over presumption; the miracles of the early Church
were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were
claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath,
love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and
mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became
impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their
own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation
into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege. Ignorance could as easily lead
the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have
been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of
absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that
walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their guides to
be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood and
contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the rejection of the
highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind: while the learned
infidel, standing aloof, drew his own conclusions, both from the rancor
of the antagonists, and from their errors; believed each in all that he
alleged against the other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he
watched the winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of
England drink the blood of King Charles.

Sec. XCIX. Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent of the
renewal of the study of Pagan writers. But that renewal found the faith
of Christendom already weakened and divided; and therefore it was itself
productive of an effect tenfold greater than could have been apprehended
from it at another time. It acted first, as before noticed, in leading
the attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was
discovered that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt, and
the primal object of every scholar became now to purify his style. To
this study of words, that of forms being added, both as of matters of
the first importance, half the intellect of the age was at once absorbed
in the base sciences of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly
unworthy of the serious labor of men, and necessarily rendering those
employed upon them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion. Of the
debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once reading
a grammarian's notes on a great poet: logic is unnecessary for men who
can reason; and about as useful to those who cannot, as a machi