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Chaucer by Sir Adolphus William Ward
page 42 of 216 (19%)
--an inclination unfortunately fostered rather than checked by the
uncertain gropings of contemporary science. Hence, the credulous
acceptance of relics like those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends
like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the
numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the
"Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the
other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy,
notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class
represented by Chaucer's "Franklin" towards

such folly
As in our days is not held worth a fly,

and notwithstanding the exposure of fraud by repentant or sickened
accomplices, such as the gold-making "Canon's Yeoman." Hence, again, the
vitality of such quasi-scientific fancies as the magic mirror, of which
miraculous instrument the "Squire's" "half-told story" describes a
specimen, referring to the incontestable authority of Aristotle and
others, who write "in their lives" concerning quaint mirrors and
perspective glasses, as is well known to those who have "heard the books"
of these sages. Hence, finally, the corresponding tendency to eschew the
consideration of serious religious questions, and to leave them to clerks,
as if they were crabbed problems of theology. For in truth, while the
most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or
were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms
of the doctrines of the Church--even of the most stimulative as well as of
the most solemn among them,--had grown hard and stiff. To those who
received if not to those who taught these doctrines they seemed alike
lifeless, unless translated into the terms of the merest earthly
transactions or the language of purely human relations. And thus,
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