Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/166

156 Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well called the clearest head of his time. With the same insight which penetrated the fallacies and follies of image worship, belief in witchcraft, persecution, the ordeal, and the judicial duel, he saw the futility of this vast fabric of interpretation, protested against the idea that the Divine Spirit extended its inspiration to the mere words of Scripture, and asked a question which has resounded through every generation since: "If you once begin such a system, who can measure the absurdity which will follow?"

During the same century another opponent of this dominant system appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and authority come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that the fathers, great as their authority is, often contradict each other; and that, in last resort, reason must be called in to decide between them.

But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and Erigena placed under the ban by two councils, his work being condemned by a synod as a "Commentum Diaboli." Four centuries later Honorius III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the venom of heretical depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed it on the Index, where it remains to this day. Nor did Abélard, who, three centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some respects like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St. Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous words: "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines, and then find texts to confirm them.

These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous fabric of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that the Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the two wives the Synagogue and the Church; even such men as Alfred the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in building above the sacred books this prodigious mass of sophistry.

Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system of interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last decade of the fifteenth century, just at the close of the mediæval period, he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No man ever preached more powerfully the Gospel of Righteousness; none ever laid more stress on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless of