which his attention was directed, on his public appearance in Europe, was a translation of the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Scotus crossed over to Paris in the reign of Charles the Bald, whose friend and tutor he became; and there undertook to render into Latin the platonism of the great disciple of the Alexandrian school, whose books had been sent to Louis the Debonair by the Greek Emperor Balbus, and had been recommended to French popularity as no other than those of the famous St. Denys, first bishop of Paris! The translation was followed by an original work, in which, pursuing the mystic doctrines of Dionysius, Scotus threw out into the arena of Europe that bone of contention between scholasticism and mysticism which the more ardent theologians are gnawing to this hour. This was his Dialogue De Divisione Natura; in which, whatever his heresies from Origen or Pelagius, ample testimony was borne to his rare and wonderful learning. He takes occasion, in the course of it, to give concise and able definitions of the seven liberal arts, and to express his opinion on the composition of things: he includes in it a very elaborate discussion on arithmetic, which he says he had learned from his infancy: the elements of matter, the motions of the heavenly bodies, even the means of calculating the diameters of the lunar and solar circles, with other topics of astronomy and physiology, form the occasional subjects of its curious conversations and beside the Fathers Justin, the two Gregories, Chrysostom, Basil, Epiphanius, Origen, Jerome, and Ambrosius, whose works are largely quoted, he displays in its course an intimate acquaintance with Virgil, Cicero, Aristotle, Pliny, Plato, and Boethius; on points of astronomy, appeals to the writings of Eratosthenes and Pythagoras; cites Martianus Capella; and exhibits in almost every page a thorough knowledge of Greek.

But more remarkable than this vast learning, were the opinions he dared in those dark ages to promulgate, under sanction of its authority. His views of the nature of God and the universe, must be placed in the same school with those of Spinoza: overlooking, from the extreme borders of universal deification, the desolate land of universal materialism. All things are God,' he argues, and God is all things. When we say that God created all things, we mean only, that God is in all things, and that he is the essence of all things, by which they exist. The universe is both eternal and created; and neither did its eternity precede its creation, nor its creation precede its eternity.' His philosophical and theologi

cal system seems, in a few words, to have been this :-That the universe, and all things which it comprehends, were not only virtually, but essentially, in God; that from eternity they flowed from him; and shall, at the consummation of all things, be resolved again into him, as into their great fountain and origin. After the resurrection,' he says, nature, and all its causes, shall be resolved into God, and then nothing shall exist but God alone.' The process by which he declared himself to have arrived at these conclusions, contained a germ of wiser thought, yet more significant of danger to the reigning system. There were not two studies, he asserted, one of philosophy, and the other of religion; but the true philosophy was the true religion, and the true religion the true philosophy.

Nor did this acute and fearless scholar hesitate openly to assail -the all-powerful church of his day, in some of its strongest holds of faith and doctrine. Godelscale, a known and favoured monk, having publicly maintained in a learned treatise (where he followed the views of St. Augustin and anticipated those of Calvin), that the decrees of God had, from all eternity, preordained some men to everlasting life, and others to everlasting punishment and misery,— John Scotus Erigena soon after sent into circulation among scholars, a yet more learned essay, denying that there was any predestination of the damned; and contending that the prescience of God extended only to the election of the blessed, since he could not foresee that of which he was not the author; and, being the source neither of sin nor evil, could not foreknow, or predestinate, concerning them. This treatise was boldly addressed to Hinemar Archbishop of Rheims, and Pardulus Bishop of Laon; and opened with the confident position, that every question might be resolved by four general rules of philosophy, division, definition, demonstration, and analysis. By these rules it then endeavoured to demonstrate, that there could not be a double predestination, of one to glory, and another to damnation; that predestination did not impose any necessity, but that man was absolutely free; and that, although he could not do good without the grace of Jesus Christ, yet he did it by his own free choice without being constrained or forced to do it by the will of God. Sin, and the consequences of it, argued Erigena, and the punishments with which it is attended, were mere privations, neither foreseen nor predestinated by God; while predestination had no place but in those things which God had preordained, in order to eternal happiness;

for our predestination arose from the foresight of the good use of our free will.

The origin of this reasoning, in the mind of Erigena, is manifest. Identifying all things with God, it was impossible to acknowledge permanent pain or evil in the system, without making the Deity a sharer in them. Nor did he shrink from the extremity of his doctrine. He held that the punishment of the damned, and even the wickedness of the devils themselves, would some time or other cease; and the blessed and the unblessed dwell in a state of endless happiness, differing only in degree. It was realising, by a speedier and more summary process, that one universal and harmonious City of God, which haunted the dreams of Augustin in his latter days.

His next heresy was bolder, because more startling to the churchmen. Origen had in some sort prepared them for the idea of a final redemption, to even the demons and the damned; Pelagius had distantly foreshadowed the assertion of the power of the human will, and the denial of the corruption of our human nature; but no one had openly called in question the doctrine of the church on the sacrament of the Eucharist, when John Scotus Erigena stepped forward in opposition to Paschasius Radbertus. denied the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in that sacrament, and the monstrous tenet of Transubstantiation received its first heavy blow.

