“To any one carefully considering what man is, nothing will seem more probable than that he is a divine animal, distinguished by a certain share of divinity (_numinis_). By bone and flesh he smacks of the earth. By reason his affinity to God is shown. Moses, inspired, certifies that by this prerogative man was created in the image of God. Whence it also follows for man, that he should through reason recognize and love his true good. Now reason teaches that what pertains to virtue is the true good, and that it is within us. The things we temporally possess are good only by opinion (_opinione_, _i.e._ not _ratione_), and these are about us. What is about us is not within our _jus_ but another’s (_alterius juris sunt_). Chance directs them; they neither come nor stand under our arbitrament. For us they are at the lender’s will (_precaria_), like a slave belonging to another.[225] Through such, true felicity is neither had nor lost. Indeed no one is happy, no one is wretched by reason of what is another’s. It is his own that makes a man’s good or ill, and whatever is not within him is not his own.” Then Hildebert speaks of dignities, of wife and child, of the fruits of the earth and riches--_bona vaga_, _bona sunt pennata haec omnia_. Men quarrel and struggle about all these things--_ecce vides quanta mundus laboret insania_.[226] No one need point out how much more natural this reasoning would have been from the lips of Seneca than from those of an archiepiscopal contemporary of St. Bernard. One may, however, comment on the patent fact that this reflection of the antique in Hildebert’s ethical consolation reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood, and in this it is an instance of the general fact that mediaeval methods of reasoning consciously or unconsciously followed the antique; while the emotion, the love and yearning, of mediaeval religion was more largely the gift of Christianity. CHAPTER XXXI EVOLUTION OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN PROSE Classical antiquity lay far back of the mediaeval period, while in the nearer background pressed the centuries of transition, the time of the Church Fathers. The patristic material and a crude knowledge of the antique passed over to the early Middle Ages. Mediaeval progress was to consist, very largely, in the mastery and appropriation of the one and the other.