sted admiration of Mahometan literature,
and affection for his Mahometan subjects who afforded him aid in carrying
out the plans of civilization which his powerful mind had formed;(291) and
it was his indifference to a crusade, induced probably by other causes,
which led the Pope to impute to him the blasphemy just quoted. The contact
with the East, half a century later, in like manner afforded the pretext
for fastening a charge of unbelief on the Knights Templars.(292) Contact
with Mahometans had thus, we have reason to believe, created a latitude of
thought in many parts of Christendom.

The same idea of the comparison of Christianity with other creeds
reappears in a tale of Boccaccio,(293) in which the three great religions
are represented under the allegory of three rings which a father gave to
his children, so exactly alike that the judges could not decide which was
the genuine one of the three, and which the copies. It is also illustrated
by the tradition of the existence of a book, entitled "De Tribus
Impostoribus," which has been attributed almost to every great name in the
middle ages which was conspicuous for opposition to the claims of the
church, or for uneasiness under the pressure of its dogmatic teaching. The
existence of the book is legendary: no one ever saw it: and the two
distinct works which now bear the title can be shown to have been composed
respectively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: but the legend is
a witness to the fact of the existence of the idea which the book was said
to embody. (20)

It is perhaps in some degree to the influence of the doctrine of
absorption in the Mahometan philosophy of Averroes, a commentator on
Aristotle, who was the contemporary of Abelard, that we may attribute the
disbelief in immortality to which we find a tendency toward the close of
the thirteenth and during the fourteenth century.(294) Though it is
probable that the indirect influence of the Arabic philosophy was felt
earlier, in stimulating a demand for inquiry, a disposition to make dogmas
submit to the test of reason, which has been shown to be the earliest form
of mediaeval doubt; yet it was not until the thirteenth century that the
works of Averroes definitely influenced scholasticism, through the
teaching of Michael Scot and Alexander Hales, and by means of the rapidity
of intellectual communication which forms so singular a feature in
mediaeval history, spread their influence in Italy as wel