that, although the remainder of the body had crumbled into dust, the hand that had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed.(430) A young and nameless scholar was once buried near a convent at Bonn. The night after his funeral, a nun whose cell overlooked the cemetery was awakened by a brilliant light that filled the room. She started up, imagining that the day had dawned, but on looking out she found that it was still night, though a dazzling splendour was around. A female form of matchless loveliness was bending over the scholar’s grave. The effluence of her beauty filled the air with light, and she clasped to her heart a snow-white dove that rose to meet her from the tomb. It was the Mother of God come to receive the soul of the martyred scholar; “for scholars too,” adds the old chronicler, “are martyrs if they live in purity and labour with courage.”(431) But legends of this kind, though not without a very real beauty, must not blind us to the fact that the period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. The energies of Christendom were diverted from all useful and progressive studies, and were wholly expended on theological disquisitions. A crowd of superstitions, attributed to infallible wisdom, barred the path of knowledge, and the charge of magic, or the charge of heresy, crushed every bold enquiry in the sphere of physical nature or of opinions. Above all, the conditions of true enquiry had been cursed by the Church. A blind unquestioning credulity was inculcated as the first of duties, and the habit of doubt, the impartiality of a suspended judgment, the desire to hear both sides of a disputed question, and to emancipate the judgment from unreasoning prejudice, were all in consequence condemned. The belief in the guilt of error and doubt became universal, and that belief may be confidently pronounced to be the most pernicious superstition that has ever been accredited among mankind. Mistaken facts are rectified by enquiry. Mistaken methods of research, though far more inveterate, are gradually altered; but the spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful, and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free-thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.