In judging of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, account must always be taken of the fact that their earlier literature is mainly religious and ecclesiastical, and that such literature often gives a very faint idea of the higher mental life of the educated laity. In our own time, and still more in the last two centuries, the literature of devotion and of the Church seldom suggests the play of intelligence that actually goes on in the world: taken by itself, indeed, it would often imply intellectual decline. As we have seen and shall see, the Middle Ages had an intellectual life apart from the Church; and in the period we term the Renaissance that life was far-reaching; there is reason therefore to question whether at a time when authors were mostly clerics there was not some sane thinking of which we read little or nothing. But even if such allowance be made, the fact remains that the period of clerical supremacy in literature is a period of enormous superstition. Under that term even religious people now include a habitual belief in diabolical agency, a constant affirmation of miracles, portents, divine and fiendish apparitions; and the Protestant adds to the definition saint-worship, belief in the supernatural virtue of relics, and the acceptance of the daily miracle of transubstantiation. But even if questions of doctrine be put aside, we may sum up that the average Christian in the Middle Ages was more credulous as to daily prodigies, saintly and fiendish, than even the average Catholic peasant of to-day in the more backward European countries. Doubters and unbelievers there must always have been; but in the medieval period it was dangerous to utter doubt, unless by way of attack on priests and monks in circles where they were not popular. Ribald doubt, besides, came off best; grave disbelief incurred suspicion; and where men cannot speak their thought they are hindered in their thinking. The most unseemly debates, such as that as to whether the eucharist when eaten passed through the normal process of digestion ("stercoranism" was the name given to the heresy that it did), and that set up by Ratramnus as to how the impregnation of the Virgin actually took place--such discussions could go on freely; but more decent controversy could not. Beyond question, the influence of clerical literature was mainly for gross credulity. The lives of the saints in general, from Gregory I onwards, tell constantly of a puerility of judgment which to a Periclean Greek would have been inconceivable, and which was incompatible not only with rational thought but with tolerable veracity. Language and the art of writing had become means of destroying common sense. In the hands of the hagiographers, the use of miracle so far outgoes the older tradition that it must have finally failed to suggest anything divine--even to a believer. To a skeptic it suggests burlesque.