"I have endeavored to reply but with this protest at the outset, that many of these articles do not pertain to the teachings of faith, but rather to the dogmas of the philosophers. But it works a great injury either to assert or deny as belonging to sacred doctrine such things as do not bear upon the doctrine of piety. For Augustine says, 'When I hear certain Christians ignorant of those things (namely, what philosophers have said of the heavens, or the stars, or the motion of the sun and moon) or misunderstanding them, I look with patience upon such men: nor do I see any reason to hinder them, when of thee, Lord Creator of all things, they do not believe unworthy things, if perhaps they be ignorant of the structure, and condition of corporal creatures. But they are a hindrance if they think these things belong to the very doctrine of piety; and more, pertinaciously, dare to affirm that of which they are ignorant.' But that they may be the cause of injury Augustine shows. 'It is very disgraceful,' he says, 'and pernicious and especially to be avoided, that a Christian speaking of these things as though according to Christian teaching should so rave that any infidel may hear; so that, as it is said, seeing him altogether in the wrong, he may {120} scarcely contain his mirth. And it is not so hurtful that one man should be seen to err, as that our writers are believed by those who are without [the Church] to have such opinions, and to the ruin of those whose salvation is our care they are scorned and contemned as unlearned.' Whence it seems safer to me that those things which philosophers have commonly held, and are not repugnant to our faith, should neither be asserted as dogmas of faith, although at times they may be introduced under the names of the philosophers, nor so denied as contrary to the faith, as to give occasion to the wise of this world of contemning the teaching of the faith." Is it any wonder that Professor Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh, whose training in the old Scotch universities has given him a breadth of sympathy not common in our time, and whose wide knowledge of the literature of that period as well as its philosophy and education, and whose training in the discussion of the criticism of all time in his "History of Criticism" has made his opinion of special value, should have sympathetically turned to these old teachers and deprecated a little bitterly the modern attitude towards them? He said: