capon are His body, which for our salvation was baked and pierced at the Cross.  The Holy Ghost baked the cake in the Virgin’s womb, in which the sugar of His divinity amalgamated with the dough of our humanity.  In the Virgin’s womb the Holy Ghost also spiced the mead and prepared it from wine; the spice is divine virtue, the wine is human blood.  In addition He caused the holy capon to issue from the egg; the yolk of the egg is the deity, the white is humanity, the shell is the womb of the Virgin Mary ...,” etc.

The religion of Christ was lost, man had become a stranger to his own soul—­celestial warnings, signs of the Judgment Day, daemonic temptations, surrounded him, as far as he paid heed to anything super-sensuous on all sides.  The French chronicler, Radulf Glaber (about A.D. 1000), might have been writing a satire on antiquity when he warned his contemporaries of the demons lurking everywhere, but more especially dwelling in trees and fountains.  Of a learned man who was studying the classic poets, he said:  “This man, confused by the magic of evil spirits, had the impudence to propound doctrines contradictory to our holy faith.  In his opinion everything the ancient poets had maintained was true.  Peter, the bishop of the town, condemned him as a heretic.  At that time there were many men in Italy believing this false doctrine; they perished by the sword or at the stake.”  We have a letter, written at the same time by Gerbert, who later on became Pope Sylvester II., to a friend, beseeching him to obtain for him manuscripts of the Latin philosophers and poets.  He wrote textbooks of astronomy, geometry and medicine, and introduced the Arabic numbers and the decimal system into Europe.  In consequence he, too, was accused of magic and intercourse with Arabian pagans.  A chronicler relates that he sold his soul to the devil and became pope through the devil’s agency; and that, when he was on the point of death, he ordered his body to be cut to pieces so that the devil should not carry it away.

To-day we find it difficult to realise such a state of mind.  Every man of our period who takes the smallest interest in things spiritual—­be he the most orthodox ecclesiastic—­at least knows that there are capable people in the world whose opinions differ from his, who seek fresh knowledge; he knows it, even though he may pretend that they are people who have gone astray and have been abandoned by God.  No one can be entirely blind to the new values created by human intellect.  But the men of the Middle Ages were swayed by a monstrous dualism, and despite their belief in the illimitable power of human cognition, they unquestioningly accepted the sacred tradition and rejected the naive evidence of the senses and intellect whenever it seemed to contradict the dogma.  Thus mediaeval science did not represent what it represented in antiquity, and what it represents now, the study of the true relationship of things, but rather the application of truths revealed