"so that one might sooner get out of a labyrinth than out of the windings of Realists, Nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, Scotists. And these not all by any means, only the chief of them. In them all there is so much learning, so much refinement, that I should say the very apostles themselves would have to be of another spirit if they were compelled to discuss these matters with this new race of theologians. Paul knew something about faith; but when he says 'faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,' that is far from being a definition fit for a _Magister_; and though he knew well enough about charity, his definition and division of it in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians was by no means good dialectics." "The apostles knew the mother of Jesus, but which of them has shown as philosophically as our theologians have done, how she was preserved from the sin of Adam? Peter received the keys, and from one who would not have given them to an unworthy keeper, but I doubt whether he ever reached the subtilty of knowing how one who has no knowledge can hold the keys of knowledge." "The apostles worshipped, but in spirit, following simply that apostolic rule:--'God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth'; but it does not appear that it was revealed to them that an image drawn with a crayon on the wall was to be worshipped, provided only it have two fingers held upright, hair flowing, and three rays in the halo about its head. For who can understand these things unless he has ground out six and thirty years in the study of physics and the superhuman notions of Aristotle and the Scotists? "Meanwhile the actual words of the apostles are utterly neglected. While they keep up their fooleries in the schools, they fancy that, like Atlas in the poets, they are holding up the tottering Church with their syllogistic pillars, and what joy they take in moulding and remoulding Scripture according to their will as if it were made of wax; yet their own conclusions, if a few schoolmen have subscribed to them, they think more weighty than the laws of Solon or the decretals of popes, and like censors of the world, if anything does not square to the line with their conclusions implicit and explicit, they declare as by an oracle 'this proposition is scandalous; this is lacking in reverence; this smacks of heresy; this hasn't the right sound.' So that, by this time, neither Baptism, nor Gospel, nor Paul, nor Peter, nor St. Jerome, nor Augustine--nay, not even the most Aristotelian Thomas himself, can make a man a Christian unless the reckoning of these bachelors be added."