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clericate with such nimbie steps, by Papal provisions obtained by insidious prayers, and also by the prayers, which may not berejected, of cardinals and great men, by the cupidity of friendsand relatives, who, bullding up Sion in blood, secure ecclesiastical dignities for their nephews and pupiis, besore they are
Alast by the fame disease which we are deploring, we See that the Palladium os Paris has been carried Og in these sad times of ours, wherein the Zeal of that nobie university, whoserays once shed light into every corner of the worid, has growntUhewarm, nay, is ali but froZen. There the pen os every scribe
author. They wrap up their doctrines in unskilled discourse, and are tosing ali propriety os logic, excepi that our En isti subiteties, whicli they denounce in public, are the subject of their surtive vigiis. Admirabie Minerva seems to bend her course to ali thenations of the earth, and reacheth from end to end mightily, that she may reveat herseis to ali mankind. We see that shelias atready visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks, the Arabs and the Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and now has happily come to Britain, themost nobie of istands, nay, rather a microcosm in iiself, thatshe may show herseis a deblor both to the Greelis and to the Barbarians. At which wondrous figlit it is conceived by mostmen, that as philosophy is now luhewarm in France, so hersoldiery are unmanned and languishing.
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the men os old, according to the counset of the Wise Man Eccles. XXXix): The wise man, hesays, will seek out the wisdom os ali the ancients, we have not thought fit to be misi ed into the opinion that thefirsi s unders of the aris have purged away ali crudeneSs, knowing that the discoveries of each of the faithsul, whenweighed in a faithsul balance, malles a tiny portion of Science, but that by the anxious investigations os a multitude os schol- ars, Cach as it were contributing his sitare, the mighty bodies of the sciences have grown by successiVe augmentations tothe immense buth that we now belloid. For the discipies, continuatly melling down the doctrines of their masters, and passing them again through the starnace, drove os the dross thathad been previousty overtooked, untii there came out refinedgold tried in a furnace of earlli, purified seven times to persection, and sta ined by no admiXture of error or doUbi. For not even Aristolle, although a man os gigantic intellect, in whom it pleased Nature to try how much of reason site could bestow upon mortality, and whom the Most High madeonly a litile lower than the angeis, sucked from his own fingers those wondersul volumes whicli the whole worid canhardly contain. But, on the contrary, with lynX-eyed penetration he had seen through the sacred books of the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Perstans and the Medes, ali of whicli learned Greece had transferredinto her treasuries. Whose true sayings he received, butsmoothed away their crudities, pruned their superfluities, supplied their deficiencies, and removed their errors. And heheld that we should give thanks not only to those who teach
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rightly, but even to those who err, as assording the way of more eastly investigating truth, as he plainly declares in thesecond book of his Metaphystcs. Thus many learned lawyers contributed to the Pandecis, many physicians to the Tegni, and it was by this means that Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his great work on Natural History, and Ptolemy
think of the authors of the sciences . For no man by himselfhas brought sortii any science, since belween the earliest StU- denis and those of the lalter times we find intermediaries, ancient is they be compared with our own age, bUt modernis we think of the s undations os learning, and these men wCconsider the most learned. What would Virgil, the clites poetamong the Latins, have achieved, is he had not despolied Theocritus, Lucretius, and Homer, and had not ploughedwith their heiser 8 What, uni ess again and again he had readsomewhat os Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence hecould by no means imitate 8 What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus, and in stiori thewhole troop of Latin writers have done, is they had not seenthe productions of Athens or the volumes of the GreeksξCertes, litile would Ierome, master of three languages, Ambrosius, Augustine, though he consesses that he haled Greek, or even Gregory, who is sald to have been wholly ignorant ofit, have contributed to the doctrine of the Church, is more learned Greece had not surnished them sirom iis stores. AsRome, watered by the streams of Greece, had earlier brought
sortii philosophers in the image of the Greelis, in like fas hionasterwards it produced doctors of the orthodox faith. The
by their Counciis, and established by the martyr lom of many. Yet their natural flowness, as it happens, turns to the gloryof the Latins, since as they were less learned in their studies,
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so they were less perverse in their errors. In truth, the Arian heresy had ali but eclipsed the whole Church; the Nestorianwichedness presumed to rave with blasphemous rage against the Virgin, sor it would have robbed the Queen os HeaVen, not in open figlit but in disputation, of her name and characteras Mother of God, unless the invincible champion Cyril, readyto do single batile, with the help of the Councit of Ephesus,
totalty destroyed primitive simplicity of doctrine, and blinded by the darkness of novel ty would fati into the bottonaless pit, uni ess He provide i sor them in His inscrutible prerogative,
whose wisdom is past rechoning. Let this suffce; sor here we reach the limit of our power of judgment. One thing, howeVer, we conclude from the premises, that the ignorance of the Greek longue is now a greathindrance to the study of the Latin writers, since without it the doctrines of the ancient authors, whether Christian or Gentile, cannot be understood. And we must come to a likejudgment as to Arabic in numerous astronomical treatifeS,
Wheres re we have talien care to provide a Greek as weli asa Hebrew grammar sor our scholars, with certain other alds,
by the help of whicli studious readers may greatly informiliemselves in the writing, rea ling, and Understanding of thesaid longues, although only the hearing of them can teach
