the university of the responsibility of renting buildings and halls, of raising money for the masters and doctors who conducted the instruction, and devolved it upon many lesser institutions, which, while practically subdivisions of it and enjoying the benefits of its guidance and influence with state and church, at the same time had the benefit of that spirit of honorable rivalry which makes itself so immensely helpful in every great field of activity.

VI. SOME OF THE HINDRANCES.

There is another side of this picture, however. It was not all sunshine with the university. There were serious hindrances, as well as many helps toward its development.

I. THE OPPOSING CHANCELLOR OF NOTRE DAME.

The first of them was the antagonism, in one form and another, of the powerful chancellor of the cathedral, whose personal ambition was unbounded, and who, foreseeing the probability of a loss of power in university matters unless great vigilance and skillful management should be exercised on his part, was persistent in his opposition to all forward tendencies. The association of masters of arts, ready for any service as teachers in the arts department of the coming university, which had been formed almost spontaneously and without very definite aims around the cloister school of the cathedral, finally came to a realizing sense of the looseness of its organization, and began to think seriously of a formal and legal incorporation of the several schools or faculties growing up and to be developed as one great institution, with statutes of its own, and with the requisite facilities and powers.

It seems that hitherto the chancellor could not only grant or refuse licenses to teach at his own pleasure, but could take away a license already enjoyed, or deprive a student of his privileges as such, and by his own arbitrary command also rob either master or student of the ecclesiastical privileges appertaining to his connection with the schools. He was in fact clothed with, or at least exercised, the most absolute tyranny, and did not omit to indulge himself in the exercise of his authority. He enforced his decisions by excommunication, and kad control of a prison for the confinement of the refractory. The only offset the society of masters had lay in the fact that, while all-powerful in the granting of the licenses, he could not compel the association to admit as a member anyone so licensed. On the other hand, they could require every new master to make oath to obey the regulations of the association, and could impose various penalties and disabilities upon anyone who, through falsities or other misconduct, had rendered himself obnoxious. Moreover, no licentiate of the chancellor was accounted fully empowered until he had been received into the association of masters by a public inception.

It is manifest that two forces thus so empowered, respectively, and in the nature of the case, antagonistie, would have almost unceasing conflicts. And so it was with the chancellor and the masters.

Many interesting accounts of clashes, prosecutions, and suits are recorded. It was the chancellor versus the university, or vice versa, all the while, until the powers at Rome became weary and intervened by decreeing: (1) That the oaths of obedience to the chancellor hitherto taken by masters should be relaxed; (2) that there should be no exaction of such oaths in the future; (3) that the chancellor's licenses should hereafter be gratuitous; (4) that it should be the duty of the chancellor to grant licenses to all candidates recommended by

a majority of the masters in the several superior faculties, or by six selected masters in the faculty of arts, three to be named by the chancellor and three by the faculty; (5) that there should not be imprisonment of scholars during trial in case of but slight offenses, and that in any event a scholar imprisoned should be discharged upon the furnishing of sufficient bail, and, finally, (6) that the chancellor should under no circumstances whatsoever impose a money penalty on a convicted student, though there might be an award of damages to the party injured.

Two years later (in 1215) these provisions were embodied in permanent statutes imposed by Cardinal Courçon, together with the right of the university, within certain limits, to make statutes for its own government and to require oaths of obedience thereto.

Nevertheless the conflict went on, becoming more and more bitter on the part of the chancellor, who, with the cooperation of the bishop, even went so far as to revive an old and defunct proclamation against conspiracies, and to excommunicate the university as a whole, on the ground of disobedience thereto. The very existence of the university was a conspiracy from the chancellor's and bishop's point of view and they were bent on destroying it. Happily the Holy See took a very different view, and in 1219 and 1222 bulls were issued by Popes Honorius III and Gregory IX which turned the scale and gave to the university a larger freedom.

II. THE OPPOSING MENDICANT ORDERS.

A more subtle and still more troublesome hindrance was found in the mendicant orders, Dominican and Franciscan, both of them powerful and persistent. Ere the coming of the twelfth century the higher educational work was quite exclusively done in the convents, some of which had forgotten the old-time simplicity and become both wealthy and vainly ambitious. The schools known as "external," which followed the efforts of Charlemagne, had so far occupied this field and interfered with the plans of the monastics that the cloisters had practically ceased to furnish educational facilities for the seculars, who by the twelfth century had become the active workers. The monasteries were gradually ceasing to be intellectual forces, and there must come a new order of things unless they were to lose their hold upon the more progressive elements of society, and above all upon the educational agencies already in the lead at the great centers of intellectual effort-even the universities themselves.

