mere exercise's sake; or else was eager to try their edge upon whatever subject came in their way. Hence, on the one hand, the endless logical combats, the twistings and turnings of the syllogism in every shape, the invention of innumerable sophisms and solutions of sophisms; on the other hand, that undue extension of rational methods to objects of faith which we have ascribed to Abelard. The danger was great; already Abelard's definitions and explanations trembled on the verge of heresy, if they did not go beyond it; but the ground-tone of his philosophy was still more inconsistent with a traditional scheme of belief than any particular expressions.

8. At this crisis St. Bernard appeared to check the growing evil. He turned back the stream of philosophy, or rather he forced it back within its own limits, and forbade it to encroach upon a domain which did not belong to it. In answering Abelard, he denied that Faith and Reason were identical, or that the doctrines of faith could be discovered and proved independently by any argumentative process. The objects of faith, he said, are given to us from above; they are revealed by God exactly because it is impossible that they should be discovered by man. 'Quid magis contra rationem, quam ratione rationem conari transcendere?' A conference between the two, to be held at Soissons, was agreed to; but when the time came for vindicating his philosophy, Abelard's heart failed him, and he appealed to the Pope. He was on the whole leniently treated; he seems to have had misgivings that he had wandered into a wrong path; and his life of struggle and suffering found its close in the peaceful seclusion of Cluny, whose abbot, Peter the Venerable, generously sheltered and protected his unhappy friend.

We must not suppose, however, that St. Bernard's influ ence as a thinker was mainly of a negative sort. On the contrary, this last, and not least eloquent, of the Fathers, scarcely ever employed his penetrating and versatile genius except for some end of practical edification. Whether he addresses his own monks at Clairvaux, or writes to Pope Eugenius, or kindles the crusading zeal of nations, or counsels the Knights of the Temple, or composes Latin hymns, the evident aim of his labours is always to enlighten, animate, and do good to his neighbour. His Latin is admirable; far superior to that of St. Anselm; and the charm of genius unites with the halo of saintliness in giving attractiveness to his writings.

9. Scholasticism, then, made what we may call a false start in the school of Bec; its true commencement dates a little later, and from Paris. Peter Lombard, the Master of the

Sentences, hit upon the most convenient method of presenting theology under philosophical forms. The data of religion-the substance of revealed truth-be took from tradition; and reserved to philosophy the subordinate office of presenting it in a connected form, of deducing inferences, solving difficulties, and harmonizing apparent discrepancies. The Book of Sentences, which appeared in 1151, is a complete body of theology in four books. It commences with God-His being and attributes ;then treats of the Creation, first of angels, then of man; of the Fall, and original and actual sin. In the third book it treats of the remedy of the Fall, the Incarnation; of the theological virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the fourth, of the sacraments, purgatory, the resurrection, the last judgment, and the state of the blessed. All these doctrines are given in the form of 'sentences,' extracted from the writings of the Fathers. The sentences are interspersed with numerous 'quæstiones,' in which the author proposes and attempts to solve any difficulties that may arise. The conveniences of this plan are manifest, and it was at once adopted. Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century,-Duns Scotus, and William of Occam in the fourteenth,-whatever may be their differences, agree in treating theology as a whole, in seeking its data from authority, not from speculation, and in confining themselves to the discussion of special questions. Extraneous impulses were not wanting. The metaphysical and ethical works of Aristotle became known in the West about this period, chiefly through the commentaries of the celebrated Spanish Arab Averrhoes (1120–1198), and powerfully stimulated the speculative genius of the schoolmen. But the admiration of the Greek philosopher degenerated into an extravagance, and his authority was at last considered infallible in the schools. It was as if the age, in its horror of losing its way, would have a sheet anchor for the mind as well as for the soul, and chain the progressive intellect of man to the Aristotelian philosophy, because the unchanging interests of the soul demanded fixity and certainty in the eternal Gospel. So it ever is, that a true and valuable principle, once found, is sure to be strained in the application.

10. The scholastic method, having thus taken its rise in Paris, soon spread to England, and was prosecuted there with equal ardour. Some of the greatest of the schoolmen were British-born, although they reaped their highest honours, and spent the greater part of their lives, abroad. Alexander Hales,

the Irrefragable, the master of St. Bonaventure, was the author of the first important commentary on the work of Peter Lombard,

and died at Paris in 1245. Duns Scotus, the subtle doctor, whose birthplace, and even the date of whose death, are not certainly known, but who was, at any rate, a native of the British Isles, after lecturing at Paris with extraordinary success, is said to have died at Bologna in 1308. William of Occam, styled the Invincible, passed the greater part of his manhood at the court of the Emperor in Germany, and died there in the year 1347. In the great struggle then proceeding between imperial and papal claims, Occam sided with the Emperors. He was also in his day the head of the school of the Nominalists, a section of the schoolmen which maintained that our abstract ideas had no realities corresponding to them in external existence, but merely corresponded in thought to universal terms in language, that is to generalized expressions, arrived at by the abstraction of differences.

Historians and Chroniclers.

