of literary innocence, when no legend was too stupendous
for credulity; when there was no one who had ever suspected that Tully,
as they delighted to call him, was not a great philosopher, and Virgil
not a great poet.

[Sidenote: Disuse of patristic works.] Of those ponderous, those massive
folios on ecclesiastical affairs, at once the product and
representatives of the time, but little needs here to be said. They
boasted themselves as the supreme effort of human intellect; they laid
claim to an enduring authority; to many they had a weight little less
than the oracles of God. But if their intrinsic value is to be measured
by their pretensions, and their pretensions judged of by their present
use, what is it that must be said? Long ago their term was reached, long
ago they became obsolete. They have no reader. Such must be the issue of
any literature springing from an immovable, an unexpanding basis, the
offspring of thought that has been held in subjugation by political
formulas, or of intellectual energies that have been cramped.

[Sidenote: Spread of science in France.] The Roman ecclesiastical
system, like the Byzantine, had been irrevocably committed in an
opposition to intellectual development. It professed to cultivate the
morals, but it crushed the mind. Yet, in the course of events, this
state of things was to come to an end through the working of other
principles equally enduring and more powerful. They constitute what we
may speak of under the title of the Arabian element. On preceding pages
it has been shown that, when the Saracens conquered Egypt, they came
under the influence of the Nestorians and Hellenizing Jews, acquiring
from them a love of philosophy, which soon manifested itself in full
energy from the banks of the Euphrates to those of Guadalquivir. The
hammer of Charles Martel might strike down the ranks of the Saracens on
the field of Tours, but there was something intangible, something
indestructible accompanying them, which the Frank chivalry could not
confront. To the Church there was an evil omen. It has been well
remarked that in the Provencal poetry there are noble bursts of
crusading religious sentiment, but they are incorporated with a
sovereign contempt for the clergy.

The biography of any of the physicians or alchemists of the thirteenth
century would serve the purpose of illustrating the watchfulness of the
Church, the unsound condition of the universities, the indirect
patronage e