by the appointment of an Inquisitor-General at Rome, with whom all branches of the tribunal—wherever the new corporation was admitted were to be in constant communication. Its bloody success might seem to fulfil the portent of Dominic's nativity. Legend relates that his mother, in the season of childbirth, dreamed that a dog was about to issue from her womb, bearing a lighted torch that would kindle the whole world. We shall see its officers branding the disbeliever with hot irons, wrenching fingers asunder, shattering bones,-doing it all in the name of the Teacher who had said, 'By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another,'-yet doing it perhaps in devotion to the truth as, in their human frailty, they conceive it.

The pagan philosopher fixed his eye upon virtue; the Christian, upon sin. The former sought to awaken the sentiment of admiration; the latter, that of remorse. The one, powerless to restrain vice, was fitted to dignify man; the other, to regenerate him. Those who are insensible to the nobleness of virtue, may be so convulsed by the fear of judgment as to renew the tenor of their lives.

The pagans asserted the immateriality of the soul, because they believed that the body must perish forever. The Fathers, with the exception of Augustine, maintained that the soul was simply a second body. The material view derived strength from the firm belief in punishment by fire. This was the central fact of religion. Its ghastly imagery left nature stricken and forlorn. The agitations of craters were ascribed to the great press of lost souls. In the hush of evening, when the peasant boy asked why the sinking sun, as it dipped beneath the horizon, kindled with such a glorious red, he was answered, in the words of an old. Saxon catechism, 'because it is then looking into hell.' The pen of the poet, the pencil of the artist, the visions of the monk, sustained the maddening terror with appalling vividness and minuteness. Through the vast of hell rolled a seething stream of sulphur, to feed and intensify the waves of fire. In the centre was Satan, bound by red-hot chains, on a burning gridiron. But his hands are free, and he seizes the damned, crushes them like grapes against his teeth, then sucks them down the fiery cavern of his throat. Hideous beings, of dreadful aspect and fantastic

form, with hooks of red-hot iron, plunge the lost alternately into fire and ice. Some of the souls are hung up by their tongues, others are sawn asunder between flaming iron posts, others gnawed by serpents, others with hammer and anvil are welded into a mass, others boiled and then strained through a cloth. A narrow bridge spans the abyss, and from this the shrieking souls are plunged into the mounting flames below.

But in every age there are some who stand upon the heights, above the ideal of their generation, and forecast the realized conceptions of the distant future. One of the most rationalistic minds of the fourth century was Pelagius, a British prelate. His persecutors were wont to say, 'Speak not to Pelagius, or he will convert you.' His principal tenets may be thus epitomized: 1. Adam was created mortal, and would have died whether he had sinned or not.

2. Adam's transgression affected only himself, not his posterity.

3. Mankind neither perish through Adam, nor are raised from the dead through Christ.

4. The law, as well as the Gospel, leads men to heaven.

5. Divine grace is conditioned on human worthiness.

6. Infants are in the same state as Adam before his fall. He would not, however, venture to deny the necessity of infant baptism. Severely pressed on this point by his opponents, he replied that baptism was necessary to wash away the guilt of the child's pettishness! One striking example of a bold free spirit in the tenth century was the famed Erigena. Alone in the middle ages, he maintained the figurative interpretation of hell-fire.

In 1277, propositions like the following were professed by philosophers at Paris: God is not triune and one, for trinity is incompatible with simplicity; the world and humanity are eternal; the resurrection of the body must not be admitted by philosophers; the soul, when separated from the body, cannot suffer by fire; theological discourses are based on fables; a man who has in himself moral and intellectual virtues, has all that is necessary to happiness.

It is gratifying to know that St. Augustine, in answering this argument, declared distinctly that the crying of a baby is not sinful, and therefore does not deserve eternal

damnation.

It may be needless to add explicitly- what the theology of the past so plainly suggests in the changed atmosphere of the present - that every age creates its image of God; and the image, conforming to the conceptions of its creator, is the measure of its civilization. This child shall one day grow up to manhood, and sing lofty psalms with noble human voice.

