s
class. Bede, Alcuin, Hincmar, Raban, and a number of inferior names,
become real giants of learning in their uncritical panegyrics. But one
might justly say that ignorance is the smallest defect of the writers of
these dark ages. Several of them were tolerably acquainted with books;
but that wherein they are uniformly deficient is original argument or
expression. Almost every one is a compiler of scraps from the fathers,
or from such semi-classical authors as Boethius, Cassiodorus, or
Martianus Capella.[515] Indeed I am not aware that there appeared more
than two really considerable men in the republic of letters from the
sixth to the middle of the eleventh century--John, surnamed Scotus or
Erigena, a native of Ireland; and Gerbert, who became pope by the name
of Silvester II.: the first endowed with a bold and acute metaphysical
genius; the second excellent, for the time when he lived, in
mathematical science and mechanical inventions.[516]

[Sidenote: Causes of the preservation of learning--religion.]

If it be demanded by what cause it happened that a few sparks of ancient
learning survived throughout this long winter, we can only ascribe their
preservation to the establishment of Christianity. Religion alone made a
bridge, as it were, across the chaos, and has linked the two periods of
ancient and modern civilization. Without this connecting principle,
Europe might indeed have awakened to intellectual pursuits, and the
genius of recent times needed not to be invigorated by the imitation of
antiquity. But the memory of Greece and Rome would have been feebly
preserved by tradition, and the monuments of those nations might have
excited, on the return of civilization, that vague sentiment of
speculation and wonder with which men now contemplate Persepolis or the
Pyramids. It is not, however, from religion simply that we have derived
this advantage, but from religion as it was modified in the dark ages.
Such is the complex reciprocation of good and evil in the dispensations
of Providence, that we may assert, with only an apparent paradox, that,
had religion been more pure, it would have been less permanent, and that
Christianity has been preserved by means of its corruptions. The sole
hope for literature depended on the Latin language; and I do not see why
that should not have been lost, if three circumstances in the prevailing
religious system, all of which we are justly accustomed to disapprove,
had not conspired to