Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/172

154 whose activity was consistently devoted to the correction of the moral disorders from which she suffered. Roscelin, Abailard, William of Conches are unsparing in their exposure of abuses in the state of the clergy which it was equally the desire of every earnest member of the order to eradicate. If Abailard's life be thought to be vitiated by a single fault, his colleagues are invariably blameless. The learned clergy are the exemplars of the age; the unlettered are its reproof. It was owing to the latter, to their degradation in life because in mind, that the church stood in need of repeated, periodical revivals of religious discipline. The stimulus of learning was the least intermittent and therefore the most trustworthy motive for moral advancement: but instead of fostering the seed of promise, the husbandmen of the church rooted it up. Yet, be it observed, the good service and high rectitude of the philosophers were obvious and admitted: the errors were only suspected or guessed at. A complete examination was seldom attempted, never successfully carried out. Whereas the custom of the church, as Abailard notes, had ruled that in such cases argument not force should be the constraining engine, the proceedings of their trials generally left it open to the accused to declare that his opinions had been misconstrued, that the quotations from his writings had been garbled. No council sat in judgement upon them that received, even among the most loyal catholics, unanimous assent: the sentence was the subject of apology not of congratulation.

It is in the youth of an intellectual movement that antagonisms such as those to which we refer are sure to arise. The conservative instincts of a corporation, especially of a religious corporation, and most of all when that corporation has the splendid and sacred traditions of the catholic church, are immediately excited at the first whisper of possible competition; and not only so, or at least not