which first marked out Canon Law as a distinct field of learning,
separate from both Theology and Roman Law. It was written as a
text-book; "it was one of those great text-books which take the world by
storm." It created an entirely new class of students, separate from
those devoted to Arts, Theology, Roman Law, and Medicine,--just as the
development of Engineering and other new professional studies have
created new groups of university students to-day,--and thereby increased
the resort to the universities.

The selection following illustrates numerous characteristics of
mediaeval university study. (1) The question itself is a very ancient
subject of debate; the controversy, on religious grounds, concerning the
study of the classics, had already continued for nearly a thousand
years, and was destined to continue for centuries after the appearance
of the _Decretum_. Many such questions were debated in the universities
for generations. The debate on the classics still rages, though the
arguments pro and con no longer raise the point of their influence on
religious belief. (2) The selection is one among many examples of the
powerful influence of Abelard's method in mediaeval writing and
teaching. The reader will at once see in it the form of the "Yes and
No." (3) It gives a very good idea of the substance of a university
lecture, which would ordinarily consist in reading the actual text and
comments here set down (see p. 111). (4) It shows how the mass of
comments came to overshadow the original text, and by consequence to
absorb the greater part of the attention of teachers and students. One
object of university reform in all studies at the end of the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth century was to sweep away this
burdensome and often useless material, and to return to the study of the
text itself (see p. 48). (5) It illustrates a common mode of
interpreting in a figurative sense passages from the Bible which to the