Yet whatever the defects of the scholastic philosophy, it holds a great and significant place in the history of the intellectual development of western Europe, since it was the means whereby the learning of the ancient world was recovered and preserved and an intellectual continuity rendered possible. Such is one out of many of the great contributions made by the mediæval Church to the cause of civilization. Secular knowledge was not proscribed, but on the contrary adopted and utilized, by the Church; enquiry and research not looked askance upon, but encouraged. The universities of the Middle Ages were ecclesiastical in origin; their teachers and scholars were clerks. The great University of Paris, the very centre of the intellectual life of Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was an object of very special solicitude to the Holy See. The two great mendicant orders, the Prædicants and the Minorites, taking the lead in the schools and universities only a few years after their own inception, speedily produced some of the most erudite and the most brilliant minds of the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century the leading scholastics were Augustinians; in the middle of the thirteenth the dominant philosophy was still of a Neoplatonic character. The great Franciscans Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Peckham belonged to that school of thought. In many of them, notably in Bonaventura, there was a marked strain of mysticism. The mystic note in Plato, his insistence on moral and spiritual values had made his doctrine harmonize easily with Christian dogma. The appropriation of pagan thought and secular science had not so far produced any discord with the truths of the Christian faith, or any serious tendency to question them. It is indeed significant that the pupils of Anselm of Bec should have asked him for a _rational_ justification of Christian dogma; but that had not betokened any doubt as to the possibility of reconciling faith with reason, but only an appreciation of the desirability of being able to demonstrate that, however superfluous, such justification was perfectly possible. Again, in the vast compendious treatises of such encyclopædic scholars as Vincent of Beauvais, Hugo of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, there was the explicit recognition that, while secular learning is a thing to be desired for its own sake, yet its stages of _cogitatio_ and _meditatio_ are only the threshold before the portal of the shrine, wherein the divine nature may be contemplated. Reason cannot unaided explain the ineffable; the visible world is but the _simulacrum_ of the unseen.[71] Once or twice indeed there had been hints of danger. Right back in the ninth century a certain very self-confident Irishman, by name John Scotus Eriugena, had declared the supremacy of reason over authority; for while authority sometimes proceeded from reason, reason never proceeded from authority. In the eleventh century there had been the