At first glance this appears very surprising. Yet the explanation is in reality simple enough. In the first place, the Church was no enemy of speculative thinking as such. The doctors, the masters and the students who debated so earnestly, so vehemently, abstract questions in philosophy as well as in theology were themselves clerics; the universities were ecclesiastical foundations; their studies were essentially sacred, not profane. It was no part of the policy of the mediæval Church to stifle enquiry and discussion by those properly qualified concerning the ultimate truths of existence. Such work might well be to the glory of God and the permanent enrichment of the Church. And if the Averrhoïsts did not, like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas and the great Franciscan Augustinians, convert their learning into Christian apologetics; on the other hand, they were not like the wandering sectaries, whom the Church did persecute, irresponsible unlearned laity, who spoke of mysteries they were not fit to understand, but they were themselves clergy under proper academic discipline and supervision. Moreover, they did not attack the Church; on the contrary, they professed themselves the most devout true Catholics. Their interest in philosophy was purely abstract; they had no ulterior motives, no remotest idea of propaganda with a view to shaking the authority of the Church or the filial allegiance to her of a single one of her children. On the contrary, they repeatedly and most emphatically asserted that their philosophical tenets were exclusively academic and not intended to have any bearing upon life and conduct. Thus the Averrhoïst postulate of a double truth, one philosophic, the other religious, stood its adherents in good stead. We cannot to-day see into the minds of these Latin Averrhoïsts, cannot tell whether they persuaded themselves that they really were Christians, were sincere in their conception of two irreconcilable truths or adopted it merely as a convenient subterfuge and were flippantly cynical or sardonically insolent in their hypocrisy. The subterfuge served the Averrhoïsts; whether its acquiescence in the subterfuge served the Church is another matter. While the obviously honest Waldensian and Beghard were harried to the stake, the obviously dishonest Averrhoïst was usually left at large. Was not the tendency of such discrepancy of treatment to place a premium upon mere lip-service and religious insincerity? From the fourteenth-century Averrhoïst, with his idea of the double truth, it is but one step to the fifteenth-century humanist, openly indifferent to religion altogether, not troubling to consider whether such a thing as religious truth exists at all, seeking and discerning truth in the pagan world only. CHAPTER V REFORM MOVEMENTS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE