[60] The instruction of the people was not, however, to be limited to a knowledge of these prayers. “Let them be taught,” he says, “by what works they may please God, and from what things they must abstain; with what sincerity they must believe in Him, and with what devotion they must pray; how diligently and frequently they must fortify themselves with the holy sign of the Cross; and how salutary for every class of Christian is the daily reception of the Lord’s Body and Blood, which is, you know, the constant practice of the Church of Christ throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Greece, and the whole of the East.” This is a most important testimony as to the existing practice of the Church in the eighth century, and Bede goes on to say that to his knowledge there are innumerable young persons, of both sexes, who might, beyond all question, be suffered to communicate, at least, on all Sundays and festivals.
[61] “Caras super omnia gazas.” (De Pont. Ebor. Eccl.)
[62] Jamdiu optata adest dies. (Vita S. Bon. Acta SS. Ben.)
[63] “O felix collegium beatissimi Bonifacii!” exclaims the biographer of S. Sola.
[64] Dr. Campbell in his “Strictures on the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland,” observes that “this great man was degraded by Pope Zachary on conviction of being a mathematician.” But perhaps the most remarkable reproduction of this oft-told tale occurs in Dr. Enfield’s translation of Brucker’s “History of Philosophy,” which I give verbatim, as only to be paralleled in the “Art of Pluck.” “Boniface,” he says, “the patron of ignorance and barbarism, summoned Polydore Virgil, bishop of Salisbury, to the Court of Inquisition for maintaining the existence of the antipodes.” (Vol. i, p. 363.) Would it be believed that a writer who is engaged in bewailing the ignorance of monkish philosophers should commit himself to a statement which confuses St. Feargil, or Virgil, bishop of Saltzburg, in the eighth century, with Polydore Vergil, archdeacon of Bath (for he was never bishop of Salisbury at all), in the fifteenth? And then the Inquisition! To make it complete he should have identified Virgil with the Latin poet, and convicted him of the Albigensian heresy. Yet these are the writers who find no terms contemptuous enough in which to speak of mediæval ignorance. “Among the scholastics,” writes Dr. Enfield, in the very next sentence, “we find surprising proofs of weakness and ignorance.” The scholastics, could they speak, might find something to retort on their accusers.
[65] The doctrines attributed to Virgil, and their condemnation by Pope Zachary, have been examined by Decker, a professor of Louvain, who shows very clearly that the error lay, not in their maintaining the existence of the antipodes, but in the notion of a race distinct from that of Adam. Feller, in the account he gives of the matter in his Historical Dictionary, refers to the teaching of Bede, who, he declares, denied the spherical figure of the earth. But the work from which he quotes is not to be found among the writings of our English saint, whose real opinion on the subject may be seen from the following explicit passage: “We call the earth a globe, not that it is absolutely the perfect form of a globe, by reason of the unevenness of hills and plains, but because its whole compass, if comprehended within the circumference of lines, would make the figure of a globe.”—De Nat. Rer. c. xlvi. 118.
[66] This question was resolved by Pope Zachary in favour of the validity of the baptism so administered.
[67] Vita S. Liob. ap. Surium.
[68] Tradition says that they stopped at Antwerp some days, and a grotto is still shown in the ancient church dedicated to St. Walburga, where she is said to have prayed.
[69] For the ingenious arguments by which certain writers have endeavoured to show that the Council of Cloveshoe rejected the authority of the Roman Pontiff (by whose command it was summoned), and for their able refutation, the reader is referred to “Lingard’s Anglo-Saxon Antiquities,” vol. i. Appendix, note G.