first attempts of any Christian writer to educe from purely human reason the conception of an overruling Divinity. He anticipated Descartes in his argument for the exist ence of a supreme being, based upon the very general idea of the possibility of infinite perfection.

A man of far less ability and scholarship, and yet a more voluminous writer, than Anselm, was one John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres. He lived during the time of the second Henry, and was an ardent friend of Thomas à Becket. He was the author of a book of huge proportions and no little originality of subject-matter, entitled Polycraticus: sive De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum (On the Trifles of the Courtiers and the Tracks of the Philosophers). The first part of this book is a bitter satire upon the prevailing follies of the time, and especially upon the corruption and levities of courtiers and kings. The latter part is an ingenious argument in favor of tyrannicide; and in connection with this subject he discusses at length the rights and duties of kings and the relations existing between the governing power and the governed; and he concludes with the assertion that it is the right of the church to determine who are tyrants, to sit in judgment over them, and to decide what their punishment shall be. It seems rather strange that a man should dare, at that dark period, speak so plainly and so fearlessly regarding the royal prerogative; but we must remember that he was in sympathy with the church, and that the church was more powerful than the king.

Alexander of Hales, commonly called the Irrefragable Doctor, was a native of Gloucestershire, but educated at Paris, where, indeed, the greater part of his life was spent. Ile was one of the most learned theologians of the age, and is sometimes spoken of as the first of the scholastic philosophers. His principal work is entitled Summa Theologiæ.

John Duns Scotus-sometimes, from the similarity of names, confounded with John Scotus Erigena-was a

Franciscan monk and schoolman, chiefly remembered for his championship of the doctrine of realism and for his famous controversies with Thomas Aquinas, a Benedictine monk and schoolman of Italy. The date of the birth of Duns Scotus is unknown, but he died in 1308. He was educated first at Newcastle, and afterwards at Oxford, and from his skill in debate and his wonderful powers of analysis, he was known among his admirers as the Subtle Doctor. Like Alexander of Hales, he spent much of his life abroad, first as a student in Paris, then as a teacher in a theological school at Toulouse. His works fill twelve huge folio volumes-wonderful examples of wordiness. He was the principal defender of the doctrines of the Realists, a class of scholastics who held that universals have an existence independent of individuals. He argued that abstract ideas, as age, beauty, roundness, have a real being apart from any objects, as old things, beautiful things, round things. In these opinions the Realists were opposed by the Nominalists, who claimed that whatever is general is merely a name; that is, that it has only a nominal and not any real existence. For instance, they maintained that "age" is only a name referring to that which is old; that "circle" is a term applied to all round objects, and having no independent existence; and that "beauty," aside from beautiful things, can be conceived of only as a word.

Thomas Aquinas, the Benedictine monk, was, like Duns Scotus, an ardent Realist. But the two men differed in their views regarding fore-ordination and free-will, and long and bitter was the controversy which was waged between them. Two rival sects sprang up,-the Scotists and Thomists, and their wranglings were equaled only by those between the Realists and the Nominalists. The disputes between the two great factions of scholastics continued with unabated fervor for many years, and, indeed, were not entirely silenced for some centuries afterwards.

The Nominalists had an able champion in the person

of William Occam, originally a pupil, but afterwards an opponent, of John Duns Scotus. To the purely speculative doctrines of his school he added some opinions of a more practical character, for instance, the denial of the temporal supremacy of the pope. Occam was the last and, in point of intellectual ability, the greatest of the English schoolmen. He died in 1347, but the controversies between the Realists and the Nominalists lost none of their vigor or bitterness.

"When the disputants had exhausted their stock of verbal abuse," says a contemporary, "they often came to blows; and it was not uncommon to see them engaging not only with their fists, but with clubs and swords, so that many have been wounded, and some killed." But, if we will believe John of Salisbury, these wranglings over mere abstractions, which could add nothing to the human understanding, had been going on for at least two centuries before Occam had added fuel to the flame. Writing in 1150, he says: "There hath been more time consumed in these disputes than the Cæsars employed in making themselves masters of the world; the riches of Croesus were not equal to the treasures that have been exhausted in this controversy; and the contending parties, after having spent their whole lives in the discussion of this single point, have neither been so happy as to determine it to their satisfaction, nor to find in the labyrinths of science where they have been groping any discovery that is worth the pains they have taken." *

With reference to the influence which the scholastic philosophy exerted towards the intellectual improvement and development of the age, Lord Lyttelton remarks: "The minds of men were turned from classical studies. to the subtleties of school divinity, which Rome encouraged as more profitable for the maintenance of her doctrines.

It was a great misfortune to religion and to

*Mosheim: Ecclesiastical History.

learning that men of such acute understanding, who might have done much to reform the errors of the church and to restore science in Europe, should have depraved both, by applying their admirable parts to weave these cobwebs of sophistry, and to confound the clear simplicity of evangelical truths by a false philosophy and a captious logic."

Would you know the nature of the questions discussed with such eagerness and acrimony by these scholastic philosophers? We venture to quote a few: Whether angels were created before the world; whether they were created in grace; whether many angels cannot be in the same space; whether the divine essence engendered the Son, or was engendered by the Father; why the three persons together are not greater than one alone; if created spirits are local, and can be circumscribed; if God can know more things than he is aware of. John Duns Scotus gravely attempts to demonstrate whether God can cause that, the place and body being retained, the body shall have no position, that is, existence in place; whether identity, similitude, and equality are real relations in God; whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared was a real animal; whether, in a state of innocence, all children were masculine; and a thousand other inanities equally absurd. Thomas Aquinas devotes three hundred and fifty-eight chapters to discussing the nature of angels:

An angel is composed of action and potentiality; the more superior he is, he has the less potentiality. They have not matter properly. Every angel differs from another angel in species. An angel is of the same species as a soul. Angels have not naturally a body united to them. They may assume bodies; but they do not want to assume bodies for themselves, but for us. The bodies assumed by angels are of thick air. The bodies they assume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life, but those which are common to inanimate things. Angels administer and govern every corporeal creature. God, an angel, and the soul are not contained in space, but contain it.

Such was the stuff with which the learned men of the Middle Ages seriously occupied their time and their talents. Now and then, as if by accident, a schoolman would originate a happy thought, a valuable idea. Now and then a diamond glittered among the rubbish; but rubbish and diamonds were all alike to these quibblers in threadbare cavils. The scholastic system, as a celebrated critic remarks, had "enthroned the dead letter and peopled the world with dead understandings." Yet it was not without some. redeeming qualities, and, in its own blind way, it doubtless accomplished that for future learning and research which could not have been so well accomplished by any other means.

"What, amidst all their errors, these scholastic philosophers undoubtedly did," says Green, the historian, "was to insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration and a more exact use of words, to introduce a clear and methodical treatment of all subjects into discussion, and, above all, to substitute an appeal to reason for unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this critical tendency, by the new clearness and precision which scholasticism gave to inquiry, that, in spite of the trivial questions with which it often concerned itself, it trained the human mind through the next two centuries to a temper which fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge that brought about the Renaissance. And it is to the same spirit of fearless inquiry, as well as to the strong popular sympathies which their very constitution necessitated, that we must attribute the influence which the friars undoubtedly exerted in the coming struggle between the people and the crown."

It is a pleasure to turn from the mass of Latin dissertations and chronicles and the endless imitations and argumentations which compose the greater part of the literature of this period to find something, however crude it may be, written in the native language of the people. We have already referred to the vernacular poetry of