volume 1, book 4, chapter 4.

"It is difficult, by a mere perusal of Abelard's works, to understand the effect he produced upon his hearers by the force of his argumentation, whether studied or improvised, and by the ardor and animation of his eloquence, and the grace and attractiveness of his person. But the testimony of his contemporaries is unanimous; even his adversaries themselves render justice to his high oratorical qualities. No one ever reasoned with more subtlety, or handled the dialectic tool with more address; and assuredly, something of these qualities is to be found in the writings he has left us. But the intense life, the enthusiastic ardor which enlivened his discourses, the beauty of his face, and the charm of his voice cannot be imparted by cold manuscripts. {694} Héloise, whose name is inseparably linked with that of her unfortunate husband, and whom Charles de Rémusat does not hesitate to call 'the first of women'; who, in any case, was a superior person of her time; Héloise, who loved Abelard with 'an immoderate love,' and who, under the veil of a 'religieuse' and throughout the practice of devotional duties, remained faithful to him until death; Héloise said to him in her famous letter of 1136: 'Thou hast two things especially which could instantly win thee the hearts of all women: the charm thou knowest how to impart to thy voice in speaking and singing.' External gifts combined with intellectual qualities to make of Abelard an incomparable seducer of minds and hearts. Add to this an astonishing memory, a knowledge as profound as was compatible with the resources of his time, and a vast erudition which caused his contemporaries to consider him a master of universal knowledge. ... How can one be astonished that with such qualities Abelard gained an extraordinary ascendency over his age; that, having become the intellectual ruler and, as it were, the dictator of the thought of the twelfth century, he should have succeeded in attracting to his chair and in retaining around it thousands of young men; the first germ of those assemblages of students who were to constitute the universities several years later? ... It is not alone by the outward success of his scholastic apostolate that Abelard merits consideration as the precursor of the modern spirit and the promoter of the foundation of the universities; it is also by his doctrine, or at least by his method. ... No one claims that Abelard was the first who, in the Middle Ages, had introduced dialectics into theology, reason into authority. In the ninth century, Scotus Erigena had already said: 'Authority is derived from reason.' Scholasticism, which is nothing but logic enlightening theology, an effort of reason to demonstrate dogma, had begun before Abelard; but it was he who gave movement and life to the method by lending it his power and his renown."

_G. Compayré, Abelard, part 1, chapter 2-3._

EDUCATION: Latin Language.

"Greek was an unknown tongue: only a very few of the Latin classics received a perfunctory attention: Boethius was preferred to Cicero, and the Moral Sentences ascribed to Cato to either. Rules couched in barbarous Latin verse were committed to memory. Aristotle was known only in incorrect Latin translations, which many of the taught, and some of the teachers probably, supposed to be the originals. Matters were not mended when the student, having passed through the preliminary course of arts, advanced to the study of the sciences. Theology meant an acquaintance with the 'Sentences' of Peter Lombard, or, in other cases, with the 'Summa' of Thomas Aquinas; in medicine, Galen was an authority from which there was no appeal. On every side the student was fenced round by traditions and prejudices, through which it was impossible to break. In truth, he had no means of knowing that there was a wider and fairer world beyond. Till the classical revival came, every decade made the yoke of prescription heavier, and each generation of students, therefore, a feebler copy of the last."

_C. Beard, Martin Luther and the Reformation, chapter 3._

"What at first had been everywhere a Greek became in Western Europe a Latin religion. The discipline of Rome maintained the body of doctrine which the thought of Greece had defined. A new Latin version, superseding alike the venerable Greek translation of the Old Testament and the original words of Evangelists and Apostles, became the received text of Holy Scripture. The Latin Fathers acquired an authority scarcely less binding. The ritual, lessons, and hymns of the Church were Latin. Ecclesiastics transacted the business of civil departments requiring education. Libraries were armories of the Church: grammar was part of her drill. The humblest scholar was enlisted, in her service: she recruited her ranks by founding Latin schools. 'Education in the rudiments of Latin,' says Hallam, 'was imparted to a greater number of individuals than at present;' and, as they had more use for it than at present, it was longer retained. If a boy of humble birth had a taste for letters, or if a boy of high birth had a distaste for arms, the first step was to learn Latin. His foot was then on the ladder. He might rise by the good offices of his family to a bishopric, or to the papacy itself by merit and the grace of God. Latin enabled a Greek from Tarsus (Theodore) to become the founder of learning in the English church; and a Yorkshireman (Alcuin) to organize the schools of Charlemagne. Without Latin, our English Winfrid (St. Boniface) could not have been apostle of Germany and reformer of the Frankish Church; or the German Albert, master at Paris of Thomas Aquinas; or Nicholas Breakspeare, Pope of Rome. With it, Western Christendom was one vast field of labor: calls for self-sacrifice, or offers of promotion, might come from north or south, from east or west. Thus in the Middle Ages Latin was made the groundwork of education; not for the beauty of its classical literature, nor because the study of a dead language was the best mental gymnastic, or the only means of acquiring a masterly freedom in the use of living tongues, but because it was the language of educated men throughout Western Europe, employed for public business, literature, philosophy, and science; above all, in God's providence, essential to the unity, and therefore enforced by the authority of, the Western Church."

_C. S. Parker, Essay on the History of Classical Education (quoted in Dr. Henry Barnard's "Letters, Essays and Thoughts on Studies and Conduct," page 467)._

EDUCATION: France.

"The countries of western Europe, leavened, all of them, by the one spirit of the feudal and catholic Middle Age, formed in some sense one community, and were more associated than they have been since the feudal and catholic unity of the Middle Age has disappeared and given place to the divided and various life of modern Europe. In the mediæval community France held the first place. It is now well known that to place in the 15th century the revival of intellectual life and the re-establishment of civilisation, and to treat the period between the 5th century, when ancient civilisation was ruined by the barbarians, and the 15th, when the life and intellect of this civilisation reappeared and transformed the world, as one chaos, is a mistake. The chaos ends about the 10th century; in the 11th there truly comes the first re-establishment of civilisation, the first revival of intellectual life; the principal centre of this revival is France, its chief monuments of literature are in the French language, its chief monuments of art are the French cathedrals. {695} This revival fills the 12th and 13th centuries with its activity and with its works; all this time France has the lead; in the 14th century the lead passes to Italy; but now comes the commencement of a wholly new period, the period of the Renaissance properly so called, the beginning of modern European life, the ceasing of the life of the feudal and catholic Middle Age. The anterior and less glorious Renaissance, the Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Age itself, a revival which came to a stop and could not successfully develop itself, but which has yet left profound traces in our spirit and our literature,--this revival belongs chiefly to France. France, then, may well serve as a typical country wherein to trace the mediæval growth of intellect and learning; above all she may so stand for us, whose connection with her in the Middle Age, owing to our Norman kings and the currency of her language among our cultivated class, was so peculiarly close; so close that the literary and intellectual development of the two countries at that time intermingles, and no important event can happen in that of the one without straightway affecting and interesting that of the other. ... With the hostility of the long French Wars of Edward the Third comes the estrangement, never afterwards diminishing but always increasing."

_M. Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent,