The central thought in all evangelical religion is that the believer does not owe his position before God, and his assurance of salvation, to the good deeds which he really can do, but to the grace of God manifested in the mission and the work of Christ; and the more we turn from the thought of what we can do to the thought of what God has done for us, the stronger will be the conviction that simple trust in God is that by which the pardoning grace of God is appropriated. This double conception—God’s grace coming down upon us from above, and the believer’s trust rising from beneath to meet and appropriate it—was never absent from the simplest religion of the Middle Ages. It did not find articulate expression in mediæval theology, for, owing to its enforced connection with Aristotelian philosophy, that theology was largely artificial; but the thought itself had a continuous and constant existence in the public consciousness of Christian men and women, and appeared in sermons, prayers, and hymns, and in the other ways in which the devotional life manifested itself. It is found in the sermons of the greatest of mediæval preachers, Bernard of Clairvaux, and in the teaching of the most persuasive of religious guides, Francis of Assisi. The one, Bernard, in spite of his theological training, was able to rise above the thought of human merit recommending the sinner to God; and the other, Francis, who had no theological training at all, insisted that he was fitted to lead a life of imitation simply because he had no personal merits whatsoever, and owed everything to the marvellous mercy and grace of God given freely to him in the work of Christ. The thought that all the good we can do comes from the wisdom and mercy of God, and that without these gifts of grace we are sinful and worthless—the feeling that all pardon and all holy living are free gifts of God’s grace, was the central thought round which in mediæval, as in all times, the faith of simple and pious people twined itself. It found expression in the simpler mediæval hymns, Latin and German. The utter need for sin-pardoning grace is expressed and taught in the prayer of the _Canon of the Mass_. It found its way, in spite of the theology, even into the official agenda of the Church, where the dying are told that they must repose their confidence upon Christ and His Passion as the sole ground of confidence in their salvation. If we take the fourth book of Thomas à Kempis’ _Imitatio Christi_, it is impossible to avoid seeing that his ideas about the sacrament of the Supper (in spite of the mistakes in them) kept alive in his mind the thought of a free grace of God, and that he had a clear conception that God’s grace was freely given, and not merited by what man can do. For the main thought with pious mediæval Christians, however it might be overlaid with superstitious conceptions, was that they received in the sacrament a _gift_ of overwhelming greatness. Many a modern