aving equal claims to their
obedience and respect; alas! for poor old weak tradition, those
fabrications of man's faulty reason were found, with all their orthodoxy,
to clash woefully in scriptural interpretation. Here was a dilemma for
the monkish student! whose vow of obedience to patristical guidance was
thus sorely perplexed; he read and re-read, analyzed passage after
passage, interpreted word after word; and yet, poor man, his laborious
study was fruitless and unprofitable! What bible student can refrain from
sympathizing with him amidst these torturing doubts and this crowd of
contradiction, but after all we cannot regret this, for we owe to it more
than my feeble pen can write, so immeasurable have been the fruits of
this little unheeded circumstance. It gave birth to many a bright
independent declaration, involving pure lines of scripture
interpretation, which appear in the darkness of those times like fixed
stars before us; to this, in Saxon days, we are indebted for the labors
of AElfric and his anti-Roman doctrines, whose soul also sympathized with
a later age by translating portions of the Bible into the vulgar tongue,
thus making it accessible to all classes of the people. To this we are
indebted for all the good that resulted from those various heterodoxies
and heresies, which sometimes disturbed the church during the dark ages;
but which wrought much ultimate good by compelling the thoughts of men to
dwell on these important matters. Indeed, to the instability of the
fathers, as a sure guide, we may trace the origin of all those efforts of
the human mind, which cleared the way for the Reformation, and relieved
man from the shackles of these spiritual guides of the monks.

But there were many cloistered Christians who studied the bible
undisturbed by these shadows and doubts, and who, heedless of patristical
lore and saintly wisdom, devoured the spiritual food in its pure and
uncontaminating simplicity--such students, humble, patient, devoted, will
be found crowding the monastic annals, and yielding good evidence of the
same by the holy tenor of their sinless lives, their Christian charity
and love.

But while so many obtained the good title of an "_Amator Scripturarum_,"
as the bible student was called in those monkish days, I do not pretend
to say that the Bible was a common book among them, or that every monk
possessed one--far different indeed was the case--a copy of the Old and
New Testament often s