Attention was directed much more to the instrumental portion of our knowledge, the mind's tools and apparatus, than to the knowledge itself. Words rather than ideas, arguments rather than truths, distinctions rather than generalizations, were the tendency of the time. It was impossible that piety should escape the trammels thrown round the free limbs of knowledge. It caught the formality of the circumstances under which it lived, and became narrow and angular as the cells and cloisters that sheltered it.

Nor were learning and piety less limited in extension than in character. They flourished beneath the shadow of convents, where men, shut out from the struggling world outside, betook themselves to study and speculation out of very sickness of heart and weariness of mind. Their spheres of influence lay amid the general barbarism of the

time, like the green gardens beneath the monastery walls, spots of fresh and pleasant fertility contrasted with the war-trodden and desolated aspect of the land beyond. Now an age takes its character not from the few, but from the many. Not the exceptions, but the rule; not the isolated instances, but the general average fixes its mental and moral features. Hence the medieval centuries were truly the dark ages. Learning and piety appeared to hide themselves in secret from the rude interruptions of lawless violence and unprincipled force.

The picture was much the same all the world over. In the East, activity and enterprise lay buried beneath the ruins of past magnificence. In the West they were prostrated by barbaric conquest or pined in exhaustion, as the heavings of the storm began to subside and peace and order to emerge out of the chaos. Yet the witness of the Church to the one great fact that she is the bearer of a message from God survived nevertheless. The voice may still be heard, though it sounds as if it were stifled by authority and choked by definition.

The scholastic theology represented a new school of thought, characterized not alone by mental activity, but also by a deep interest in the great questions of Divine truth. On such a subject it befits me to speak with great modesty. But it appears to me that the tone and spirit of the schoolmen, although thoroughly impregnated with the Church principles of their day, is something much higher and better than simply ecclesiastical. Their fatal error lay not so much in an excessive logical subtlety, as in the purposes to which they applied it. Had it been confined simply to the refutation of error and used as an apologetic weapon against heresy, employing subtlety in defending the faith against subtlety in attacking it, its use would have been legitimate. But they unhappily employed it on its positive side as an adequate instrument for teach

ing, and even for working out the truth of Divine things, and thus they unconsciously throned reason in the place of revelation. I say unconsciously, because the language of Anselm, for instance, shows how very far such a result was from his intention [5]. Hence great and broad truths, lying beyond the reach of the reasoning faculty, were merged in subtle questions, minute and curious beyond the finding out of man. Such, for instance, were the theses of Peter Lombard relative to the Divine Essence, whether the Father begot the Essence, or the Essence begot itself. Such the discussions of Aquinas on the nature of truth and falsehood, and whether the notions of "the one" and of "the many" were contradictory. The wonder is, not that religion should have suffered from such disputations, but that so much real and genuine piety should have survived amid them.

The unfavourable impression produced by a critical account of the philosophy of the schoolmen is considerably modified by a personal acquaintance with their writings. The witness of the Church to the dogmatic nature of her faith at all events survived. They not only maintained dogmas as the very life of the Church, but they carried their foundations below Church authority, to their only true and permanent basis in the revealed Scriptures. Take, for instance, Anselm's celebrated treatise on the Atonement, "Cur Deus Homo." In one place only does an explicit reference occur to the authority of revelation [6]. But it would be a great mistake to conclude from this that reason and not Scripture was made the ultimate basis of belief. In truth Scripture is latent in the argument from end to end. There is not a proposition which does not admit of defence by Scriptural quotation. The same deep reverence for the Word pervades the stateliness of Peter Lombard, the tender grace of Abelard, the pious fervour of Aquinas, and the glowing devotion of John Scotus.

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may be traced beneath the arrogant haughtiness of Langfranc, who seems ever to have written with the episcopal staff in his hand. It underlies even the dry dialectics of Alexander de Ales, the Doctor irrefragabilis, whose laborious subtlety and ponderous argumentation, unillumined as it seems by a solitary spark of spiritual life, place the study of his works beyond the power of any ordinary mental digestion.

But the more distinctive the characteristics and the greater the evils produced by the system of the schoolmen, the more need is there to rescue from forgetfulness their emphatic assertion of the dogmatic authority of the Word. Thus Langfranc declares the Scriptures to be sufficient for salvation because God is the author of them, and rests his arguments against Berengarius on the teaching of the Scriptures and "the inviolable authority of the Prophets and sacred Fathers." Anselm professes that any thing he might possibly have taught contrary to Scripture was undoubtedly false, and declares in another place that reason is not to be believed even on grounds apparently indisputable if its conclusions contradict the Word. Rosceline vehemently charges Abelard with ignorance of the Word of God. Abelard himself declares that he rests his convictions on the rock on which Christ built the Church, and then proceeds to explain this rock to be the faith, and to prove the articles of the faith by quotations from the Scriptures. Peter Lombard, anxious to direct his readers, under the guidance of God (Deo duce), to the knowledge of Divine things, adopts "the Divine Scriptures" as "the prescribed rule of doctrine." Alexander de Ales argues at length upon the ground that whatever is learned from the Scriptures is taught by "the testimony of the Spirit." Aquinas points out the necessity arising from the fallibility of the reason that we should be taught concerning "Divine things" by "Divine inspiration." John Scotus dwells