in the ‘Morgante Maggiore,’ in which the mood is one of complete levity and all the forces of ridicule are brought against the quips and quiddities of the theologian and the superiority of Orlando’s God over Morgante’s original deity is made to look exceedingly equivocal. We must not allow ourselves to discover an Averrhoïst origin for all the outspoken language used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in which Christianity is regarded critically, objectively.[116] It is no doubt true that Averrhoïsm was principally an academic force belonging to the universities, and that even there its adherents were never numerous. On the other hand, there must inevitably have been some infiltration of Averrhoïst ideas through the general community. There must have been some dispersal through the agency of the scholars who thronged the seats of learning, who were more often than not wanderers from one school to another, from Spain to France, from France to England, from England to Italy, and who must have scattered abroad the influences under which they themselves were brought. There were from the point of view of the Church two obviously dangerous features in Averrhoïsm. First there was its anti-scholastic nature, its determination to follow philosophy wheresoever it might lead, regardless of whether it could be reconciled with Christian dogma or not, a determination which was accompanied by a bold insistence upon their incompatibility in point of fact. In the resolution to follow truth, untrammelled by religious dogma, there might at the surface appear to be something of that critical spirit which produced another anti-scholastic revolt, that of Roger Bacon. But whereas in his case the inductive method gave promise of progress in knowledge, the possibility scarcely existed with philosophers who were just as completely persuaded as was the most orthodox mediæval saint that the truth had once and for ever been vouchsafed to mankind, with the sole difference that whereas the saint found the truth in the Bible, the Averrhoïst found it in the treatises of Aristotle. But the fact that he did so find it—in pagan and not in sacred writ—was, one would have thought, radical enough and dangerous enough; while the actual doctrines he professed were as divorced from Christian belief, as wildly heretical as any that the most fiercely persecuted mediæval sect ever expressed. Nevertheless as a rule the Averrhoïst was not persecuted.