perly of no nation; for all thought was European then, even more perhaps than now. Nevertheless, as speculation, in whatever mould it might be cast, was no doubt coloured by national character, and as the theories of a master would be best appreciated in his own country, we can scarcely take better exemplars of medieval training than Anselm, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham, three representative minds of three centuries. Anselm, indeed, was no Englishman by birth; but he was trained in Normandy, and wrote the greatest of his works to solve the scruples that perplexed the brothers of Bec. His elevation by Rufus to the English primacy extended his influence over the conquered island.

The common view of Anselm's philosophy is derived from his Monologium. In that work he grapples with the difficulties of theism, and constructs a semi-Platonic system on arguments drawn from the facts of his consciousness. Since we all have a vague desire for something which we agree in calling good, this object of common aspirations must have an absolute and independent existence. Even if there be several causes of good, these causes must have a common unity. Moreover, the mere fact that there are certain ideas which by their nature transcend finite experience, the belief in any infinite Being, is a proof that there is some existence independent of the mind, and yet underlying all consciousness. The mind, therefore, in conceiving God does also demonstrate His existence. And in proportion as it is itself perfect, as it has understanding and memory, and the love of its own true nature, will it be the mirror and image of the Trinity. Reason, therefore, by itself is not a sufficient guide to truth; it is the instrument by which truth is known, but it will only act with certainty in proportion as the whole character is in rapport with Deity. We may even say that the senses are more trustworthy than the intellect, for our mistakes are more often the results of wrong inference than of wrong observation. For instance, when we seem to see the lower part of a stick in the water bent, it is not the eye that is at fault, but the reason that does not allow for a change in the medium. It follows that we must train our thought by all intellectual exercise, and direct it with a single-hearted love of truth, if we wish to understand the realities of life and the world. Ultimately, therefore, the will is the great efficient of sound knowledge as of a right life. How, then, can we stand firm since the will is weak? It is never so weak, says Anselm, that it cannot resist temptation if it will. It is by its very essence the power of working out God's law for the sake of that law. And whatever in this philosophy may seem too stoical and exalted for the level of practice is softened down by the

knowledge that the philosopher was also a theologian: he held as a barren theory that man had power of himself to subdue evil, but he was certain that he could do it with God's grace. Rude and violent as the eleventh century was, it at least produced men; the conception that vice and dishonour were an accident of climate, or a taint in the blood, would have been disdained for its cowardice even by those whose practical ethics were not the purest. The accepted doctrine was that of idealists, who believed in a splendid ancestry, and in a grand future for their race. It led no doubt to a certain hardness towards the criminal; but it based life on the distinction of right and wrong. "Away with the excuses of sin," says Bradwardine. "It is I, it is I who have erred; not fate, nor fortune, nor the devil, for he could not constrain me; it was I who consented to his persuasions." Not, indeed, that there were not some blackguards (maligni) who seemed great and distinguished men in their age, and who proved that Mars determined homicide, and that men were rogues by planetary conjunction. But these men never touched the heart of society; their works, their very names, have perished; and on the muster-roll of the schoolmen we may find many blockheads, but no casuist.

We trace the result of these theories curiously enough in Bacon, the second great original mind that influenced English thought. The conception of science as a totality in connection with the idea of God as the source of being, is the link that unites his labours. But he has not, like Vincent of Beauvais, anticipated the modern conception of an encyclopædia; he aims rather at the codification of thought, and at the reduction of all knowledge to its first principles. If these can once be clearly laid down, he is confident that the results, which it has cost himself thirty years of labour to achieve, may be condensed into some two years in the life of a schoolboy. There can of course be no question that Bacon's own method was not satisfactory. Himself a geometrician by habit and a Platonist by training, he combined his results into a curious system, half logic, half optics, which assumed that our knowledge was not of things, but of their species (at once manifestations and distinctions), and proposed apparently to give a calculus for the differences of these. But while he failed in constructing a theory of knowledge, Bacon's deep insight into the relations of the sciences made him a keen critic of existing deficiencies, and an almost unequalled prophet of future capabilities. His strictures on philology and medicine; his belief in the power of man to vary the laws of life; his discovery of gunpowder and of the camera lucida; and his boast of the more wonderful treasures that science had yet to disclose,-of ships that would

sail against the tide, and carriages that would run without horses,-powerfully impressed the fancy and stimulated the thought of his contemporaries. During three centuries, when his works were almost lost and were quite unknown, the curious passage in which he unfolds the future of discovery was preserved in a popular romance, and treated by antiquaries as an old wife's tale. But with all this Bacon was the man of his times; the friend of Grosteste, a churchman and a mystic, not an inductive philosopher. He desired wisdom not of itself, but as a means to the knowledge and love of God. Had he lived in the times and city of Savonarola, he would certainly have cast his treatises on the pyre which consumed the art of Florence and the secular learning of Greece. From the depths of the unlettered solitude to which the jealousy of his order condemned him, he seems to have sighed only for the kingdom of Christ.