Ethics. A nation or an age may be without moral science, but never, without moral distinctions. The languages and literature of the world indicate that at all times, among all peoples, the idea of right and wrong has been recognized and applied. We shall find ethical notions, ethical life, powerfully operative, in mediæval England, but no ethical system. When society is semibarbarous, the inculcation of morality devolves avowedly and exclusively upon the priests. Motives of action require to be materialized. Theology is the groundwork of morality. The moral faculty, too weak of itself to be a guide of conduct, must be reenforced by the rewards and punishments of religion,-the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell. The propensity to evil, in consequence of original sin, is itself sin. The foundation of the moral law is the Divine will. Thus Scotus asserted that the good is good, not by its own inherent nature, but because God commands it. But there appear from time to time men who, rising above surrounding circumstances, anticipate the moral standard of a later age, and inculcate principles before their appropriate civilization has dawned. Thus Abelard, emphasizing the subjective aspect of conscience, represents that moral good and evil reside not in the act but in the intention. It is only the consenting to evil which is sin. The pure hate sin from love of virtue, not from a slavish fear of pain inflicted. The good is good, not because God commands it; but He commands it because it is good. God is the absolutely highest good, and that, through virtue, should be the aim of human endeavor. The civilizations of the future may estimate their relative excellence by their nearness to this eminence of thought!

Science. Before the Conquest, in the popular series of Solomon and Saturn, it was asked, as a question that engaged English curiosity, 'What is the substance of which Adam, the first man, was made?' and the answer was:

'I tell thee of eight pounds by weight.' 'Tell me what they are called.'-'I tell thee the first was a pound of earth, of which his flesh was made; the second was a pound of fire, whence his blood came, red and hot; the third was a pound of wind, and thence his breathing was given to him; the fourth was a pound of welkin, thence was his unsteadiness of mood given him; the fifth was a pound of grace, whence was given him his growth; the sixth was a pound of blossoms, whence was given him the variety of his eyes; and seventh was a pound of dew, whence he got his sweat; the eighth was a pound of salt, and thence were his tears salt.'

From this we may infer and estimate the rest. The same question and answer will be found in The Maisters of Oxford's Catechism, written in fifteenth-century English! What are the condition and hope of science, when inquisitive children, who delight in riddles and enigmas, reduce it to a religious catechism? The overwhelming importance attached to theology diverted to it all those intellects which in another condition of society would have been employed in the investigations of science. Everything was done to cultivate habits the opposite of scientific,-fear and faith. Innovation of every kind was regarded as a crime. Superior knowledge, shown in speculation, was called heresy; shown in the study of mathematics or of nature, it was called magic,-a proof that such pursuits were rare. In the thirteenth century, few students of geometry proceeded farther than the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid,—the famous asses' bridge. What must be the state of the natural sciences, when the science of demonstration, which is their foundation, is neglected? Indeed, the name of the mathematics was given chiefly to astrology. Mathematicians were defined to be 'those who, from the position of the stars, the aspect of the firmament, and the motions of the planets, discover things that are to come.' It was universally believed that the whole destiny of man is determined by the star that presides over his nativity. Many could not, as they imagined, safely appear in public, or eat, or bathe, unless they had first carefully consulted the almanac, to ascertain the place and appearance of their particular planet. Comets and meteors foreshadowed the fate of empires; and the signs of the zodiac served only to predict the career of individuals and the development of communities. But as these constant observations, and the construction of instruments required for making them, led to astronomy; so alchemy, which aimed to transmute all metals into gold, or find the elixir of life, led to chemistry. An alchem

ist records that in a secret chamber of the Tower of London, he performed in the royal presence the experiment of transmuting some crystal into diamond, of which Edward I, he says, caused some little pillars to be made for the tabernacle of God. The healing art, from being practised only by women, who employed charms and spells with their herbs and decoctions, gradually became the province of priests, who trusted to relics, holy water, and other superstitions. Medicine had in the thirteenth century been taken in a great measure out of the hands of the clergy, though it was still in the main a mixture of superstition and quackery. The distinction between the physician and the apothecary was understood, and surgery also began to be followed as a separate branch.

With Edward the Confessor, about the middle of the eleventh century, began the extraordinary usage of touching, to cure the disease called the 'King's Evil,'-a usage that continued for nearly seven hundred years. When Malcolm and Macduff have fled to England, it is in the palace of Edward the Confessor that Malcolm inquires of an English doctor,

All which proves, if anything, that in the treatment of disease faith is more potent than physic.

The supposed influence of the stars, with a crowd of superstitions, naturally followed from the geocentric theory of the