more harm. It has been said, and probably with much truth, that their
metaphysics were injurious to their theology. But I must observe in
return that their theology was equally injurious to their metaphysics.
Their disputes continually turned upon questions either involving
absurdity and contradiction, or at best inscrutable by human
comprehension. Those who assert the greatest antiquity of the Roman
Catholic doctrine as to the real presence, allow that both the word and
the definition of transubstantiation are owing to the scholastic
writers. Their subtleties were not always so well received. They
reasoned at imminent peril of being charged with heresy, which Roscelin,
Abelard, Lombard, and Ockham did not escape. In the virulent factions
that arose out of their metaphysical quarrels, either party was eager to
expose its adversary to detraction and persecution. The Nominalists were
accused, one hardly sees why, with reducing, like Sabellius, the persons
of the Trinity to modal distinctions. The Realists, with more pretence,
incurred the imputation of holding a language that savoured of
atheism.[845] In the controversy which the Dominicans and Franciscans,
disciples respectively of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, maintained
about grace and freewill, it was of course still more easy to deal in
mutual reproaches of heterodoxy. But the schoolmen were in general
prudent enough not to defy the censures of the church; and the popes, in
return for the support they gave to all exorbitant pretensions of the
Holy See, connived at this factious wrangling, which threatened no
serious mischief, as it did not proceed from any independent spirit of
research. Yet with all their apparent conformity to the received creed,
there was, as might be expected from the circumstances, a great deal of
real deviation from orthodoxy, and even of infidelity. The scholastic
mode of dispute, admitting of no termination and producing no
conviction, was the sure cause of scepticism; and the system of
Aristotle, especially with the commentaries of Averroes, bore an aspect
very unfavourable to natural religion.[846] The Aristotelian philosophy,
even in the hands of the Master, was like a barren tree that conceals
its want of fruit by profusion of leaves. But the scholastic ontology
was much worse. What could be more trifling than disquisitions about the
nature of angels, their modes of operation, their means of conversing,
or (for these were distinguished)