aberrations of Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. In the next century a new and more brilliant Eriugena arose in the person of Abelard, a man even more self-opinionated and self-confident, one who treated the seeming contradictions of the Fathers as opportunity merely for mental calisthenics, whose whole method of thought appeared to enthrone reason at the expense of authority. But the potential danger was never realized. The trained dialectician trembled before the unlearned spiritual dictator of Christendom; the man who exalted himself in his own eyes dared not face Bernard, to whom God was all in all and man as nothing: and at the last Abelard, a monk of Cluny, died humbled, in the odour of sanctity. Up to the end of the twelfth century, then, the free play of enquiry and discussion in the schools had not threatened defilement of the purity of the Christian faith. Heresy had indeed been a serious danger; but not among the learned, not in the precincts of the university, had it been bred. The succeeding century, however, did bring with it an anxious problem. There came a large influx of new learning out of the pagan past—the encyclopædic knowledge of Aristotle. Aristotle had been introduced into the world of Latin Christianity long ere this through the medium of Boëthius in the days of Theodoric.[72] The Dark Ages had intervened since then. Now came a second and a much more significant advent of Aristotle. This time he came through a non-Christian medium, through the interpretations of the ‘great commentator,’ the Moslem Ibn-Roschd, Averrhoës. Could the Stagirite be won for Christ; could his teachings be enlisted for the Christian theodicæa? The Church could not but be alive to the risks involved in any converse with Aristotelianism. There were radical contrasts between the Platonic and Aristotelian methods. The latter was inductive, non-committal, denoted an impartial examination of natural phenomena, the range of which was infinitely more comprehensive than anything which any other human mind had ever attempted. Aristotle seemed intent rather upon coldly collecting evidence from the operations of a soulless Nature than extolling the wonders of God in a beatific vision. The extent of secular knowledge opened up in the writings of Aristotle was, then, vast and their attraction to the alert and curious mind correspondingly vivid; but the attractiveness had to be viewed with caution. The Church perceived that there were in the Peripatetic philosophy elements which must be repugnant to truly devout minds. This would have been true even had the pure unadulterated text of Aristotle been in question; it was the more cogently true seeing that Aristotle was presented to the Christian world through the voice of Averrhoës and the commentary was more familiar than the original.