spirit of the Universities' threatened feudalism, their
spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer
seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension which
mediaeval usage gave to the word "orders" gathered the whole educated
world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be their age or
proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay
responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to
the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This
ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.
The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the
University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it
had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the
Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then
situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only
rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them. The
sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of
those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto
absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of
classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a
greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in
society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of
denial into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for
reason a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a smile
the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these,
Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new
culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the "World's
Wonder" of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an
infidel. A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by
the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact
with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer an
accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere
Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and against what
obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.
"Slowly," he tells us, "has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle
come into use among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his
Metaphysics, with the Comment