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Rh ; every topic is clearly and logically related to the basic ideas of the faith. He does not have to labor to show how human concepts of law or of physics are related to religion; they enter naturally and inevitably into his discussion of theological problems. Granting his premises—the truths of the Christian faith and the basic principles of Aristotelian philosophy—his conclusions are coherent and convincing. His work has often been compared to that of the architects of the great medieval cathedrals, and there is some validity in the comparison, but no cathedral-builder reared such a vast structure out of such disparate materials.

The lawyers of the thirteenth century perfected legal systems which endured for centuries; the theologians left even more enduring monuments to their ability. There were no such striking achievements in other fields of thirteenth-century scholarship. Interest in the Latin classics continued to decline as students concentrated on logic, law, and theology. Medicine continued to attract students, but it acquired little new material and remained bound to the study of earlier texts. The great wave of translation of scientific and semi-scientific works from the eastern languages was spent by the third quarter of the thirteenth century; almost no new translations were made after that date. Medieval science still consisted largely in an effort to harmonize and to draw new conclusions from the authoritative works of Greek and Arab scholars. This was not always as easy as it had first seemed: the authorities were at times in conflict with each other or with Christian theology, and logic often gave results which seemed to be contradicted by common sense. Faced with these problems some scholars, notably the English bishop Robert Grosseteste, began to urge that conclusions drawn by logic be verified by experimental observation. Grosseteste's methods were continued at Oxford, and though experimentation never became dominant in medieval scientific study, enough was done to pave the way for the work of the early modern period.

Imaginative literature of the thirteenth century seems