Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/59

Rh sense is no doubt divine but its form is human. The same rule must be our guide in its interpretation. We must make it intelligible, even against the grammatical sense, so long as we preserve its spirit; - ut sacramento rei concordaret.

To this wide-reaching liberality there is one exception in the hostility which Agobard bore towards the Jews. But the archbishop's action was not simply that of a bigot, and the motive of the controversy in which he engaged was entirely honourable to him. He set his face against a flagitious custom of which the Jews, the great slave-dealers of the empire (H. Graetz, Gesch. der Juden 5. 246, Magdeburg 1860.), had the monopoly. (De insolentia Iudaeorum, p. 255 C.) He forbade the Christians of his diocese to sell slaves to the Jews for exportation to the Arabs of Spain, and sought also to place a variety of restrictions upon the intercourse of the two races. The emperor however supported the Jews (A.D. 826.), and Agobard could only resort to passionate appeals to the statesmen of the palace and to the bishops, in the hope of reëstablishing a state of things more consonant with the principles of the church. We are not concerned to defend the curious slanders he repeats in his letter On the Superstitions of the Jews: it is sufficient that he believed them. But the truth was that under Lewis the Pious, particularly after his marriage with his second empress, Judith, the position of the Jews might fairly be held to menace Christianity. Charles the Great had shewn them tolerance; Lewis added his personal favour; and under him they enjoyed a prosperity without example in the long course of the middle ages. They formed a peculiar people under his own protection, equally against the nobles and the church; and their privileges