new Christian virtue oppressed, but did not quench, admiration (though held sinful by the most severe) for the great name of ancient Rome, and the many works of pagan civilization, its eloquence, its poetry, its civil wisdom. Nor did it forbid admiration for Arabic or Judaic-Arabic wisdom, of which the works were well received, notwithstanding religious strife. Hence we may say that in the same way as Græco-Roman humanism did not altogether exclude the supernatural, so the Christian supernatural did not prevent human consideration of worldly passions and earthly transactions. This becomes more and more evident as we pass from the early to the late Middle Ages, when profane historiography progresses, as the result of the struggles between Church and State, of the communal movement, of the more frequent commercial communications between Europe and the East, and the like. These are themselves the result of the development, the maturing, and the modernization of thought, which grows with life and makes life grow. Neither life nor thought remained attached to the conceptions of the fathers of the Church, of Augustine, of Orosius, to whom history offered nothing but the proof of the infinite evils that afflict humanity, of the unceasing punishments of God, and of the "deaths of the persecutors." In Otto of Frisia himself, who holds more firmly than the others to the doctrines of Augustine, we find the asperity of doctrine tempered by grace; and when he afterward proceeds to narrate the struggle between the Church and the Empire, if it cannot be said that he takes the side of the Empire, it also cannot be said that he resolutely defends that of the Church, for the eschatological visions that form so great a part of his work do not blind his practical sense and political judgment. The party of the faith against the faithless remained, however, always the 'great party,' the great 'struggle of classes' (elect and reprobate) and of 'states' (celestial and earthly cities). But within this large framework we perceive other figures more closely particularized, other parties and interests, which gradually come to occupy the first, second, and third planes, so that the struggle between God and the devil is forced ever more and more into the background and becomes somewhat vague, something always assumed to be present, but not felt to be active and urgent in the soul, as something which is still talked of, but is not deeply felt, or at least felt with the energy that the words would wish us to believe, the words themselves often sounding like a refrain, as pious as it is conventional. The miraculous gradually fills less and less space and appears more rarely: God acts more willingly by means of secondary causes, and respects natural laws; He rarely intervenes directly in a revolutionary manner. The form of the chronicles, too, becomes also less accidental and arid, the better among the chroniclers