Therefore, mine eyes mount up, as by a stair, To seek the picture on my chamber wall; Therefore my soul climbs oft the steeps of prayer, To rest where shadows of thy Son’s cross fall. Centres Of Thought In The Past. First Article. The Monasteries. It seems very ambitious to try and present to the reader a sketch of anything so vast as the field of research pointed out by the above title, and, indeed, far from aiming at this, we will set forth by saying, once for all, that our attempts will be nothing more than passing views, isolated specimens of that immense whole which, under the names of education, progress, development, scholasticism, and _renaissance_, forms the intellectual “stock in trade” of every modern system of knowledge. The “past” is divided into two distinct eras—the monastic and the scholastic. In the earlier era, the centres of thought were the Benedictine and the Columbanian monasteries; in the second era, intellectual life gathered its strength in the universities, under the guidance of the church, typified by the Mendicant Orders. The first era may be said to have lasted from the fifth century to the eleventh, and to have reached its apogee in the seventh and eighth. The second reached from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, and attained its highest glory in the prolific and gifted thirteenth century. Each had its representative centre _par excellence_, its representative men, philosophy, and religious development. Prior Vaughan, in his recent masterpiece, the _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_, expresses this idea in many ways. “From the sixth to the thirteenth century,” he says, “the education of Europe was Benedictine. Monks in their cells ... were planting the mustard‐seed of future European intellectual growth.” Further on he says: “Plato represents rest; Aristotle, inquisitiveness. The former is synthetical; the latter, analytical. _Quies_ is monastic, inquisitiveness is dialectical.” Thus, Plato is the representative master of the earlier era; S. Benedict and his incomparable rule, its representative religious outgrowth; the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the liberal arts, its representative system of education. We do not hear of many “commentaries” in those days, nor of curious schedules of questions, such as, “Did the little hands of the Boy Jesus create the stars?”(26) On the other hand, elegant Latinity was taught, and the Scriptures were multiplied by thousands of costly and laborious transcriptions. The first era was eminently conservative. Its very schools were physically representative; “the solitary abbey, hidden away amongst the hills, with its psalmody, and manual work, and unexciting study.”(27) In the scholastic era, things were reversed. “Latinity grew barbarous, and many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise of reason. Yet intellectual progress was being made in spite of the decay of letters.... In the extraordinary intellectual revolution