speculation.  The works of the freethinker Averroes (twelfth century) which were based on Aristotle’s philosophy, propagated a small wave of rationalism in Christian countries.  Averroes held the eternity of matter and denied the immortality of the soul; his general view may be described as pantheism.  But he sought to avoid difficulties with the orthodox authorities of Islam by laying down the doctrine of double truth, that is the coexistence of two independent and contradictory truths, the one philosophical, and the other religious.  This

[69] did not save him from being banished from the court of the Spanish caliph.  In the University of Paris his teaching produced a school of freethinkers who held that the Creation, the resurrection of the body, and other essential dogmas, might be true from the standpoint of religion but are false from the standpoint of reason.  To a plain mind this seems much as if one said that the doctrine of immortality is true on Sundays but not on week-days, or that the Apostles’ Creed is false in the drawing-room and true in the kitchen.  This dangerous movement was crushed, and the saving principle of double truth condemned, by Pope John XXI.  The spread of Averroistic and similar speculations called forth the Theology of Thomas, of Aquino in South Italy (died 1274), a most subtle thinker, whose mind had a natural turn for scepticism.  He enlisted Aristotle, hitherto the guide of infidelity, on the side of orthodoxy, and constructed an ingenious Christian philosophy which is still authoritative in the Roman Church.  But Aristotle and reason are dangerous allies for faith, and the treatise of Thomas is perhaps more calculated to unsettle a believing mind by the doubts which it powerfully states than to quiet the scruples of a doubter by its solutions.

There must always have been some private

[70] and underground unbelief here and there, which did not lead to any serious consequences.  The blasphemous statement that the world had been deceived by three impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, was current in the thirteenth century.  It was attributed to the freethinking Emperor Frederick II (died 1250), who has been described as “the first modern man.”  The same idea, in a milder form, was expressed in the story of the Three Rings, which is at least as old.  A Mohammedan ruler, desiring to extort money from a rich Jew, summoned him to his court and laid a snare for him.  “My friend,” he said, “I have often heard it reported that thou art a very wise man.  Tell me therefore which of the three religions, that of the Jews, that of the Mohammedans, and that of the Christians, thou believest to be the truest.”  The Jew saw that a trap was laid for him and answered as follows:  “My lord, there was once a rich man who among his treasures had a ring of such great value that he wished to leave it as a perpetual heirloom to his successors.  So he made a will that whichever of his sons should be found in possession of this ring after his death should be considered his heir.  The son to whom he gave the ring acted in the same way as his father, and so the ring passed from hand to