Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/93

 chop-logics in a narrow groove, industrious tillers of a barren soil. This has at any rate been the popular notion of their quality, and the vast majority of readers have been led to dismiss them from their minds with a shudder at their repelling dryness and ineffective ingenuity. It is only since yesterday that something like justice has been done to their intellectual and theological position, to their attitude as men of action and not merely as writers, and especially to their character as leaders in religious reform. Hallam remarks that the discovery of truth by means of scholastic discussions "was rendered hopeless by two insurmountable obstacles, the authority of Aristotle and that of the Church." The great historian, from whose judgments so few of his successors are competent to dissent, regarded the Schoolmen as writers only. He does not mention Marsiglio, nor deal with Wyclif as a Schoolman. He expresses disappointment with what he had read of Ockham; but he had not directed his attention to the political association of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Michael of Cesena with Ludwig of Bavaria, nor to that of Wyclif with the English court. Indeed it is only in the present generation that full light has been cast on the innovating and revolutionary spirit of the later Schoolmen. We must be content to sacrifice the representative character of the story of angels dancing on the point of a needle in return for the more just appreciation of scholastic aims and methods which we owe to modern German and English research.

Enough, perhaps, has been said of the political