the doctrine of the beatific vision, which they so fully and so beautifully evolved, stands a perpetual protest. For in what was this coarseness and lowness of thought more likely to appear, than in their conception of the greatest happiness of man? Or who were more likely to teach what is far removed from vulgar and worldly conceptions than men who placed the sum of all happiness in the vision and fruition of divine essence, which, according to them, could be seen by no corporal eye, [Footnote 16] and in which was, they said, that joy which eye had not seen nor ear heard, neither had it entered into the heart of man to conceive? The whole of the scholastic treatise _De Deo Uno_ is but another magnificent protest against such an accusation. {85} The heresy of Gilbert Porretanus [Footnote 17] would never be condemned by the Protestants of the present day; nor has ever the conception of the divine simplicity in perfection been so fully realized as it was by those much-abused theologians. The mediatorship of our blessed Lord is now commonly apprehended by Protestants in a manner which makes a real difference of character between the father and son; but no one who knows anything of the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation can imagine that these theologians would have tolerated for a moment a notion so frightfully heretical. With respect to psychology, the scholastic age saw the death of Traducianism; and anyone who has attended to the earlier scholastic opinions respecting the manner in which spirits suffer in the penal fire, will have seen that they are of a more "spiritual" tendency than those of most Protestant theologians. [Footnote 18] [Footnote 15: De Peccato Originall.] [Footnote 16: St. Thomas, in ima & q.12, a. 3; and other older authors in Sent. i. 1, d.1, & l. 4, d.49] [Footnote 17: Lombardus in Sent. i. 1, d.33, 34; and the commentators _ad loc_.] [Footnote 18: Sensation and "sensitive imagination" appeared to the scholastic to be of sole material a character, that they would not admit that these and other sensitive affections can exist in a separate spirit; and, consequently, those theologians who explain the punishment of separate spirits by the analogy of the soul and body, were compelled to admit that the pain must be different in kind from the "passio conjuncti."]