11. The great intellectual movement which we have been describing expended its force chiefly on questions of theology and philosophy; but it also caused other subjects to be treated more intelligently and studied more earnestly. A great number of historians and chroniclers flourished in England during this period. All of these were ecclesiastics, most of them monks; and all wrote in the Latin language. With the exception of Marianus Scotus, Ordericus Vitalis, and Ranulph Higden, they all confined themselves to recording the succession of events in their own country. There is no occasion to seek out motives and particular inducements impelling the learned of any country to historical composition. All men are eager to know the past; to hear about the deeds of their forefathers; to take their bearings, as it were, from the elevation to which history raises them, and from a survey of the road along which their nation, or race, or class, have come, deduce more trustworthy conclusions as to the unknown future which lies before them. If, however, in regard to the principal writers, any special reasons must be given, it might be mentioned that Willam of Malmesbury, and his contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, took as their literary model the Venerable Bede, the father of modern history in the West: thas Richard the Canon records with natural complacency the chivalrous adventures of King Richard, in whose train le visited Palestine at the time of the third Crussde: and that Geoffrey of Monmouth and Caradoc, when clothing in a grave historic dress the dating fictions which had come down the

stream of their popular poetry, may have thought to indemnify their Welsh countrymen for recent defeat and present inferiority, by telling them of the imaginary victories of Arthur over Saxon hosts.

Some account must be given of the chief historians or chroniclers in each century of our period. The twelfth century is the richest ; then flourished Eadmer, William of Malmesbury, Ordericus Vitalis, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Simeon of Durham, Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, Giraldus Cambrensis, Benedictus Abbas, Ralph de Diceto, and Roger de Hoveden. In the thirteenth century the leading names are Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris; in the fourteenth, Nicholas Trivet, and Ranulph Higden.

12. Eadmer, the faithful and trusted follower of St. Anselm, wrote a chronicle to which he gave the name Historia Novorum, terminating in 1122. For the reigns of the two sons of the Conqueror it is the most valuable work that we possess; it was printed by Selden in 1623.

13. The chronicle of Ingulfus, with its various continuations, extends from about 650 to 1486. It is chiefly occupied with the history of Croyland, an abbey founded in the eighth century by Ethelbald King of Mercia, at the place where had stood the cell of his friend and confessor, St. Guthlac the anchorite. Ingulfus was abbot from 1075 to 1109, but the part of the chronicle which he wrote ends in 1090. The first continuation was by Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath, who died at a great age about the year 1198; a letter to him from the abbot, Henry de Longchamp, asking him to undertake the work, with his reply, in which he explicitly states his purpose of continuing the work of Ingulfus, are still extant. When therefore we find Sir Francis Palgrave setting down the said work as 'a historical novel,' 'a monkish forgery of the thirteenth or fourteenth century,' we can only wonder at this extravagance of scepticism; at the same time there can be little doubt that nearly all the charters and deeds of grant, in which the chronicle abounds, are spurious.

14. William of Malmesbury, a monk in the famous monastery of that name, founded by the Irish St. Maidulf in the seventh century, dedicated his Historia Regum Angliæ to Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a natural son of Henry I., and the chief patron of literature in those times. He congratulates

himself on being the 'first who, since Beda, has arranged a con tinuous history of the English.' Being, as he tells us, of Norman descent by one parent, and of Saxon by the other, he writes of the actions of both impartially. Certain modern historians

have, perhaps, made too much of the alienation caused between Saxon and Norman by the difference of race. The English knew that William of Normandy professed to have as good a title to the crown as Harold; it was chiefly the unjust laws, not the persons, of him and his sons, to which they had a rooted objection; and it was as the tyrants of their fields,' not as Normans, that they detested his followers. Malmesbury himself, though half Norman, evidently regards himself as a thorough Englishman; the history of England, from the landing of Hengist and Horsa, is his history. Archbishop Lanfranc has a special devotion to Dunstan, a Saxon saint; and even the Saxon chronicler can freely praise the Norman abbot of Peterborough, if he is a man of worth and stands up for the rights of the monastery. Malmesbury's history comes down to the year 1142;-he is supposed to have died soon afterwards. Besides writing the history of the English kings, he also compiled an account of the English bishops,-De Gestis Pontificum, composed biographies of St. Aldhelm and other saints, and left behind him various other works, of which some are still in MS., while several are not now known to exist.

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15. Ordericus Vitalis, though his father was a native of Orleans, and he himself lived the greater part of his life in Normandy, speaks of himself as an Englishman' (Bk. v. ch. 1). His father Odelirius, a clerk, and a member of the household of Roger of Montgomeri, accompanied his lord to England at the time of the Conquest. He seems to have married an Englishwoman, by whom he had three sons, Orderic (born in 1075), Everard, and Benedict. His wife died, and Odelirius soon afterwards resolved to give up the remainder of his own life, as well as two of his sons, to the service of God. With Benedict, he took the monastic habit in a convent founded on his own land near Shrewsbury; Orderic, when but a boy ten years old, was given over to the monks of St. Evroult in Normandy. Writing some fifty-five years afterwards, the historian says: Wherefore, O glorious God, who badest Abraham to depart from his own land and his father's house, and the society of his kinsmen, thou didst put it into the heart of my father Odelirius to separate me entirely from himself, and devote me, in body and soul, to thee. He therefore, amidst floods of tears, delivered me, also weeping bitterly, to the monk Reynold, and, sending me into exile for the love of thee, never saw me afterwards. Being then a young boy, it was not for me to oppose my father's will; and he promised me, for his part, that if I became a monk I should partake with the Innocents the joys of Paradise. . . I was ten years old when I crossed the British sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile,