has one grille has all virtues, and whether all sins are equal
and equally to be punished may appear to have a less
direct bearing upon theology; but it will not escape
observation that hardly one of them but has come to
make part, if not of the formal creed, still of the accepted
tradition of some one of the sects of Christendom. In
the middle ages the association was the more closely felt
because theology was almost universally the standard of
knowledge, the test by which the goodness of a philoso
phical tenet was tried. We do not indeed presume to say
that John of Salisbury calculated the issues to which he
committed himself ; certainly if any connexion of the sort
just named could be proved he would have been the first
to withdraw the problem in question out of the class of
doubtfuls. Still it is his signal virtue, a virtue which,
if we mistake not, he derived immediately from Bernard
of Chartres, that, although he held as strongly as any
man to the principle just mentioned, he distinctly limited
it to facts with regard to which authority was precise,
and left the rest open questions.
He did more than this : he enlarged the conception of authority; for the divine influence, he maintained with Abailard, is not to be sought pnly in the written revelation but in its indwelling in man s reason.
Est hominis ratio summae rationis imago
Quae capit interius vera docente Deo.
Ut data lux oculis tarn se quam cetera monstrati
Quae sub luce patent et sine luce latent,
Claraque fit nubes concepto lumine solis,
Cum dependentes flatus abegit aquas :
Subdita sic ratio formam summae rationis
Sordibus expulsis induit, inde micat.
The reasonable soul is the habitation of God, by participation in whom all things exist : the good man therefore, for virtue is the antecedent of the right exercise of reason, may be trusted to know. It is thus that John is able to declare that freedom is the most glorious of all things, because it is inseparable from, if not identical with, virtue.