The disciples of St. Dominic were first to gain the conception and first to move with energy. Already established at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, in each of which places they had schools of collegiate rank, with this ambitious end in view they soon aroused the less intellectually ambitious Franciscans, who were not willing to be left behind, and they, too, established a convent at Paris. The two orders were different in spirit and purpose in that the Dominicans were zealous for conservative orthodoxy, while the Franciscans seemed constitutionally inclined to encourage new theories and new social movements, and were, of course an easy prey for new heresies. But both were in harmony on the vital necessity for overcoming the rationalistic tendencies of the time. Aristotelianism, in spite of the early narrowness of the Church, had not only come to be thought safe, but its dialectic element was now reinforced, philosophically speaking, from the East, through Saracenic channels, and had brought with it new and disturbing elements in the teachings of Avicenna and Averroes. As a consequence, skepticism had established itself at Paris with very serious results for a considerable time, and there were measures against the reading of Aristotle's newer works. After which, however, came the adoption out and out of

his writings as text-books in the university faculty of arts, followed by direct translations of Aristotle from the Greek, by acts for the suppression of heresy by fine, etc.

Meanwhile the Dominicans, made strong by the teachings and writings of those two greatest men of the age, Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas, steadily gained ground. The first won the world to Aristotle by making his philosophy Christian, while Aquinas devoted himself to a reconciliation of the new truths and highest thought with the profoundest of religious convictions based on the truths of the Gospel.

At first the studies of the friars were made in the secular theological schools then available, but later they were pleased to present themselves at the university for admission to the faculty of theology. They were cordially received and continued to avail themselves of its facilities until the great dispersion of the university masters and doctors because of the suspension of university work in 1229, already mentioned. But during the suspension the friars were pleased to form a school of their own; nay two schools, the newly converted theologian, John of St. Giles, of England, having been constrained by his admirers to open a second.

At about the same time the Franciscans opened a school under the leadership of another Englishman, Alexander Hales, as also did still other religious orders, so that the university, when it had settled itself down again to regular work, found a whole cluster of theological schools doing the work which the faculty of theology had hitherto supposed itself fully and alone competent to do. The mendicant orders had taken the field and a conflict was inevitable. A bull from the Pope requiring the chancellor at Paris to confer the licentia docendi upon as many members of the religious orders as upon examination he should find qualified opened the rupture quite unexpectedly in 1250. The defense was promptly taken up, first by the great university association in the form of an insistence upon its right to refuse to approve the inception of doctors whom the chancellor had licensed without its consent; and, secondly, by the faculty of theology in a formal statute against the Dominicans, Franciscans, and all other of the mendicant orders to the extent of ordering serious limitations upon the privileges of their members. Riots and other troubles resulted, and these were followed by a university decree of cessatio (cessation of lectures), by the refusal of obedience thereto by three friars, two of them Dominican and one Franciscan, by an ineffectual appeal to Rome, by a university requirement that all masters should swear to insist on justice, and by final expulsion of the friars.

The persistency of the university in this case had been due to the discovery that the friars were bent on enjoying the benefits of the association of masters, whether obeying its requirements or not, as they might prefer. The masters were firm in their determination that the regulations of the society should be sacredly observed. It was absolutely necessary to the maintenance of the university itself. The offending friars were expelled. Then followed an appeal to the Holy See, an annulment of the order of expulsion, a positive requirement for the reinstatement of the offenders, and the defiance of the Pope in the form of official notice to the thousands likely to attend the instruction and sermons of the friars that their schools would not be recognized by the university. After Innocent IV, who favored the seculars and condemned the usurpations of the friars, his successor, Alexander IV, took the other side very emphatically, and even offensively. Bull succeeded bull, and yet the masters resisted, finally adopting the expedient of dissolving their society as a means of cutting off the mendicants from association with them, as hitherto.

Under these circumstances it was inevitable that the seculars should decline in power and influence. But in 1261 Alexander IV died and the university

found a new friend in his successor, Urban IV, who had been a Parisian canonist and who took a different view of matters. As a result, bulls of privilege took the place of bans of condemnation, and among them certain restrictions upon the privileges which had been acquired by the mendicants, to the effect that, although members of the faculty of theology, the faculty of canon law, or the university as such, the mendicants and the students with them could, nevertheless, be refused admission to the faculty of arts or the societas magistrorum et scholarium at its pleasure; that no religious college would be allowed to have more than two doctors acting as regents and sitting at the same time in the general congregation of the university, and that secular students should thereafter incept under secular doctors only. Naturally, under existing circumstances, these rights of refusal accorded to the faculty of arts and the university congregation were duly exercised. Seculars were not debarred the privilege of attending lectures given by friar doctors, yet their inability to incept under them, together with the oath to "stand with the secular masters to whatever state he should come," regularly administered to every master of arts at his inception, would, in most cases, prevent such attendance.

