[Footnote 269: Histoire de la Civilisation an cinquième siècle, chap. iv.]
The doctrine of progress is as old as the gospel; and the author of Les Etudes sur les Barbares et le Moyen Age confirms this: "The people of the middle ages felt the necessity of knowledge; they studied and labored conscientiously and energetically, and marked each age by important developments." The more carefully we examine those ages, the better shall we understand the extent of knowledge in the church. The most eminent men of those times—who does not know them?—are bishops, monks, and popes: Gerbert, St. Bernard, Innocent III., and St. Thomas Aquinas, who can only be compared to Aristotle; the most original writers—who does not forget it?—are priests: Froissart, Petrarch, and later, Calderon, Lope de Vega, and Tirso de Molina; the greatest poet of the middle ages, Dante, was he not a theologian? Cimabue, who revived the art of painting, was he not reared among the Dominicans of Florence? Was not the first press in Paris set up at the Sorbonne? The best informed class of men were so incontestably the clergy that the names of priest and savant were confounded. The word clergie in the middle ages signified learned. [Footnote 270] The church takes the highest rank in the world of science. It does not acquire knowledge for itself alone, but to diffuse everywhere, that the whole earth may be enlightened. Like the sun, it is a great centre diffusing the light it derives from God—its eternal source!
[Footnote 270: J. de Maistre, Du Pape, ii. 16.]
From The French Of Erckmann And Chatrian.
The Invasion; Or, Yegof The Fool.
Chapter XVII.
At the end of a dark passage through the house was the farmyard, to which five or six well-worn steps descended. To the left were the barn and the press; and to the right, the stables and the dove-cote, the dark shape of the last standing sharply outlined against the gray, misty sky. Opposite the door was the wash-house.
Not a sound was heard. Hullin, after the wild and stormy day, was impressed with the deep silence. He gazed at the tufts of straw hanging between the rafters of the barn, the harrows, the ploughs, the carts, half hidden in the gloom of the sheds, with an indefinable feeling of calmness and satisfaction. Fowl were roosting along the wall, and a cat fled by like a flash, and disappeared in the cellar. Hullin seemed waking from a dream.