We are amazed that intellectual giants, equal to the old Greeks in acuteness and logical powers, could waste their time on the frivolous questions and dialectical subtilties to which they devoted their mighty powers.  However interesting to them, nothing is drier and duller to us, nothing more barren and unsatisfying, than their logical sports.  Their treatises are like trees with endless branches, each leading to new ramifications, with no central point in view, and hence never finished, and which might be carried on ad infinitum.  To attempt to read their disquisitions is like walking in labyrinths of ever-opening intricacies.  By such a method no ultimate truth could be arrived at, beyond what was assumed.  There is now and then a man who professes to have derived light and wisdom from those dialectical displays, since they were doubtless marvels of logical precision and clearness of statement.  But in a practical point of view those “masterpieces of logic” are utterly useless to most modern inquirers.  These are interesting only as they exhibit the waste of gigantic energies; they do not even have the merit of illustrative rhetoric or eloquence.  The earlier monks were devout and spiritual, and we can still read their lofty meditations with profit, since they elevate the soul and make it pant for the beatitudes of spiritual communion with God.  But the writings of the Scholastic doctors are cold, calm, passionless, and purely intellectual,—­logical without being edifying.  We turn from them, however acute and able, with blended disappointment and despair.  They are fig-trees, bearing nothing but leaves, such as our Lord did curse.  The distinctions are simply metaphysical, and not moral.

Why the whole force of an awakening age should have been devoted to such subtilties and barren discussion it is difficult to see, unless they were found useful in supporting a theology made up of metaphysical deductions rather than an interpretation of the meaning of Scripture texts.  But there was then no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew; there was no exegetical research; there was no science and no real learning.  There was nothing but theology, with the exception of Lives of the Saints.  The horizon of human inquiries was extremely narrow.  But when the minds of very intellectual men were directed to one particular field, it would be natural to expect something remarkable and marvellously elaborate of its kind.  Such was the Scholastic Philosophy.  As a mere exhibition of dialectical acumen, minute distinctions, and logical precision in the use of words, it was wonderful.  The intricacy and detail and ramifications of this system were an intellectual feat which astonishes us, yet which does not instruct us, certainly outside of a metaphysical divinity which had more charm to the men of the Middle Ages than it can have to us, even in a theological school where dogmatic divinity is made the most important study.  The day will soon come when the principal chair in the theological