umbling sea of everlasting agitation. A
central gravitation in the power of Christianity has drawn to one point
and converged into one tendency all capital agencies in all degrees of
remoteness, making them tend to rest and unity; whilst, again, by an
antagonist action, one vast centrifugal force, measured against the
other, has so modified the result as to compel the intellect of man into
divergencies answering to the line of convergence; balancing the central
rest for man's hopes by everlasting motion for his intellect, and the
central unity for man's conscience by everlasting progress for his
efforts.

Now, the Scholastic philosophy meddled chiefly with those tertiary or
sub-dependent truths; such, viz., as are indifferent to Christianity by
any reaction which they can exert from error in their treatment, but not
indifferent as regards their own original derivation. Many people
connect Scholasticism with a notion of error and even of falsehood,
because they suppose it to have arisen on the incitement of Popery. And
it is undeniable that Popery impressed a bias or _clinamen_ upon its
movement. It is true also that Scholasticism is not only ministerial to
Popery, but in parts is consubstantial with Popery. Popery is not fully
fleshed and developed apart from the commentaries or polemical apologies
of Aquinas. But still we must remember that Popery had not yet taken up
the formal position of hostility to truth, seeing that as yet
Protestantism was only beginning its first infant struggles. Many Popish
errors were hardened and confirmed in the very furnace of the strife.
And though perilous errors had intermingled themselves with Popery,
which would eventually have strangled all the Christian truth which it
involved, yet that truth it was which gave its whole interest to the
Reformation. Had the Reformation fought against mere unmixed error, it
could not have been viewed as a reforming process, but as one entirely
innovating. So that even where it is most exclusively Popish,
Scholasticism has often a golden thread of truth running through its
texture; often it is not Popish in the sense of being Anti-Protestant,
but in the elder sense of being Anti-Pagan. However, generally speaking,
it is upon the neutral ground common to all modes of Christianity that
this philosophy ranges. That being so, there was truth enough of a high
order to sustain the sublimer motives of the Schoolmen; whilst the
consciousness of supporting the