Thus, while failing of entire success in recovering its ground, the university had nevertheless won a substantial victory after a long and bitter contest, so that in 1318 it was able once more to impose upon the friars the oath of obedience to its statutes. Furthermore, by reason of the conflict, the university and its faculties became better organized. The corporate body could act for one of its faculties as a whole, and the acts of the faculties were to be treated as acts of the university. A system of finance had been developed, and the university had acquired a consciousness of its ability to hold its own high ground in defiance, if need be, of decisions of the Holy See.

VII. CONCLUÐING WORDS.

I have thus presented, with such fullness as the prescribed limit would allow, a systematic and orderly detail of the several steps by which the University of Paris advanced from its small beginning to final greatness. Totally wanting in the grand cluster of palatial halls, laboratories, museums, observatories, and other establishments suggested by the munificent endowments and ambitious plans of the Stanfords, Rockefellers, and Carnegies of modern times, the early University of Paris is nevertheless more deeply interesting than all of these because of the simple and rude conditions-material, social, political, and religious-of its origin, the intellectual awakening among the people of many lands which fostered it, and the unparalleled enlistment of kingly and papal powers which finally established it.

As already remarked, the notable achievements of the University of Paris were not alone in the field of learning, where indeed they were unsurpassed, but also and especially, as already suggested, in affairs national, international, and ecclesiastical. Its place in the world was exceedingly fortunate on many accounts. Unlike Bologna and other Italian universities in relation to the cities where they were located, it made itself a part of Paris and Paris a part of it, with resulting greater numbers of both niasters and students, with increasing interest on the part of the religious, municipal, and national authorities through a most natural pride and sympathy, and with such relationships as eventually gained for it an unprecedented and otherwise impossible influence and power.

After its safe passage through the perils at first believed to attach to the pagan philosophies of Greece, Arabia, and Persia, and the reenforcement of its

faculty of theology by the very ablest philosophers and theologians of the age, the university easily came to the honors and responsibilities of what was in fact a supreme council of the church-rectifier of minor errors, whether of prelates or others, and the invincible defender of the faith where assailed from without. It created a scholastic theology, and it was thus, as Rashdall has well said, that it triumphed over the skeptical as well as over the mystical reactionaries, and became "the first school of the church and theological arbiter of Europe;" for, "however much the theological dictatorship assumed by the university may have blasted the fair prospects of the twelfth century ‘illumination,' it was by means of this dictatorship that Paris conferred on France, and indeed on all northern Europe, one of the most memorable services which she ever rendered to the cause of enlightenment, of civilization, and of humanity."

The reference here is, of course, to the influence exerted by the University of Paris in saving France and other portions of northern and northwestern Europe to so large an extent from the fearful ravages of the great inquisition.

Another signal service was that of resisting, and in some measure thwarting, as we have seen, the adverse schemes of the mendicant orders. It was, indeed, the most powerful champion of the secular clergy in their many conflicts, while in the remarkable schism which for a time divided the papal power the university also managed with great wisdom and was at last the main instrument in bringing about a return to unity. It had come to first honors, so that it even sent ambassadors to foreign courts on missions most important, and thus gained a still larger influence in the affairs of the world at large.

I have dealt first with the ecclesiastical side of this interesting subject of the university's influence because it was, first of all, by intent of its founders and in actual service, a theological institution par excellence. But the situation of the university at Europe's most brilliant and most influential center was no less fortunate from a political than from a theological point of view. Because of this simple fact it gained a supreme advantage, as already noted, and well it utilized it. First of all, it won the favor of the King, so that in a large sense he made it his special protégé, protecting its students from abroad when at war with their native lands and thus making them practically citizens of the world; tenderly entitling it eldest daughter of the King," and opening the way for it to become a real force and influence in national and international affairs.

In many cases the university became the chief pacificator, outranking in recognized dignity and importance all other mediators, civil or ecclesiastical. It had become a European power."

Historians dealing with the middle ages have with one accord made Germany first in imperial power and martial glory; Italy first in jurisprudence, in art, and in ecclesiastical authority, as seat of the papal power; but to France no less fitly belongs the honor of having produced that most brilliant and influential of the world's universities, through whose agency her queenly capital was made first in the realm of letters, first in science, first in medieval philosophy, and first in scholastic theology, as well as foremost in the vast and diversified realm of those practical, æsthetic, and social arts which are essential to the world's progress in civilization.