There was another type of religious life and pious a.s.sociation which existed, and which seems in one form or other to have exercised a great influence among the better cla.s.s of artisans, and more especially among the printers of Augsburg, Nurnberg, and Stra.s.sburg.
It is probable that this type of piety had at least three roots.
(_a_) We can trace as far back as the closing years of the thirteenth century, in many parts of Germany, the existence of nonconformists who, on the testimony of inquisitors, lived pious lives, acted righteously towards their neighbours, and believed in all the articles of the Christian faith, but repudiated the Roman Church and the clergy. Their persecutors gave them a high character. "The heretics are known by their walk and conversation: they live quietly and modestly; they have no pride in dress; their learned men are tailors and weavers; they do not heap up riches, but are content with what is necessary; they live chastely; they are temperate in eating and drinking; they never go to taverns, nor to public dances, nor to any such vanities; they refrain from all foul language, from backbiting, from thoughtless speech, from lying and from swearing." The list of objections which they had to usages of the mediaeval Church are those which would occur to any evangelical Protestant of this century.
They professed a simple evangelical creed; they offered a pa.s.sive resistance to the hierarchical and priestly pretensions of the clergy; they were careful to educate their children in schools which they supported; they had vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and committed large portions to memory; they conducted their religious service in the vernacular, and it was one of the accusations made against them that they alleged that the word of G.o.d was as profitable when read in the vernacular as when studied in Latin. It is also interesting to know that they were accused of visiting the leper-houses to pray with the inmates, and that in some towns they had schools for the leper children.(104) They called themselves the _Brethren_. The societies of the _Brethren_ had never died out. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were continually subject to local and somewhat spasmodic persecutions, when the ecclesiastical could secure the aid of the secular authorities to their schemes of repression, which was not always possible. They were strongly represented among the artisans in the great cities, and there are instances when the civic authorities gave them one of the churches of the towns for their services. The liability to intermittent persecution led to an organisation whereby the _Brethren_, who were for the time being living in peace, made arrangements to receive and support those who were able to escape from any district where the persecution raged. These societies were in correspondence with their brethren all over Europe, and were never so active as during the last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
(_b_) As early as the times of Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), of his disciples Tauler (d. 1361) and Suso (d 1366), of the mysterious "Friend of G.o.d in the Oberland" and his a.s.sociates (among them the Stra.s.sburg merchant Rulman Merswin (d. 1382)), and of the Brussels curate John Ruysbroeck (d.
1381), the leaders of the mediaeval Mystics had been accustomed to gather their followers together into praying circles; and the custom was perpetuated long after their departure. How these pious a.s.sociations continued to exist in the half century before the Reformation, and what forms their organisation took, it seems impossible to say with any accuracy. The school system of the _Brethren __ of the Common Lot_, which always had an intimate connection with the _Gottesfreunde_, in all probability served to spread the praying circles which had come down from the earlier Mystics. It seems to have been a custom among these _Brethren of the Common Lot_ to invite their neighbours to meet in their schoolrooms or in a hall to listen to religious discourses. There they read and expounded the New Testament in the vernacular. They also read extracts from books written to convey popular religious instruction. They questioned their audience to find out how far their hearers understood their teaching, and endeavoured by question and answer to discover and solve religious difficulties. These schools and teachers had extended all over Germany by the close of the fifteenth century, and their effect in quickening and keeping alive personal religion must have been great.
(_c_) Then, altogether apart from the social and semi-political propaganda of the Hussites, there is evidence that ever since the circulation of the encyclic letter addressed by the Taborites in November 1431 to all Christians in all lands, and more especially since the foundation of the _Unitas Fratrum_ in 1452, there had been constant communication between Bohemia and the scattered bodies of evangelical dissenters throughout Germany. Probably historians have credited the Hussites with more than their due influence over their German sympathisers. The latter had arrived at the conclusion that t.i.thes ought to be looked upon as free-will offerings, that the cup should be given to the laity, etc., long before the movements under the leadership of Wiclif and of Huss. But the knowledge that they had sympathisers and brethren beyond their own land must have been a source of strength to the German nonconformists.
