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 leniently treated; his own conscience seems to have told him that he had wandered into a wrong path; and he died a penitent in the monastery of Cluny (1142).

We must not suppose, however, that St. Bernard's influence 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 fascination to his eloquent pages.

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 right method of presenting theology under philosophical forms. The data of religion

then

-the substance of revealed truth-he took from tradition; and reserved to philosophy the subordinate office of presenting it in a connected form, of deducing inferences, solving difficulties, and harmonising 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; treats of the Creation, first of angels, then of man; of the Fall, and of 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, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas, 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.

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 most 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.

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.

C

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 and Ordericus Vitalis (the latter of whom, though born in England, was of French extraction), 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 William of Malmesbury, the best of them all, with his contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, took as their literary model the Venerable Bede, the father of modern history in the West;—that Geoffrey Vinesauf records with natural complacency the chivalrous adventures of King Richard, in whose train he visited Palestine at the time of the third Crusade; and that Geoffrey of Monmouth and Caradoc, when clothing in a grave historic dress the floating 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.

It may be worth while to collect a few facts concerning the best historians in each century of our period. For the twelfth century, we will take William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth; for the thirteenth, Geoffrey Vinesauf, Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris; for the fourteenth, Nicholas Trivet and Ranulph Higden.

1. 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 Anglia 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 Bede, has arranged a continuous 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.

2. Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the famous Historia Britonum, was a Welshman, as his name implies, and was raised in 1152 to the bishopric of St. Asaph. He also dedicated his history to Robert, Earl of Gloucester. It professes to be a translation of "a very ancient book in the British tongue," brought out of Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, in which the actions of all the kings of Britain were related, from the Trojan Brutus "down to Cadwallader, the son of Cadwallo." Nothing further is known of this "very ancient book," and not a