He

Erigena was now marked out for persecution. IIonorius (the third of that name who had filled the papal chair) suddenly issued a bull commanding all his books to be reclaimed from eirculation, and sent to Rome to be burnt. They are quite full,' said his Holiness, of the worms of heretical pravity.' Wemlo Archbishop of Sens, Prudentius Bishop of Troyes, Deacon Florus of the church of Lyons, had meanwhile been engaged in the more difficult duty of answering the books; but the papal interdict seems to have affected Erigena as little as the episcopal answers. He remained safe under the protection of Charles, as long as that monarch lived. He remained, to testify to much enduring truth amidst many perishable falsehoods; and, by the social position he challenged and obtained from the sovereign, to sow that fruitful seed of respect for the dignity of learning, which sprung up, in after ages, to an independent sovereignty of its own. Charles admitted this poor, foreign, travelling scholar to a footing of the most intimate friendship and familiarity. Erigena slept for the most part in the royal apartments, and dined daily at the royal

table. Charles had taste to be delighted with his wit, and sense to profit by his wisdom; and when men asked, at the papal or other courts, who was that so agreeable companion of the accomplished King of France, his preceptor in the sciences and his best counsellor in the arduous affairs of government, they were told of the poor and low-born Irish heretic, John Scotus Erigena.

Before Charles's death, it is certain he had refused compliance with a second threatening interdict from Rome, issued by Honorius's successor, and ordering him to be banished from the Paris university; what followed Charles's death, is not so certain. An evident confusion of identity, in the minds of many old as well as modern writers, between the philosopher and another John Scot (an Englishman who lived in the reign of Alfred, taught at Oxford, and was slain by the monks of the abbey of Ethelingey, where he was abbot), has brought Erigena over to England in his latter years at the earnest entreaty of Alfred; has appointed him professor of mathematics and astronomy in the schools of Oxford; has taken him thence to a tutorship in the abbey of Malmesbury; and finally, at the close of the century, has there murdered him with the iron writing-bodkins of his scholars, urged to the deed by heretic-hating monks. The true Johannes Scotus, there is not much reason to doubt, had meanwhile quietly breathed his last in Paris. The well-known Anastasius, librarian to Charles the Bald, wrote of him in 875 as for some years dead. • Wonderful

is it,' says the Bibliothecarian, how that barbarous man—who, 'placed at the extremity of the world, might, in proportion as he was remote from the rest of mankind, be supposed to be unacquainted with other languages-was able to comprehend such deep things, and to render them in another tongue. I mean 'John Scotigena, whom I have heard spoken of as a holy man in every respect.'

But holy in every respect, only Death had been able to render Erigena. Once out of the way of farther mischief, it was the policy of the Roman Catholic church to appropriate to herself the fame and influence of his wonderful acquirements. His books were withdrawn from circulation, and his name inserted in the Calendar. But in after years, when the question of transubstantiation was again in the mouths of disputants, his unlucky treatise on the Eucharist was suddenly revived. choice was then left to Rome. The manuscript was at once, and for the last time, ordered to be destroyed; and the

No

name of Scotus Erigena was struck from the list of saints by the hand of Baronius. The treatise has never been recovered; but with the lessons that have been recovered from those dark ages, it becomes the more incumbent on us to associate the memory of its writer. And therefore he receives here the place, which, by the rare privilege of genius in anticipating time, he did in reality himself possess,-beside the great actors in those changes and reforms of faith, in those influences and vicissitudes of learning, who come upon the stage of English history with the reign of Henry the Second, and seldom depart from it again.

These invisible but ever-acting influences, which history so seldom deigns to dwell upon, are in truth the springs of history. The past, the present, the future, are in the hands of one overruling and guiding power: MAGNI DEI SAPIENS OPUS. The complete proportion of the grand form of Columbanus brings to its right proportion the exaggerated yet imperfect stature of à Becket; and Scotus Erigena prefigures the Wicliffes and Roger Bacons. The current of our narrative may be now resumed; nor is it necessary that it should again be interrupted.

SONNET

ON THE PROPOSED EXCLUSION OF THE STATUE OF OLIVER CROMWELL FROM THE NEW PARLIAMENT HOUSE.

O ENGLISH people, that in Time's long date,
Slow piling stone on stone, have raised on high
A stately house of freedom, where to lie

Secure and smile, though kings beat at the gate;
Do not, in this your ease, do not forget
Those your forefathers, that in times gone by
Did toil and sweat, and all their lives long ply
At the foundations of your free estate.
Hutchinson-Vane-Hampden, that with his blood
Mortared the stones, and that chief architect,
Oliver Cromwell, he whose heavy hand

Smote the false Stuart. Him would they now eject
From his well-earned honours, and o'erflood

With base neglect that ancient glorious strand!