156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well 

 called the clearest head of his time. With the same insight 

 which penetrated the fallacies and follies of image worship, 

 belief in witchcraft, persecution, the ordeal, and the judicial duel, 

 he saw the futility of this vast fabric of interpretation, protested 

 against the idea that the Divine Spirit extended its inspiration to 

 the mere words of Scripture, and asked a question which has re- 

 sounded through every generation since : " If you once begin such 

 a system, who can measure the absurdity which will follow ?" 



During the same century another opponent of this dominant 

 system appeared : John Scotus Erigena. He contended that 

 " reason and authority come alike from the one source of Divine 

 Wisdom"; that the fathers, great as their authority is, often 

 contradict each other ; and that, in last resort, reason must be 

 called in to decide between them. 



But the evolution of unreason continued : Agobard was un- 

 heeded, and Erigena placed under the ban by two councils, his 

 work being condemned by a synod as a " Commentum Diaboli." 

 Four centuries later Honorius III ordered it to be burned, as 

 "teeming with the venom of heretical depravity"; and finally, 

 after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed it on the Index, 

 where it remains to this day. Nor did Abelard, who, three 

 centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some 

 respects like theirs, have any better success : his fate at the 

 hands of St. Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by 

 heart. Far more consonant with the spirit of the universal 

 Church was the teaching in the twelfth century of the great 

 Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous words : " Learn 

 first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod credendum est), 

 meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines, and then 

 find texts to confirm them. 



These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enor- 

 mous fabric of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the 

 fact that the Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in 

 the text mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means 

 Christ and the two wives the Synagogue and the Church; even 

 such men as Alfred the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas were 

 added to the forces at work in building above the sacred books 

 this prodigious mass of sophistry. 



Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old 

 system of interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. Dur- 

 ing the last decade of the fifteenth century, just at the close of 

 the mediaeval period, he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle 

 at Florence. No man ever preached more powerfully the Gospel 

 of Righteousness ; none ever laid more stress on conduct ; even 

 Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless of tra- 



