l as in France. It
was at this time that the doctrine of Averroes was attacked by Aquinas;
and though the amount of its influence can hardly be estimated, we have
the means of tracing the growth of dislike to its author in Christian
lands, which is an incidental probability of the increasing danger to
Christianity arising from it. In the middle of the thirteenth century the
Franciscans study him without evincing hatred. About the end of it Dante
describes him still without reproaches, though he places him in the
Inferno along with other heathen philosophers:(295) but half a century
later, in the pictures of the last judgment which exist in several states
of Italy, each a little historic satire with its own peculiarities, we
find Averroes depicted as the type of incredulity and blasphemy. In a
fresco of the Campo Santo of Pisa, executed about 1335, when perhaps the
recent canonization of Aquinas as an opponent of Averroes had directed
attention to the influence of the Arabic philosopher, Orcagna has placed a
separate _bolgia_, the lowest in his hell, for three persons,--Mahomet,
Anti-christ, and Averroes.(296)

The disbelief of immortality was however too obvious a temptation in a
corrupt age, as well as too generally spread, especially in the next
century, to be wholly attributable to the subtle influence of the doctrine
of absorption of the Arabic philosophy. A mediaeval English poet(297)
attributes incredulity to the higher classes of his age; and Dante, in
that poem which is a romantic picture of his contemporaries or
predecessors, when devoting one circle of the Inferno to the habitation of
the "more than a thousand" of those "who make the soul die with the body,"
attributes the cause of the sin to Epicureanism, a moral and not an
intellectual cause.(298) It is a sad and humiliating thought to reflect
also that a cause which must have increased incredulity, if it did not
create it, was to be found in the vices of the clergy, especially near the
papal court of Avignon. Most of the distinguished laymen whom history
records as evincing unbelief belonged to the political party, which strove
to repress the political centralization and temporal authority of the
church; and it is to be feared that the causes just named were the means
of repelling more deeply from religion the hearts of such persons whose
interests or whose vices already led them to hate its promoters.(299)

We have thus collected the few traces which mark