Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/96

 Oxford man by his own account, was able to study Aristotle and the first two books of Tully's rhetoric, evidently a giddy height of profane knowledge for the days in which he lived. The Latin poets as known to the zealous Alcuin were forbidden to his pupils, and exceedingly little is heard of them in the succeeding centuries. Law meant the decretals of the popes, with a subsequent tinge of Justinian. Medicine was but a smattering of empirical dogmas and rules, fallacious when not directly injurious and homicidal. Of liberal, still less of literary studies, in the worthier sense of the terms, we have barely a trace before the fourteenth century; and even then they were so rare that we are astonished when a man of high culture like Chaucer reveals his knowledge of the contemporary Italian poets, or when a Franciscan friar like Roger Bacon displays what looks like a genuine spirit of exact scientific inquiry. So long as for the majority of eager students the science of astronomy culminated in the arrangement of the calendar, and the science of music in a cathedral chant, whilst Virgil smelt of magic and Ovid was under a jealous ban, the learning of scholars could but bring them back to the point from which they had started, often with an eager craving for relief—to the religious dogma of their day.

Hence the men of intellectual energy, who in other ages might have been effective as philosophical inquirers, were condemned to feed upon the mere husks of knowledge, to beat the air and walk the vicious circle, mumbling inconclusive dialogues on universal ideas, on nominalism and realism, on grace