that these are treated as the handmaids of theology, and he explains his views on this subject much in the same way as Bede had done before him. For the rest, he was an enemy to anything like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works, in prose and verse, embraced a large variety of subjects, some of them belonging to mystic theology, such as his book on the Vision of God and his poem on the Holy Cross, which, in spite of its inaccurate prosody, still raises the admiration of the reader from the elevation of its sentiments. He is also commonly reputed the author of the “Veni Creator.” In 847, Rabanus was raised to the archiepiscopal see of Mentz, in which office he was called on to examine the errors of Gotteschalk, a man who, beginning life as a monk of Fulda, had quitted that monastery in disgust, and subsequently led a wandering and not very reputable life, though he appears to have considered himself attached to the monastery of Orbais. The opinions he broached on the subject of predestination being condemned by the council of Mentz, Rabanus sent him to his own metropolitan, Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims. The severity with which he was treated was disapproved even by many who condemned his doctrines, and a warm controversy arose, in the course of which Hincmar, who was far more a man of action than of the pen, bethought himself of employing on his side of the argument the genius of Scotus Erigena, then at the head of the Palatine school. Erigena was as yet only known to the learned world as a Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic scholar, and a man of surpassing wit and power of argument. His heterodox tendencies were not even suspected, and Hincmar congratulated himself on having engaged the services of one confessedly without a rival in the arena of letters. But his choice of an ally proved most unfortunate. Erigena opened fire on the opposite party with the assertion, characteristic enough of the self-sufficient sophist, that every question, on every imaginable subject, was capable of solution when submitted to the four philosophic rules of division, definition, demonstration, and analysis. To work he went, therefore, with his four rules, and while combating the ultra-predestination of Gottischalk, gave utterance to such free opinions on the subject of Divine Grace as raised against him all the theologians of France. Among these were St. Prudentius of Troyes, Amolan, Archbishop of Lyons, a Hebrew scholar whose wise and moderate manner of dealing with the subject aimed at refuting the errors of both the opposite partisans, and his successor, St. Remigius. The opinions put forth by Scotus had increased the difficulties of the question, and writers thickened on both sides. It is needless to say that neither Rabanus nor Hincmar were any way responsible for the errors broached by Scotus; nevertheless, the line of argument which they took did not satisfy the theologians of Valence and Lyons, and in the course of the controversy which