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fiery and turbulent tribes which in the "deep 

 but dazzling darkness" of the Middle Ages raged 

 upon a barren land before the nations began ; and 

 I wonder if the ideas which awed them, swayed 

 them, and welded them into stable societies were 

 fancies as wild and sterile; and if the men who 

 wrought them were mere traffickers in words. And 

 then I wonder if we are glad that the riddle of the 

 origin and issues of being, which tormented their 

 eager hearts, is not solved, but proved insoluble : 

 if we are glad that "sub specie hominis" the earth, 

 no longer the nursery of eternal souls, is but a 

 meteor in the sky ; men and women but the 

 gleam upon it ; the sons of Heaven but companies 

 of whirling stones, and the Father of Heaven an 

 inaccessible idea. 



The scholastic philosophies became inhuman only 

 in their decrepitude. In the equal eye of history, 

 the Middle Ages teach us that the slow and painful 

 travail of natural science is not to be regarded 

 as the belated labour of light in the womb of 

 darkness, nor as a mere stifling of the growth 

 of the human mind by tyranny and oppression, 

 nor indeed as the arming of moral forces against 

 brute forces, but as the condition of time 



