[Footnote 14: The Amalricans, as the followers of Amaury de Bene were termed, were not only condemned by the Lateran Council of 1215, but sharply persecuted; and we know nothing of the doctrines of Amaury, David, and the other northern Averroists or Pantheists, except from later and hostile notices.] However this may be, the claim, modest and even meagre as it may seem to some, which has been here once more put forward for this Scholasticism--the claim of a far-reaching educative influence in mere language, in mere system of arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If, at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularised theology and vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen both popularised and vulgarised since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, the fetters, the prison in which its thought was mediaevally kept. The justice or the injustice, the taste or the vulgarity, of these moralisings, of these felicitations, may not concern us here. But in expression, as distinguished from thought, the value of the discipline to which these youthful languages were subjected is not likely now to be denied by any scholar who has paid attention to the subject. It would have been perhaps a pity if thought had not gone through other phases; it would certainly have been a pity if the tongues had all been subjected to the fullest influence of Latin constraint. But that the more lawless of them benefited by that constraint there can be no doubt whatever. The influence of form which the best Latin hymns of the Middle Ages exercised in poetry, the influence in vocabulary and in logical arrangement which Scholasticism exercised in prose, are beyond dispute: and even those who will not pardon literature, whatever its historical and educating importance be, for being something less than masterly in itself, will find it difficult to maintain the exclusion of the _Cur Deus Homo_, and impossible to refuse admission to the _Dies Irae_. CHAPTER II. CHANSONS DE GESTE.[15]