Our knowledge of the times is still too obscure to warrant us in making very definite statements about the proportionate effect of these three religious sources of influence on the small communities of _Brethren_ or evangelical dissenters from the mediaeval Church which maintained a precarious existence at the close of the Middle Ages. There is one curious fact, however, which shows that there must have been an intimate connection between the Waldenses of Savoy and France, the _Brethren_ of Germany, and the _Unitas Fratrum_ of Bohemia. They all used the same catechism for the instruction of their children in divine things. So far as can be ascertained, this small catechism was first printed in 1498, and editions can be traced down to 1530. It exists in French, Italian, German, and Bohemian. The inspiration drawn from the earlier Mystics and _Gottesfreunde_ is shown by the books circulated by the _Brethren_. They made great use of the newly discovered art of printing to spread abroad small mystical writings on personal religion, and translations of portions of the Holy Scriptures. They printed and circulated books which had been used in ma.n.u.script among the Mystics of the fourteenth century, such as the celebrated _Masterbook_, single sermons by Tauler, Prayers and Rules for holy living extracted from his writings, as well as short tracts taken from the later Mystics, like the _Explanation of the Ten Commandments_. It is also probable that some of the many translations of the whole or portions of the Bible which were in circulation in Germany before the days of Luther came from these praying circles. The celebrated firm of Nurnberg printers, the Koburgers, who published so many Bibles, were the German printers of the little catechism used by the _Brethren_; and, as has been said, the Anabaptists, who were the successors of these a.s.sociations, did not use Luther"s version, but a much older one which had come down to them from their ancestors.
The members of these praying circles welcomed the Lutheran Reformation when it came, but they can scarcely be said to have belonged to it. Luther has confessed how much he owed to one of their publications, _Die deutsche Theologie_; and what helped him must have benefited others. The organisation of a Lutheran Church, based on civil divisions of the Empire, gave the signal for a thorough reorganisation of the members of these old a.s.sociations who refused to have anything to do with a State Church. They formed the best side of the very mixed and very much misunderstood movement which later was called Anabaptism, and thus remained outside of the two great divisions into which the Church of the Reformation separated. This religious type existed and showed itself more especially among the artisans in the larger towns of Germany.
It must not be supposed that these four cla.s.ses of religious sentiment which have been found existing during the later decades of the fifteenth and the early decades of the sixteenth centuries can always be clearly distinguished from each other. Religious types cannot be kept distinct, but continually blend with each other in the most unexpected way. Humanism and Anabaptism seem as far apart as they can possibly be; yet some of the most noted Anabaptist leaders were distinguished members of the Erasmus circle at Basel. Humanism and delicate clinging to the simple faith of childhood blended in the exquisite character of Melanchthon. Luther, _after_ his stern wrestle with self-righteousness in the convent at Erfurt, believed that, had his parents been dead, he could have delivered their souls from purgatory by his visits to the shrines of the saints at Rome. The boy Mec.u.m (Myconius) retained only so much of his father"s teaching about the _free_ Grace of G.o.d that he believed an Indulgence from Tetzel would benefit him if he could obtain it without paying for it.
There is everywhere and at all times a blending of separate types of religious faith, until a notable crisis brings men suddenly face to face with the necessity of a choice. Such a crisis occurred during the period we call the Reformation, with the result that the leaders in that great religious revival found that the truest theology after all was what had expressed itself in hymns and prayers, in revivalist sermons and in fireside teaching, and that they felt it to be their duty as theologians to give articulate dogmatic expression to what their fathers had been content to find inarticulately in the devotional rather than in the intellectual sphere of the mediaeval religious life.
Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born, and which he breathed from his earliest days. Every element seems to have shared in creating and shaping his religious history, and had similar effects doubtless on his most distinguished and sympathetic followers.
Chapter VI. Humanism And Reformation.(105)
-- 1. Savonarola.
When the Italian Humanism seemed about to become a mere revival of ancient Paganism, with its accompaniments of a cynical sensualism on the one hand, and the blindest trust in the occult sciences on the other, a great preacher arose in Florence who recalled men to Christianity and to Christian virtue.
Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian, a countryman of Giaocchino di Fiore, of Arnold of Brescia, of Francis of a.s.sisi, of John of Parma, and, like them, he believed himself to be favoured with visions apocalyptic and other. He belonged to a land over which, all down through the Middle Ages, had swept popular religious revivals, sudden, consuming, and transient as prairie fires. When a boy, he had quivered at seeing the pain in the world around him; he had shuddered as he pa.s.sed the great grim palaces of the Italian despots, where the banqueting hall was separated from the dungeon by a floor so thin that the groans of the prisoners mingled with the tinkle of the silver dishes and the wanton conversation of the guests. He had been destined by his family for the medical profession, and the lad was set to master the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian commentaries on Aristotle-the gateway in those days to a knowledge of the art of healing. The _Summa_ of the great Schoolman entranced him, and insensibly drew him towards theology; but outwardly he did not rebel against the lot in life marked out for him. A glimpse of a quiet resting-place in this world of pain and evil had come to him, but it vanished, swallowed up in the universal gloom, when Roberto Strozzi refused to permit him to marry his daughter Laodamia. There remained only rest on G.o.d, study of His word, and such slight solace as music and sonnet-writing could bring. His devotion to Thomas Aquinas impelled him to seek within a Dominican convent that refuge which he pa.s.sionately yearned for, from a corrupt world and a corrupt Church. There he remained buried for long years, reading and re-reading the Scriptures, poring over the _Summa_, drinking in the New Learning, almost unconsciously creating for himself a philosophy which blended the teachings of Aquinas with the Neo-Platonism of Marsiglio Ficino and of the Academy, and planning how he could best represent the doctrines of the Christian religion in harmony with the natural reason of man.
When at last he became a great preacher, able to sway heart and conscience, it should not be forgotten that he was mediaeval to the core.
His doctrinal teaching was based firmly on the theology of Thomas Aquinas.
His intellectual conception of faith, his strong belief in the divine predestination and his way of expressing it, his view of Scripture as possessing manifold meanings, were all defined for him by the great Dominican Schoolman. He held strongly the mediaeval idea that the Church was an external political unity, ruled by the Bishop of Rome, to whom every human soul must be subject, and whom everyone must obey save only when commands were issued contrary to a plain statement of the evangelical law. He expounded the fulness of and the slight limitations to the authority of the Pope exactly as Thomas and the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century had done, though in terms very different from the canonists of the Roman Curia at the close of the Middle Ages. Even his appreciation of the Neo-Platonist side of Humanism could be traced back to mediaeval authorities; for at all times the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius had been a source of inspiration to the greater Schoolmen.
His scholarship brought him into relation with the Humanist leaders in Florence, the earnest tone of his teaching and the saintliness of his character attracted them, his deep personal piety made them feel that he possessed something which they lacked; while no Neo-Platonist could be repelled by his claim to be the recipient of visions from on high.
The celebrated Humanists of Florence became the disciples of the great preacher. Marsiglio Ficino himself, the head of the Florentine Academy, who kept one lamp burning before the bust of Plato and another before an image of the Virgin, was for a time completely under his spell. Young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola"s whole inner life was changed through his conversations with the Prior of San Marco. He reformed his earlier careless habits. He burnt five books of wanton love-songs which he had composed before his conversion.(106) He prayed daily at fixed hours, and he wrote earnestly to his nephew on the importance of prayer for a G.o.dly life:
" "I stir thee not," he says, "to that prayer that standeth in many words, but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the mind, in the privy-closet of the soul, with every affect speaketh to G.o.d; which in the most lightsome darkness of contemplation not only presenteth the mind to the Father, but also uniteth it with Him by unspeakable ways which only they know who have a.s.sayed. Nor care I how long or how short thy prayer be; but how effectual, how ardent, and rather interrupted and broken between with sighs, than drawn on length with a number of words.... Let no day pa.s.s but thou once at the leastwise present thyself to G.o.d in prayer....