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TUAT LUCRATIVE PRACTICE of positive law, designed sorthe dispensation of earthly things, the more usesul itis found by the children of this worid, so much theless does it aid the children os light in comprehend-ing the mysteries of holy writ and the secret sacraments of the faith, seeing that it disposes us peculiarly to the friendship of the worid, by whicli man, as S. Iames testifies, is made theenemy of God. Law indeed encourages rather than extin-gUishes the contentions of mankind, whicli are the result os Unbounded greed, by complicated laws, whicli can be turnedeither way; though we know that it was created by jurisconsulis and pious princes sor the purpose of assuaging these contentions. But in truth, as the fame science deals with contraries, and the power os reason can be Used to opposite en is, and at the fame time the human mind is more inclined to evit, it happens with the practifers of this science that they usuallydevote themselves to promoting contention rather than Peace, and instead os quoting laws according to the intent of the legislator, violently strain the language thereos to effect their
Wheres re, although the over-mastering love of books has possessed our mind tirom boyhood, and to rejoice in their deligitis has been our only pleasure, yet the appetite sor thebooks of the civit law took less hold of our affections, and weliave spent but litile labour and expense in acquiring Volumes of this hind. For they are usesul only as the scorpion in treacle, as Aristolle, the sun os science, has said os logic in his book De Pomo. We have noticed a certain mani sest disserence of nature between law and science, in that every science is de-
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lighted and destres to open iis inward paris and display the very heari os iis principies, and to fhow sortii the roois siromwhicli it buds and flourishes, and that the emanation os iis springs may be seen os ali men; for thus from the cognate and harmonious light of the truth of conclusion to principies, the
lark. But laws, on the contrary, since they are only humanenacimenis sor the regulation os sociat lisse, or the yohes of princes thrown over the necks of their subjecis, refuse to bebrought to the standarii os synteresis, the origin os equity, be- cause they seel that they possess more os arbitrary will than rationat judgment. Wheres re the judgment of the wise sortite most part is that the causes of laws are not a sit subject of discussion. In truth, many laws ac Uire force by mere cUStom,
not by syllogistic necessity, like the aris: as Aristolle, the Phoebus of the Schoois, urges in the second book of the Politics, where he consules the poticy of Hippodamus, whicli holds
old laws and estabiisti new ones is to weaken the sorce of those whicli exist. For whatever receives iis stability from use alone must necessarily be brought to naught by disitse. From whicli it is seen clearly enough, that as laws areneither aris nor sciences, so books of law cannot properly be called books of ari or science. Nor is this faculty which wemay catl by a special terna geologia, or the eurthly science, tobe properly numbered among the sciences . Now the books of the liberat aris are so usesul to the divine writings, that without their aid the intellect would vainly aspire to under- stand them.
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This is the whole reason why we took care to replace theantiquated volumes of the grammarians by improved codices, that we might mahe royal roads, by whicli our scholars intime to come might attain without stumbling to any science.
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i by the lovers of nahed truth may be repelled by a
us ac subject-matter we may learn a charming fashion ofspeech, or that where a fictilious but hecoming subject is handled, natural or historical truth is pursued under the guiseos allegorical fiction. Although it is triae that ali men naturalty destre knowledge, yet they do not ali take the fame pleasiare in learning. On thecontrary, when they have experienced the labour os study and find their senses wearled, most men inconsiderately fling away the niat, bessere they have broken the sheli and reached the kernel. For man is naturalty sond of two things, namely, free-dom sirom controi and some pleasure in his activity; sor which
truly asseris in the tenth book of the Ethics. Accordingly the wisdom of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of men by a kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva secretly lurhing beneath the mask of pleasure.
Ali poets sing to prosit or delight.
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And he has plainly intimated the fame thing in another Verse of the fame book, where he sayS:
we proceed to fhow that those who study them with properintent are not to be condemned in regard to them. For our ignorance of one single word prevenis the understanding ofa whole long sentence, as was assumed in the preVious chapter.
As now the sayings of the sainis frequently allude to the inventions of the poets, it must needs happen that through ournot knowing the poem reserred to, the whole meaning of theauthor is completely obscured, and assuredly, as Cassiodorus says in his book of the Institutes of Sacred Literature Thosethings are not to be considered trifles without which great things cannot come to pass. It sol lows theres re that throughignorance of poetry we do not Understand Ierome, A UgUstine, Boethius, Lactantius, Sidoni Us, and Very many others, a Catalogue of whom would more than fili a long chapter. The Venerable Bede has very clearly discussed and determined this doubisui potnt, as is related by that great compiter Gratian, the repeater of nUmerous authors, who is as confised in form as he was eager in collecting matter sor his compilation. Now he writes in his 37th section: Some read secular literature sor pleasure, taking delight in the inventions and elegant language of the poets; but others study this literature
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sor the salie of scholarship, that by their reading they may learn to detest the errors of the Gentiles and may devoutly apply what they find usesul in them to the use of sacred learn-ing. Such men study secular literature in a laudabie manner. So far BedC. Tahing this salutary instruction to heari, let the detractors of those who study the poets hences orth hold their peace, and let not those who are ignorant of these things require thalothers should be as ignorant as themselves, sor this is the consolation of the wretched. And theres re let every man see thathis own intentions are Upright, and he may thus make of any subjeci, observing the limitations os viriue, a study acceptableto God. And is se have found profit in poetry, as the great Virgil relates that he had done in Ennius, he will not have