Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/173

Rh so outwardly: it resents the bare idea that its position can be seriously threatened, and it opposes the new tendency because it is new. The text which we hear repeated incessantly through these disputes is that in which the apostle warns Timothy against profanas vocum novitates. The novelty is the profanity. In no example is this consideration plainer than in that of William of Conches, whose ready yielding to the pressure of orthodox objections has been commented upon in a previous chapter. He withdraws, he condemns as blasphemous, opinions which he admits are capable of defence, solely because their terms are not to be found in the Bible. It is evidently a mere measure of prudence. He does not profess to abate a jot of his belief in the impugned statements: he suppresses the written record of them, and all parties are satisfied.

Side by side with this hardly masked fear of novelty operated another instinct resting, like the first, upon a slavish acceptance of the words of Scripture. The line of demarcation which Christians have ever been disposed to draw between the word of God and the word of man, so as to distinguish between the absolute and the relative authority with which they speak, was insensibly confused with an altogether different division, that namely between the church and the world, which in essence is determined (in however varying forms) by the presence or absence of a high principle in life. Sacred and secular in this disastrous mode of thought were treated as the practical equivalents of 'good' and 'bad.' By the time with which we are concerned the phrases had indeed lost something of their significance. They consorted easily with the secure indolence of monasticism, and when such a man as saint Bernard ventured into the intellectual arena, they were almost the only weapons at his disposal: but when educated people (the distinction is Gilbert of La Porrée's) took up the gauntlet, it was usually now as the champions of the old against the new.

It is needless to point out the disadvantages to the