What thou shalt in thy prayer ask of G.o.d, both the Holy Spirit which prayeth for us and also thine own necessity shall every hour put in thy mind." "(107)
He studied the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which contained the favourite theology of Savonarola, and spoke of the great Schoolman as a "pillar of truth."(108) He handed over the third part of his estates to his nephew, and lived plainly on what remained, that he might give largely in charity.(109) He made Savonarola his almoner, who on his behalf gave alms to dest.i.tute people and marriage portions to poor maidens.(110) He had frequent thoughts of entering the Dominican Order, and
"On a time as he walked with his nephew, John Francis, in a garden at Ferrara, talking of the love of Christ, he broke out with these words: "Nephew," said he, "this will I show thee; I warn thee keep it secret; the substance I have left after certain books of mine are finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach Christ." "(111)
It is also recorded that he made a practice of scourging himself; especially "on those days which represent unto us the Pa.s.sion and Death that Christ suffered for our sake, he beat and scourged his own flesh in remembrance of that great benefit, and for cleansing his old offences."(112) But above all things he devoted himself to a diligent study of the Holy Scriptures, and commended the practice to his nephew:
" "Thou mayest do nothing more pleasing to G.o.d, nothing more profitable to thyself, than if thine hand cease not day and night to turn and read the volumes of Holy Scripture. There lieth privily in them a certain heavenly strength, quick and effectual, which, with a marvellous power, transformeth and changeth the readers" mind into the love of G.o.d, if they be clean and lowly entreated." "(113)
The great Platonist forsook Plato for St. Paul, whom he called the "glorious Apostle."(114) When he died he left his lands to one of the hospitals in Florence, and desired to be buried in the hood of the Dominican monks and within the Convent of San Marco.
Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, was also one of Savonarola"s converts. We find him exchanging confidences with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by which we learn to know G.o.d:
" "But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo," writes Pico, "what madness holdeth us. Love G.o.d (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more.
And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were in vain found." "(115)
Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco.
Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him absolution.
Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt, there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediaeval Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediaeval on these accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the shock of a great convulsion. "Luther himself," says Professor Villari, "could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless to hope in the purification of Rome."(116)
-- 2. John Colet.
While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, John Colet, son of a wealthy London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there, we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of him and of his work. Colet"s whole future life in England bears evidence that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently such English cla.s.sics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine.
When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim was to find out the _personal_ message which the writer (St. Paul) had sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in proving doctrines or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen,-methods abundantly used by Savonarola,-and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediaeval theologian head been able to perceive, that the Bible is a personal and not a dogmatic revelation. They were mediaeval: he belongs to the Reformation circle of thinkers. Luther, Calvin, and Colet, whatever else separates them, have this one deeply important thought in common. Further, Colet discarded the mediaeval conception of a mechanical inspiration of the text of Scripture, in this also agreeing with Luther and Calvin. The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures was something mysterious to him. "The Spirit seemed to him by reason of its majesty to have a peculiar method of its own, singularly, absolutely free, blowing where it lists, making prophets of whom it will, yet so that the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets."(117)
Colet saw clearly, and denounced the abounding evils which were ruining the Church of his day. The Convocation of the English Church never listened to a bolder sermon than that preached to them by the Dean of St.
Paul"s in 1512-the same year that Luther addressed an a.s.sembly of clergy at Leitzkau. The two addresses should be compared. The same fundamental thought is contained in both-that every true reformation must begin with the individual man. Colet declared that reform must begin with the bishops, and that once begun it would spread to the clergy and thence to the laity; "for the body follows the soul; and as are the rulers in a State, such will the people be." He urged that what was wanted was the enforcement of ecclesiastical laws which were already in existence.
Ignorant and wicked men were admitted to holy orders, and there were laws prohibiting this. Simony was creeping "like a cancer through the minds of priests, so that most are not ashamed in these days to get for themselves great dignities by pet.i.tions and suits at court, rewards and promises"; and yet strict laws against the evil were in existence. He proceeded to enumerate the other flagrant abuses-the non-residence of clergy, the worldly pursuits and indulgences of the clergy; the scandals and vices of the ecclesiastical law-courts; the infrequency of provincial councils to discuss and remedy existing evils; the wasting of the patrimony of the Church on sumptuous buildings, on banquets, on enriching kinsfolk, or on keeping hounds. The Church had laws against all these abuses, but they were not enforced, and could not be until the bishops amended their ways.
His scheme of reform was to put in operation the existing regulations of Canon Law. "The diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages, and there is no evil for which the holy fathers did not provide excellent remedies; there are no crimes in prohibition of which there are not laws in the body of Canon Law." Such was his definite idea of reform in this famous Convocation sermon.
