xtended to heretics by eminent men, and the manner in which
the rival powers, ecclesiasticism and philosophy, were preparing for
their final conflict. [Sidenote: Illustration from the biography of
Arnold.] As an example of the kind, I may present briefly that of Arnold
de Villa Nova, born about A.D. 1250. He enjoyed a great reputation for
his knowledge of medicine and alchemy. For some years he was physician
to the King of Aragon. Under an accusation of defective orthodoxy he
lost his position at court, his punishment being rendered more effective
by excommunication. Hoping to find in Paris more liberality than he had
met with in Spain, he fled to that city, but was pursued by an adverse
ecclesiastical influence with a charge of having sold his soul to the
Devil, and of having changed a plate of copper into gold. In
Montpellier, to which he was obliged to retire, he found a more
congenial intellectual atmosphere, and was for long one of the regents
of the faculty of medicine. In succession, he subsequently resided in
Florence, Naples, Palermo, patronized and honoured by the Emperor
Frederick II.--at that time engaged in the attempt to unite Italy into
one kingdom and give it a single language--on account of his
extraordinary reputation as a physician. Even the pope, Clement V.,
notwithstanding the unfortunate attitude in which Arnold stood toward
the Church, besought a visit from him in hopes of relief from the stone.
On his voyage for the purpose of performing the necessary operation,
Arnold suffered shipwreck and was drowned. His body was interred at
Genoa. The pope issued an encyclic letter, entreating those who owed him
obedience to reveal where Arnold's Treatise on the Practice of Medicine
might be found, it having been lost or concealed. It appears that the
chief offences committed by Arnold against the Church were that he had
predicted that the world would come to an end A.D. 1335; that he had
said the bulls of the pope were only the work of a man, and that the
practice of charity is better than prayer, or even than the mass. If he
was the author of the celebrated book "De Tribus Impostoribus," as was
suspected by some, it is not remarkable that he was so closely watched
and disciplined. Like many of his contemporaries, he mingled a great
deal of mysticism with his work, recommending, during his alchemical
operations, the recitation of psalms, to give force to the materials
employed. Among other such things, he des