school will be for the explanation of the Scripture texts on which dogmas are based; and for this, great learning and scholarship will be indispensable.  To me it is surprising that metaphysics have so long retained their hold on the minds of Protestant divines.  Nothing is more unsatisfactory, and to many more repellent, than metaphysical divinity.  It is a perversion of the spirit of Christian teachings.  “What says our Lord?” should be the great inquiry in our schools of theology; not, What deductions can be drawn from them by a process of ingenious reasoning which often, without reference to other important truths, lands one in absurdities, or at least in one-sided systems?

But the metaphysical divinity of the Schoolmen had great attractions to the students of the Middle Ages.  And there must have been something in it which we do not appreciate, or it would not have maintained itself in the schools for three hundred years.  Perhaps it was what those ages needed, the discipline through which the mind must go before it could be prepared for the scientific investigations of our own times.  In an important sense the Scholastic doctors were the teachers of Luther and Bacon.  Certainly their unsatisfactory science was one of the marked developments of the civilization of Europe, through which the Gothic nations must need pass.  It has been the fashion to ridicule it and depreciate it in our modern times, especially among Protestants, who have ridiculed and slandered the papal power and all the institutions of the Middle Ages.  Yet scholars might as well ridicule the text-books they were required to study fifty years ago, because they are not up to our times.  We should not disdain the early steps by which future progress is made easy.  We cannot despise men who gave up their lives to the contemplation of subjects which demand the highest tension of the intellectual faculties, even if these exercises were barren of utilitarian results.  Some future age may be surprised at the comparative unimportance of questions which interest this generation.  The Scholastic Philosophy cannot indeed be utilized by us in the pursuit of scientific knowledge; nor (to recur to Vaughan’s simile for the great work of Aquinas) can a mediaeval cathedral be utilized for purposes of oratory or business.  But the cathedral is nevertheless a grand monument, suggesting lofty sentiments, which it would be senseless and ruthless barbarism to destroy or allow to fall into decay, but which should rather be preserved as a precious memento of what is most poetic and attractive in the Middle Ages.  When any modern philosopher shall rear so gigantic and symmetrical a monument of logical disquisitions as the “Summa Theologica” is said to be by the most competent authorities, then the sneers of a Macaulay or a Lewes will be entitled to more consideration.  It is said that a new edition of this great Mediaeval work is about to be published under the direct auspices of the Pope, as the best and most comprehensive system of Christian theology ever written by man.