f you
once begin such a system, who can measure the absurdity which will
follow?"

During the same century another opponent of this dominant system
appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and authority
come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that the fathers,
great as their authority is, often contradict each other; and that, in
last resort, reason must be called in to decide between them.

But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and
Erigena placed under the ban by two councils--his work being condemned
by a synod as a "Commentum Diaboli." Four centuries later Honorius
III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the venom of hereditary
depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed
it on the Index, where, with so many other works which have done good
service to humanity, it remains to this day. Nor did Abelard, who, three
centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some respects
like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St.
Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more
consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in
the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these
ominous words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod
credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines,
and then find texts to confirm them.

These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous fabric
of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that the
Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text
mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the two
wives the Synagogue and the Church. Even such men as Alfred the Great
and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in building
above the sacred books this prodigious structure of sophistry.

Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system of
interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last decade of
the fifteenth century, just at the close of the medieval period, he was
engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No man ever preached
more powerfully the gospel of righteousness; none ever laid more stress
on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless
of tradition; and yet we find the great Florentine apostle and martyr
absolutely tied fast to the old system of allegor