Almost from the first
scholars, students, and men of learning were attracted by the
irresistible charm of his wonderful moral persuasiveness; they gave
in their adherence to him in a vague hope that by contact with his
surpassing holiness virtue would go out of him, and that somehow the
divine goodness which he magnified as the one thing needful would be
communicated to them and supply that which was lacking in themselves;
but they could not bring themselves to believe that culture and
holiness were incompatible or that nearness to God was possible only
to those who were ignorant and uninstructed. We should have expected
learning among the Dominicans, but very soon the English Franciscans
became the most learned body in Europe, and that character they never
lost till the suppression of the monasteries swept them out of the
land. Before Edward I. came to the throne, in less than fifty years
after Richard Ingworth and his little band landed at Dover, Robert
Kilwarby, a Franciscan friar, had been chosen Archbishop of
Canterbury, and Bonaventura, the General of the Order, had refused
the Archbishopric of York. In 1281 Jerome of Ascoli, Bonaventura's
successor as General, was elected Pope, assuming the name of Nicholas
IV.
Meanwhile such giants as Alexander Hales and Roger Bacon and Duns
Scotus among the Minorites--all Englishmen be it remembered--and
Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among the Dominicans, had given to
intellectual life that amazing lift into a higher region of thought,
speculation, and inquiry which prepared the way for greater things
by-and-by.
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