Yet it may be observed in passing, that while the influence of their Christian faith upon these medieval teachers was absorbing and exclusive, it was not altogether sectarian. Bacon, Ockham, and Dante repeatedly praise the virtues of pagan philosophers. The admission of Trajan, Riphæus, and Statius into that paradise from which popes were excluded, will be remembered by all readers of the Commedia. It was no exceptional tenderness that relaxed the rigour of the Florentine poet. Ockham expressly examines the limits of that error which destroys the soul, and decides that no man can be called a heretic except he who refuses to be convinced on the first articles of religion. Taking the case of ancient philosophers who were pagans and yet good men (he specifies Job), he infers that they were certainly Christians at heart, since every man who honestly tries to live according to reason must find out truth. Bacon even goes so far as to place Seneca and Aristotle very high in the ethical scale above his own contemporaries. The mere fact that the Church was undisputed in Europe, and appeared destined to eternity, seemed to justify a large tolerance towards those who had been born before Christ, and a free censure of those who disgraced the fold. There was no reserve because there was no fear; and this spirit lasted down to the Reformation. Putting aside the semi-pagan Platonists of the Renaissance, we find a parish-priest like Zuingli classing Theseus among the patriarchs. The scathing irony with which Bossuet visits him for this a little loses its point, when we remember that the true tradition of the Church before Trent was rather with the Swiss reformer than with the Gallican controversialist.

But Ockham's belief in reason had a wider application than to saving the souls of philosophers. Believing, like all the

successors of Anselm, that there were universal ideas by which the structure of the world was determined, he carefully distinguished these from the substances or individualities of the different objects in nature. In other words, while he held to a general scheme of creation, he believed that its several parts were so separated by little differences, that their classification was in a measure arbitrary. The doctrine is chiefly important as showing an increased independence of thought, and a diminished value for systems. This tendency bore abundant fruit in politics. No modern Protestant could assert more strongly than Ockham does that God's truth is independent of the Church, and that the Church itself is independent of its government. The great body of the faithful may at any time try to depose and otherwise punish a pope. If they choose to act through the emperor, he may administer their powers. And if Christ acknowledged the authority of Pilate, how should the pope, who is only Christ's vicar, refuse to stand trial before the Roman emperor. But if these doctrines seem Erastian at first sight, they were not so to the thinker of the Middle Ages. Ockham's conception of the empire was an idea that had never been realised the conception of monarchy, not on feudal principles having regard to property, but derived from God as a government of persons with living souls. The phrase of Wycliffe and Huss, that "dominion is founded in grace," will best explain the theory which survived the persecutions of two hundred years, and was finally ruined by its triumphs under Calvin and Cromwell. Society had recoiled in disgust from a church governed like a lay corporation; it rebelled against a commonwealth of saints.

But our concern is with the times in which these theories had only begun to ferment. The epoch which could produce such idealists as the three we have mentioned, and which could elaborate such theories of the relations of man to God and nature, and of the fabric of society, would be in itself sufficiently remarkable. But these men are no isolated fact. They are part of a great body of teachers whose doctrines were taught in every university, and carried to every convent by wandering scholars. The main results of their speculation passed into the popular faith and into daily life. The peasant, who could not discuss accident and substance, was yet well aware that the mysterious presence of Christ in the Host was something unconnected with its colour and form and taste. The great questions at issue between Church and State were as well understood by the partisans of Becket against the king and feudalism, as by Guelph and Ghibelline at Florence. The battle passed into the courts of law, and the most subtle intellects of the age discussed the

question of universal or local jurisprudence; and by a reflex process the thought of the age, penetrated by these speculations, reproduced itself in the wonderful cycle of medieval romance, where the fables of children are instinct with a hidden earnestness. The legends that attach to the names of Arthur and Charlemagne had as deep a meaning to the men of the twelfth century as the story of the siege of Troy to the Greeks, who remembered Marathon or saw Salamis. Nor is this a mere matter of hypothesis. It is no question whether a single book, such as Turpin's Life of Charlemagne, was written, as Mr. Sharon Turner supposes, to promote a great European object like the Crusades, or, as Vossius surmised, to bring devotees to the shrine of a particular saint; Turpin's book is only one of a thousand. Thus, for instance, to take a subject of nearer interest to our→ selves, the Morte d'Arthur, in its present form, is only a com pilation from several old romances-the Iliad of the Middle Ages, but never, alas, rewritten by a Homer. Such as it is, however, it gives us the great commonplaces of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Love and war and devotion are the sources of interest; but deeper than all there lies the splendid concep tion of a Christian commonwealth, in which the life of the true citizen, the knight, is harmonised with the severest requisitions of Christian faith. Sinlessness as much as daring is a condition of success; and the achievement of the Holy Graal, the emblem of sacrifice, is crowned by the conqueror's death. Similarly the whole fabric of Arthur's royalty is overthrown by Guenever's sin; and the voices of adventure and glory seem to die away in the cloister and the grave. In this, as in the old Norse mythology, as in Piers Plowman's Vision, and a hundred minor instances, the idealist seems to give judgment against himself; he paints the transient success of an idea and the final triumph of wrong; but, in fact, his confidence is deeper than his despair; he believes that there are greater things than life, or earth, or success, and acquiesces in his own defeat because he only cared for the struggle, and because he knows that the cause is eternal.

Now it is worth while to observe that we are not reduced to conjectures as to the circulation of romantic or other literature in the Middle Ages. We know that actors and minstrels were an important element in the population of every town, and were sometimes hired to act upon public opinion, much as a modern minister might subsidise a newspaper. The same stories, even the same Latin songs, meet us in countries most remote from one another on the banks of the Neckar and of the Thames. The number of students in our universities, at the time when they were the great grammar-school of the country, has perhaps

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