The school of glossators presented the full Roman law to Europe. The careful and critical interpretation of the text of Justinian’s Codification, of the _Digest_ above all, was their great service. In performing it, these jurists also had educated themselves and developed their own intelligence. They had also put together in Summae the results of their own education in the law. These works facilitated legal study and sharpened the faculties of students and professors. Books of Quaestiones, legal disputations, works upon legal process and formulae, served the same ends.[399] These men were deficient in historical knowledge. Yet they compared _Digest_, _Codex_, and _Novels_; they tried to re-establish the purity of the text; they weighed and they expounded. Theirs was an intellectual effort to master the jurisprudence of Rome: their labours constituted a renaissance of jurisprudence; and the fact that they were often men of affairs as well as professors, kept them from ignoring the practical bearings of the matters which they taught. The work of the glossators may be compared with that of the theologian philosophers of the thirteenth century--Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas--who were winning for the world a new and comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle. Both jurists and philosophers, in their different spheres, carried through a more profound study, and reached a more comprehensive knowledge, of a great store of antique thought, than previous mediaeval centuries conceived of. Moreover, the interpretation of the _Corpus juris_ was quite as successful as the interpretation of Aristotle. It was in fact surer, because freer from the deflections of religious motive. No consideration of agreement or disagreement with Scripture troubled the glossators’ interpretation of the _Digest_, though indeed they may have been interested in finding support for whatever political views they held upon the claims of emperor and pope. But this did not disturb them as much as Aristotle’s opinion that the universe was eternal, worried Albertus and Aquinas. IV The Church, from the time of its first recognition by the Roman Empire, lived under the Roman law;[400] and the constitutions safeguarding its authority were large and ample before the Empire fell. Constantine, to be sure, never dreamed of the famous “Donation of Constantine” forged by a later time, yet his enactments fairly launched the great mediaeval Catholic Church upon the career which was to bring it more domination than was granted in this pseudo-charter of its power. A number of Constantine’s enactments were preserved by the Theodosian Code, in which the powers and privileges of Church and clergy were portentously set forth.