The first step in theology is investigation, an investigation arising out of the lively interest and devout welcome which the matters investigated claim of us; and, if Scripture teaches us the duty of faith, it teaches quite as distinctly that loving inquisitiveness which is the life of the _Schola_. It attributes that temper both to the Blessed Virgin and to the Angels. The Angels are said to have "desired to look into the mysteries of Revelation," and it is twice recorded of Mary that she "kept these things and pondered them in her heart." Moreover, her words to the Archangel, "How shall this be?" show that there is a questioning in matters revealed to us compatible with the fullest and most absolute faith. It has sometimes been said in defence and commendation of heretics that "their misbelief at least showed that they had thought upon the subject of religion;" this is an unseemly paradox,--at the same time there certainly is the opposite extreme of a readiness to receive any number of dogmas at a minute's warning, which, when it is witnessed, fairly creates a suspicion that they are merely professed with the tongue, not intelligently held. Our Lord gives no countenance to such lightness of mind; He calls on His disciples to use their reason, and to submit it. Nathanael's question "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" did not prevent our Lord's praise of him as "an Israelite without guile." Nor did He blame Nicodemus, except for want of theological knowledge, on his asking "How can these things be?" Even towards St. Thomas He was gentle, as if towards one of those who had "eyes too tremblingly awake to bear with dimness for His sake." In like manner He praised the centurion when he argued himself into a confidence of divine help and relief from the analogy of his own profession; and left his captious enemies to prove for themselves from the mission of the Baptist His own mission; and asked them "if David called Him Lord, how was He his Son?" and, when His disciples wished to have a particular matter taught them, chid them for their want of "understanding." And these are but some out of the various instances which He gives us of the same lesson. 3. Reason has ever been awake and in exercise in the Church after Him from the first. Scarcely were the Apostles withdrawn from the world, when the Martyr Ignatius, in his way to the Roman Amphitheatre, wrote his strikingly theological Epistles; he was followed by Irenæus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian; thus we are brought to the age of Athanasius and his contemporaries, and to Augustine. Then we pass on by Maximus and John Damascene to the Middle age, when theology was made still more scientific by the Schoolmen; nor has it become less so, by passing on from St. Thomas to the great Jesuit writers Suarez and Vasquez, and then to Lambertini. § 4. _Scripture and its Mystical Interpretation._