Page:A Brief Outline of the Histories of Libraries.djvu/17

This page has been validated.
Introductory Note
11

to tasting of religion at all its different founts. With gossipy pen, he briefly summarizes the facts in Lipsius's stormy theological career, which to a sixteenth-century mind, and even to one of the eighteenth century, must have seemed as important as it was chequered.

The theologian of a century or so ago undoubtedly found that Lipsius had contributed something to religious thought, but to us, in this century of freedom in such matters, Justus Lipsius is chiefly a subject for antiquarian curiosity, just as he was to Bayle. It would be idle to speculate on the present-day value of his Diva Virgo Hallensis, or