From century to century may be traced the process of restatement of patristic Christianity, with the antique material contained in it. The Christianity of the fifth century contained an amplitude of thought and learning. To the creative work of earlier and chiefly eastern men, the Latin intellect finally incorporate in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine had added its further great accomplishment and ordering. The sum of dogma was well-nigh made up; the Trinity was established; Christian learning had reached a compass beyond which it was not to pass for the next thousand years; the doctrines as to the “sacred mysteries,” as to the functions of the Church and its spiritual authority, existed in substance; the principles of symbolism and allegory had been set; the great mass of allegorical Scriptural interpretations had been devised; the spiritual relationship of man to God’s ordainment, to wit, the part to be played by the human will in man’s salvation or damnation, had been reasoned out; and man’s need and love of God, his nothingness apart from the Source and King and End of Life, had been uttered in words which men still use. Evidently succeeding generations of less illumination could not add to this vast intellectual creation; much indeed had to be done before they could comprehend and make it theirs, so as to use it as an element of their own thinking, or possess it as an inspiration of passionate, imaginative reverie. At the darkening close of the patristic period, Gregory the Great was still partially creative in his barbarizing handling of patristic themes.[6] After his death, for some three centuries, theologians were to devote themselves to mastering the great heritage from the Church Fathers. It was still a time of racial antipathy and conflict. The disparate elements of the mediaeval personality were as yet unblended. How could the unformed intellect of such a period grasp the patristic store of thought in its integrity? Still less might this wavering human spirit, uncertain of itself and unadjusted to novel and great conceptions, transform, and so renew, them with fresh life. Scarcely any proper recasting of patristic doctrine will be found in the Carolingian period, but merely a shuffling of the matter. There were some exceptions, arising, as in the case of Eriugena, from the extraordinary genius of this thinker; or again from the narrow controversial treatment of a matter argued with rupturing detachment of patristic opinions from their setting and balancing qualifications.[7] But the typical works of the eighth and ninth centuries were commentaries upon Scripture, consisting chiefly of excerpts from the Fathers. The flower of them all was the compendious _Glossa Ordinaria_ of Walafrid Strabo, a pupil of the voluminous commentator Rabanus Maurus.[8]