's
"Introduction to Divinity," his four books of "Sentences," from the
writings of the Fathers; and for this he is called "The Master of
Sentences." These Sentences, on which we have so many commentaries, are
a collection of passages from the Fathers, the real or apparent
contradictions of whom he endeavours to reconcile. But his successors
were not satisfied to be mere commentators on these "sentences," which
they now only made use of as a row of pegs to hang on their fine-spun
metaphysical cobwebs. They at length collected all these quodlibetical
questions into enormous volumes, under the terrifying form, for those
who have seen them, of _Summaries of Divinity_! They contrived, by their
chimerical speculations, to question the plainest truths; to wrest the
simple meaning of the Holy Scriptures, and give some appearance of truth
to the most ridiculous and monstrous opinions.

One of the subtile questions which agitated the world in the tenth
century, relating to dialectics, was concerning _universals_ (as for
example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not _this_ or _that_ in
particular, but _all_ in general. They distinguished _universals_, or
what we call abstract terms, by the _genera_ and _species rerum_; and
they never could decide whether these were _substances_--or _names_!
That is, whether the abstract idea we form of a horse was not really a
_being_ as much as the horse we ride! All this, and some congenial
points respecting the origin of our ideas, and what ideas were, and
whether we really had an idea of a thing before we discovered the thing
itself--in a word, what they called universals, and the essence of
universals; of all this nonsense, on which they at length proceeded to
accusations of heresy, and for which many learned men were
excommunicated, stoned, and what not, the whole was derived from the
reveries of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, about the nature of ideas, than
which subject to the present day no discussion ever degenerated into
such insanity. A modern metaphysician infers that we have no ideas at
all!

Of the scholastic divines, the most illustrious was Saint THOMAS
AQUINAS, styled the Angelical Doctor. Seventeen folio volumes not only
testify his industry but even his genius. He was a great man, busied all
his life with making the charades of metaphysics.

My learned friend Sharon Turner has favoured me with a notice of his
greatest work--his "Sum of all Theology," _Summa totius Theologiae_,