The scholasticism which was so marked a peculiarity of the age of Leo X., was the labor of intellect in the service of faith, and we know its starting point, its progress, and its end. It arose with the new society of that formative era, and arrived at perfect dominion after having been delivered from all the ruins of the ancient civilization, when the soil of Europe had become more firm and capable of receiving the foundations upon which a nobler and broader social compact might arise. Charlemagne, who with one hand arrested the Saracens in the South, and with the other resisted the barbarians of the North, became the type and leader of western civilization in the dawn of the third great period; and, succeeded by Charles the Bald and Alfred the Great, carefully fanned the sparks of ancient culture, in order to rekindle the flame of progressive science. It was he who first opened the schools, and originated scholasticism. As the Mysteries of olden times had been the primary source of Greek philosophy, so the convents of the eighth century were the cradle of the ethical systems we still possess and desire to improve. Scholasticism commenced in the absolute submission of philosophy to theology, advanced to the separation of these two spheres of mental exercise, and culminated in the entire independence of thought. The first epoch comprised, with the inspired Scriptures, the Christian fathers generally, and especially those of the Latin church, of whom Augustine was the chief. The little knowledge in this department that had escaped barbarism was then principally contained in the meagre writings of Boethius, born in 470, and senator of Theodoric; of Capella, born at Madaura, in Africa, about 474; of Mamert, at Vienna, who died in the year 477; of Cassiodorus, who flourished in the first half of the sixth century; of the Venerable Bede, who opened the chief sources of British civilization at the end of the seventh century; and of that other Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin, born at York, 726, and whom Charlemagne placed on the heights of mediæval culture, at the head of the regeneration of mind at large. John Scot, or Johannes Scotus Erigena, as he was called because an Irishman, lived long at the court of Charles the Bald, and afterward returned to England at the invitation of Alfred the Great, to teach at Oxford, where he died in 886, expressed the great text of his cotemporaries which they all labored to expound and exemplify: "There are not two studies, one of philosophy, and the other of religion; true philosophy is true religion, and true religion is true philosophy."