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centuries ; as many minded man seeks wistfully to 

 reanimate the simple wonders and beliefs of his 

 childhood. Their ministry was no more than pious ; 

 the method of modern history wins the fruits of the 

 past while casting away the shadow of its withered 

 branches. This comparative method, first applied 

 to the art and romance of the Middle Ages, so that 

 every dilettante may now discourse to us of their 

 evolution, has been applied also to the thought of 

 the period ; but its results, laid up in the closets 

 of a few scholars, are as yet unfamiliar. It may 

 then become one, who in no sense a scholar has 

 strayed into these secret places, to try to distribute 

 some lessons of the medieval thought which, to 

 many of us, seems as sere and outworn as did the 

 relics of Gothic shrines to our great-grandfathers. 

 For, as in those medieval generations which lay 

 nearest us the furnace had cooled, impatiently we 

 had thrown metal and dross aside, and let our 

 contempt for the dryriess and pedantry of its latter 

 days prevent our vision of the earlier time when 

 the passion for knowledge bore up the world, 

 and sought even to contain it. That dogma is not 

 eternal is manifest to every wanderer in the streets 

 of Toledo, yet the historian may well recall us to 



