ed
upon as a marvel of the human intellect by the Vivarian monks, for
whose benefit it was composed, and to whom it revealed, in the Psalms
which they were daily and nightly intoning, refutations of all the
heresies that had ever racked the Church, and the rudiments of all the
sciences that flourished in the world. It is impossible now for this
or any future age to do aught but lament over so much wasted
ingenuity, when we find the author maintaining that the whole of the
one hundred and fifty Psalms were written by King David, and that
Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun have only a mystical meaning; that the
first seventy represent the Old Testament, and the last eighty the
New, because we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ on the eighth
day of the week, and so forth. A closer study of the book might
perhaps discover in it some genuine additions to the sum of human
knowledge; but it is difficult to repress a murmur at the misdirected
industry which has preserved to us the whole of this ponderous
futility, while it has allowed the History of the Goths to perish.

[Footnote 84: I take my account of this treatise chiefly from Franz
(pp. 93-100).]

[Sidenote: Commentary on the Epistles.]

(2) The 'Complexiones in Epistolas Apostolorum' (first published by
Maffei in 1721, from a MS. discovered by him at Verona) have at least
the merit of being far shorter than the Commentary on the Psalms.
Perhaps the only points of interest in them, even for theological
scholars, are that Cassiodorus evidently attributes the Epistle to the
Hebrews without hesitation to the Apostle Paul, and that he notices
the celebrated passage concerning the Three Heavenly Witnesses (1 John
v. 7) in a way which seems to imply that he found that passage in the
text of the Vulgate, though on examination his language is seen to be
consistent with the theory that these words are a gloss added by the
commentator himself.

[Sidenote: Historia Tripartita.]

(3) In order to supply the want of any full Church History in the
Latin tongue, a want which was probably felt not only by his own monks
but throughout the Churches of the West, Cassiodorus induced his
friend Epiphanius to translate from the Greek the ecclesiastical
histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, and then himself fused
these three narratives into one, the well-known 'Historia Tripartita,'
which contains the story of the Church's fortunes from the accession
of Constantine to the thirty-second