66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



treated the popular religious teachers with unbounded ridicule. The 

 Minnesingers of Germany expressed freely their hatred of the tyranny 

 of the Church ; and the Provencal bards of France were unsparing in 

 their attacks upon the hierarchy, until they were silenced by the fatal 

 Albigensian crusade. The rising popular national literature. of Eng- 

 land indignantly censured the monks and higher clergy, and spoke out 

 boldly against the whole hierarchical system. The famous " Vision 

 of Piers Ploughman," by William Langlande (a. d. 1362), one of the 

 earliest pieces of English literature, is from the pen of an earnest 

 reformer, " who values reason and conscience as the guides of the 

 soul, and attributes the world's sorrows and calamities to the wealth 

 and worldliness of the clergy, and especially of the mendicant orders " ; 

 while, also, Chaucer, in his " Canterbury Tales," shows himself in full 

 accord with Wycliffe in hostility to the mendicant orders. 



In many of these early writings, reverence for the Church and re- 

 ligion is blended with bitter, censures of the arrogance and wealth of 

 the ecclesiastics. The spiritual power of the Pope is distinguished 

 from his temporal power. The one is revered, the other denounced. 



Again, we have the beginning of free thought in criticism in the 

 idea of the comparative study of religion, as seen in the work " De 

 Tribus Impostoribus." 



Further, we have the beginning of free thought in philosophy, to 

 wit : in the Mohammedan philosophy of the great infidel Averroes, 

 introduced into Christendom from the Mohammedan universities of 

 Spain ; and there was also a struggle of the Church with Averroism, 

 the subject of conflict being the nature of the soul, and the doctrines 

 of emanation and absorption. 



Furthermore, we have an effort at free thought in science. There 

 were the leaders of science, Raymond Lully and Roger Bacon ; there 

 were also the Platonists Barbaras, Curanus, Ticinus, Patricius, 

 Picus, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Fludd, etc. ; and again the theoretical 

 reformers of science Telesius, Campanella, Bruno, Ramus, and Me- 

 lanchthon. 



Moreover, there were discoveries which tended to diffuse knowl- 

 edge, and so to awaken the mind of Europe the art of making pa- 

 per, the invention of gunpowder, and the discovery of the magnetic 

 needle. There were, also, the universities. Instead of the Church 

 being exclusively the only tribunal of opinion, the universities became 

 now also centers of thought, with opinions and power of their own. 

 Thus a certain new supremacy sprang up in the world of thought a 

 supremacy generally in accord with that of the Church, but sometimes 

 antagonistic, and always more or less separate from it in the sphere 

 of philosophy, science, and letters, here claiming to have an opinion of 

 its own, and the claim being to some extent allowed. 



Again, free thought found help in the jurists. They hated the 

 Papal tyranny. Their study of the scattered remains of Roman law 



