The validity of any statement, the actuality of any alleged instance, came to be determined, not by any application of rationalistic principle, not by inherent plausibility, not by actual inquiry into the facts of the case, but by its agreement with religious feelings or beliefs, its effect in furthering the influence of the Church or the reputation of a saint--in general, by its relationship to matters of faith. Thus it happens that the chronicles of the monks and the lives of the saints, charming and interesting as they are in their naïveté, their simplicity, their trustful credulity, and their pictures of a life and an attitude of mind so remote from ours, are filled with incidents given as facts that test the greatest faith, strain the most vivid imagination, and shock that innate respect for reality, that it is the purpose of modern education to inculcate. [23]
This authoritative and repressive attitude of the Church expressed itself in many ways. The teaching of the period is an excellent example of this influence. The instruction in the so-called Seven Liberal Arts remained unchanged throughout a period of half a dozen centuries--so much accumulated knowledge passed on as a legacy to succeeding generations. It represented mere instruction; not education. As a recent writer has well expressed it, the whole knowledge and culture contained in the Seven Liberal Arts remained "like a substance in suspension in a medium incapable of absorbing it; unchanged throughout the whole mediaeval period." Inquiry or doubt in religious matters was not tolerated, and scientific inquiry and investigation ceased to exist. The notable scientific advances of the Greeks, their literature and philosophy, and particularly their genius for free inquiry and investigation, no longer influenced a world dominated by an institution preparing its children only for life in a world to come. Not until the world could shake off this mediaeval attitude toward scientific inquiry and make possible honest doubt was any real intellectual progress possible. In a rough, general way the turn in the tide came about the beginning of the twelfth century, and for the next five centuries the Church was increasingly busy trying, like King Canute of old, to stop the waves of free inquiry and scientific doubt from rising higher against the bulwarks it had erected.