fault, and the consequence is that on disputed points it is more
important to know what party a historian belongs to than what he
writes.

Is it not time that at least our educators should cease accepting this
old traditional opinion with regard to the times before the
reformation so-called, and get at the truth in the matter, or as near
it as possible. These educators of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were zealous and earnest beyond cavil. That everyone admits.
It is supposed, however, that they were ridiculously ignorant and
superstitious. Only those who are themselves ridiculously ignorant and
superstitious, for the real meaning of superstition is persistence in
accepting a supposed truth that is a survival (_superstes_) from a
previous state of knowledge, after the reasons for its acceptance have
been shown to be groundless, will continue to believe this absurd
proposition. If the educator of the modern day will only study with
the sympathy they deserve, the lives of the earliest educators of
modern times, the professors, the officials, and the ecclesiastical
authorities as well as the Papal patrons of the universities of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we shall hear no more of the
Church during the Middle Ages having been opposed to education, nor to
science, nor to any other department of human knowledge.

{167}

THE CHURCH AND SURGERY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

It is with regard to surgery that the opposition of the Church is
sometimes supposed to have been most serious in its effects upon the
progress of medical science and its applications for the relief of
human suffering. President White has stated this, as usual, very
emphatically in certain paragraphs of his chapter on From Miracles to
Medicine, especially under the caption of Theological Discouragement
of Medicine. He says, for instance:--

"As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals of
pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical science
down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility of the Church to the
shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from surgical practice
the great body of her educated men; hence surgery remained down to
the fifteenth century a despised profession, its practice continued
largely in the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period
the name 'barber-surgeon' was a survival of this. In such surgery,
the application of various ordures reliev