CAXTON.

Reduced facsimile of the first page of the only copy extant of

GODEFREY OF BOLOYNE

or

Last siege and CONQUESTE of Jherusalem.

The Prologue, at top of page, begins: 

Here begynneth the boke Intituled Eracles, and also Godefrey of Boloyne, the whiche speketh of the Conquest of the holy lande of Jherusalem.

Printed by Caxton, London, 1481.  In the British Museum.

A good specimen page of the earliest English printing.  Caxton’s first printed book, and the first book printed in English, was “The Game and Play of the Chess,” which was printed in 1474.  The blank space on this page was for the insertion by hand of an illuminated initial T.

ABELARD

(1079—­1142)

BY THOMAS DAVIDSON

Pierre, the eldest son of Berenger and Lucie (Abelard?) was born at Palais, near Nantes and the frontier of Brittany, in 1079.  His knightly father, having in his youth been a student, was anxious to give his family, and especially his favorite Pierre, a liberal education.  The boy was accordingly sent to school, under a teacher who at that time was making his mark in the world,—­Roscellin, the reputed father of Nominalism.  As the whole import and tragedy of his life may be traced back to this man’s teaching, and the relation which it bore to the thought of the time, we must pause to consider these.

[Illustration:  Abelard]

In the early centuries of our era, the two fundamental articles of the Gentile-Christian creed, the Trinity and the Incarnation, neither of them Jewish, were formulated in terms of Platonic philosophy, of which the distinctive tenet is, that the real and eternal is the universal, not the individual.  On this assumption it was possible to say that the same real substance could exist in three, or indeed in any number of persons.  In the case of God, the dogma-builders were careful to say, essence is one with existence, and therefore in Him the individuals are as real as the universal.  Platonism, having lent the formula for the Trinity, became the favorite philosophy of many of the Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative.

This distinction, as aggravated by Neo-Platonism, further affected Eastern Christianity in the sixth century, and Western Christianity in the ninth, chiefly through the writings of (the pseudo-) Dionysius Areopagita, and gave rise to Christian mysticism.  It was then erected into a rule of conduct through the efforts of Pope Gregory VII., who strove to subject practical and civil life entirely to the control of ecclesiastics