But he had wider views. He desired the diffusion of a sound Christian education, and did the best that could be done by one man to promote it, by spending his private fortune in founding St. Paul"s school, which he characteristically left in charge of a body of laymen. He longed to see a widespread preaching in the vernacular, and believed that the bishops should show an example in this clerical duty. It is probable that he wished the whole service to be in the vernacular, for it was made a charge against him that he taught his congregation to repeat the Lord"s Prayer in English. Besides, he had clearly grasped the thought, too often forgotten by theologians of all schools, that the spiritual facts and forces which lie at the roots of the Christian life are one thing, and the intellectual conceptions which men make to explain these facts and forces are another, and a much less important thing; that men are able to be Christians and to live the Christian life because of the former and not because of the latter. He saw that, while dogma has its place, it is at best the alliance of an immortal with a mortal, the union between that which is unchangeably divine and the fashions of human thought which change from one age to another. For this reason he thought little of the Scholastic Theology of his days, with its forty-three propositions about the nature of G.o.d and its forty-five about the nature of man before and after the Fall, each of which had to be a.s.sented to at the risk of a charge of heresy. "Why do you extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been so very arrogant, indeed, he would not surely so rashly and proudly have taken upon himself to define all things. And unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he would not surely have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ by mixing it with his profane philosophy." The Scholastic Theology might have been scientific in the thirteenth century, but the "scientific" is the human and changing element in dogma, and the old theology had become clearly unscientific in the sixteenth. Therefore he was accustomed to advise young theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles" Creed, and let divines, if they liked, dispute about the rest; and he taught Erasmus to look askance at Luther"s reconstruction of the Augustinian theology.
But no thinking man, however he may flout at philosophy and dogma, can do without either; and Colet was no exception to the general rule. He has placed on record his detestation of Aquinas and his dislike of Augustine, and we may perhaps see in this a lack of sympathy with a prominent characteristic of the theology of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Aquinas and Occam, to say nothing of developments since the Reformation.
The great men who built up the Western Church were almost all trained Roman lawyers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory the Great (whose writings form the bridge between the Latin Fathers and the Schoolmen) were all men whose early training had been that of a Roman lawyer,-a training which moulded and shaped all their thinking, whether theological or ecclesiastical. They instinctively regarded all questions as a great Roman lawyer would. They had the lawyer"s craving for exact definitions. They had the lawyer"s idea that the primary duty laid upon them was to enforce obedience to authority, whether that authority expressed itself in external inst.i.tutions or in the precise definitions of the correct ways of thinking about spiritual truths. No branch of Western Christendom has been able to free itself from the spell cast upon it by these Roman lawyers of the early centuries of the Christian Church.
If the ideas of Christian Roman lawyers, filtering slowly down through the centuries, had made the Bishops of Rome dream that they were the successors of Augustus, at once Emperor and Pontifex Maximus, master of the bodies and of the souls of mankind, they had also inspired the theologians of the Mediaeval Church with the conception of an intellectual imperialism, where a system of Christian thought, expressed with legal precision, could bind into a comprehensive unity the active intelligence of mankind. Dogmas thus expressed can become the instruments of a tyranny much more penetrating than that of an inst.i.tution, and so Colet found. In his revolt he turned from the Latins to the Greeks, and to that thinker who was furthest removed from the legal precision of statement which was characteristic of Western theology.
It is probable that his intercourse with the Christian Humanists of Italy, and his introduction to Platonists and to Neo-Platonism, made him turn to the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius; but it is certain that he believed at first that the author of these quaint mystical tracts was the Dionysius who was one of the converts of St. Paul at Athens, and that these writings embodied much of the teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and took the reader back to the first generation of the Christian Church. After he had learned from Grocyn that the author of the _Celestial_ and the _Terrestrial Hierarchies_ could not have been the convert of St. Paul, and that the writings could not be earlier than the sixth century, he still regarded them as evidence of the way in which a Christian philosopher could express the thoughts which were current in Christianity one thousand years before Colet"s time. The writings could be used as a touchstone to test usages and opinions prevalent at the close of the Middle Ages, when men were still subject to the domination of the Scholastic Theology, and as justification for rejecting them.
They taught him two things which he was very willing to learn: that the human mind, however it may be able to feel after G.o.d, can never comprehend Him, nor imprison His character and attributes in propositions-stereotyped aspects of thoughts-which can be fitted into syllogisms; and that such things as hierarchy and sacraments are to be prized not because they are in themselves the active sources and centres of mysterious powers, but because they faintly symbolise the spiritual forces by which G.o.d works for the salvation of His people. Colet applied to the study of the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius a mind saturated with simple Christian truth gained from a study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St.