This church is remarkable for its exceeding narrowness in proportion to its length.
It has been well said that the old heroes of the republic were unconscious Stoics, fitted by their narrowness, their stern simplicity and devotion to duty for the almost Semitic earnestness of the new doctrine.
And that method on which a great scholar 1 insisted when studying the old Persian religion is doubly to be insisted on in the study of the history of baptism and the cognate institution, the eucharist, namely, to avoid equally " the narrowness of mind which clings to matters of fact without rising to their cause and connecting them with the series of associated phenomena, and the wild and uncontrolled spirit of comparison, which, by comparing everything, confounds everything."
He was at the same time a man of impressive power, of rare and wide culture, and of lofty aim, - far above priestly conception and Philistine narrowness.
Partly from superiority to the narrowness of his age, and partly in the interest of his struggle with the Papacy, this Malleus ecclesiae Romanae drew to his court those savants whose pursuits were discouraged by the church, and especially students in the forbidden lore of the Arabians.
