COSTUME OF BISHOP OF THE 14TH CENTURY.

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Eight years prior to this Wycliffe died. His doctrines were rapidly spreading; the reformers, under the name of Lollards, were becoming numerous; the Papal hierarchy was proportionally alarmed, and Arundel, the Archbishop of York, became their most active enemy. But before he could mature his designs against them, he was involved in the prosecution of the adherents of the Duke of Gloucester for procuring a commission to control the king, for which his brother, the Earl of Arundel, was beheaded, and he himself banished. The dawn of the Reformation already reddened in the east, but the day was yet far off.

During the fourteenth century, the leading men of the Church in Scotland signalised themselves rather in the patriotic defence of their country against the English than in theological matters. Amongst the most distinguished of these were Lamberton, of St. Andrews; Wishart, of Glasgow; Landells, who was Bishop of St. Andrews from 1341 to 1385, forty-four years; and Robert Trail, Primate of Scotland, who built the castle of St. Andrews, and died in 1401, leaving a great name for strict discipline and wisdom. It is singular that, during this period, the doctrines of Wycliffe, which had made such ferment in England, appear to have excited little or no attention in Scotland.

During the period now under review—the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—the language of the learned was still Latin, and the circle of education included little more than the Trivium and Quadrivium of the former age, that is, the course of three sciences—grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the course of four—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The grammar was almost exclusively confined to the Latin, for Roger Bacon says that there were not more than three or four persons in his time that knew anything of Greek or the Oriental languages; nay, so gross was the ignorance of the students of the time of the common elementary forms of Latin itself, that Kilwardby, Archbishop of Canterbury, on a visit to Oxford in 1276, upbraided the students with such corruptions as these:—"Ego currit;" "tu currit;" "currens est ego," &c.

When grammar was so defective, the rhetoric taught could not be very profound. The mendicant friars seem to have cultivated it with the greatest assiduity, as necessary to give effect to their harangues, and the Provincial of the Augustinians, in the fourteenth century, was greatly admired for the eloquence of his preaching.

But logic was the all-absorbing study of the time. The clergy who had attended the Crusaders had brought back from the East a knowledge of Aristotle, through Latin translations and the commentaries of his Arabian admirers. His logic was now applied not only to such metaphysics as were taught, but also to theology. Hence arose the School divinity, in which the doctrines taught by the Church were endeavoured to be made conformable to the Aristotelian modes of reasoning, and to be defended by it. If we are to judge of the logic of this period by what remains of it, we should say it was the art of disputing without meaning or object; of perplexing the plainest truths, and giving an air of plausibility to the grossest absurdities. As, for instance, it was argued with the utmost earnestness that "two contrary propositions might be both true." At this time there were several thousand students at Oxford, and Hume very reasonably asks, what were these young men all about? Studying bad logic and worse metaphysics.

FACSIMILE OF PORTION OF THE FIRST CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL IN THE WYCLIFFE BIBLE
IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.